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What are some of your least favorite tropes and plot devices and why?

Any tips of getting inspiration and or brainstorming ideas?

What are some helpful tips for eager authors to avoid diving a little too deep into purple prose? I do want to flesh my author voice out and not drown it. Thanks for hosting the AMA. I do hope to gain some great insights.

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Is this where I submit proof?

Inspiration comes from knowledge and curiosity. The two can be combined in a great brainstorming session.

Here's what you do.

1. Sit down with a blank piece of paper. (It's always best to do this by hand rather than using a computer, tablet, or phone.)
2. Write down the question you are exploring. Always explore with questions. When you state a proposition, the brain often fights you. But when to put things into the form of a sentence, your brain goes into "search" mode.
3. Sit there and write down anything that comes to mind. Don't worry whether the idea is "good" or not. The point here is to be uncritical and let the ideas flow.
4. As the ideas accumulate, try to cluster related ideas together. And then start to indicate relationships with arrows. Try to write the fundamental ideas in bigger print, with underlines or bold face. In other words, try to show relationships on the page.
5. If the paper gets too messy, get a clean sheet and transfer your ideas with a better format. But don't stop brainstorming. Keep pushing. Keep adding ideas. You almost can't have too many.
6. This is important: When you get stuck, keep pushing. Dig deeper. You know more than you can immediately access. Your knowledge goes deep. Dig for it. If you remain stuck, rephrase questions and issues. Think about related ideas and examples.
7. Think also about opposites and exceptions. Don't be afraid of asking wild questions. Psychologists talk about "divergent" thinking. That means thinking that does not fit nice neat outlines and pre-set models. Be divergent!
8. Inspiration sometimes just "shows up," but not usually. You need to give yourself prompts and questions.

It’s just very hard for me to get inspiration Can you get inspiration from anything though ? Like tv, movie, music, books etc?

Excellent question. Purple prose happens when we try too hard to develop a clever style.

When it comes to developing your own style and expressing ideas with flair, I have a saying: "Good is great."

Even the most elaborate prose is really just a collection of simple parts. Your challenge as a writer is to gather an abundance of simple details and insights and then arrange them in a pleasing and engaging way.

Let me give you an example, which I develop in my book The Elements of Writing. This passage comes from Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a devastating critique of modern architecture:

"Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors—and then hires a decorator, gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse."

That passage, I think you'll agree is filled with a dizzying array of details. can you imagine writing a paragraph so laden with style and pizzazz? Of course ... if you first gathered specific details, like these:

Every great law firm in New York

moves without a sputter of protest

into a glass-box office building

with concrete slab floors

and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings

and plasterboard walls

and pygmy corridors

—and then hires a decorator,

gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars

to turn these mean cubes and grids

into a horizontal fantasy

of a Restoration townhouse.

See?

If you're attentive and collect lots of ideas and details, you can create the same kind of dizzying style as the late, great Tom Wolfe, one of the creators of the influential New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Hmm. Anything done well can work. But here are some devices that people use out of laziness. They all do the same thing. They avoid writing great scenes and use lazy shortcuts.

Voiceover: Rather than showing the characters in action, someone speaks over images and explains what they are seeing. The writer is usually too lazy to SHOW you real people doing real and engaging things.

Song playing over people acting: To show the passage of time, movies sometimes show people doing things together -- dancing, walking, eating, etc. -- with some pop-music soundtrack. The idea is to tug at the viewer's emotions ... and to kill 3 1/2 minutes. Listen: 3 1/2/ minutes is an eternity in a great film. You can show a whole scene, with the characters facing difficult challenges and somehow changing in the process. So that 3 1/2 minutes you just spent on a soundtrack is lost to real storytelling.

Writing down the nose: Using bad dialogue to summarize the story and the backstory. Like this:

"Did you have a younger sister? What was her name? Mary?"

"No, Maureen. Yeah, we haven't seen each other in years."

"Home come?"

"Well, she developed this drinking problem and got in a terrible car crash and paralyzed the other driver."

"How horrible. Did she ever get help for her drinking problem?"

"No! And I told her I wouldn't see her till she did..."

"Oh, maybe that's the only thing you can do. Still..."

"Tough love."

"Yeah, I guess..."

Rather than weaving useful information into legitimate scenes, the screenwriter just tells us background information. The problem is, it's not action and it doesn't really show us anything about how characters really behave.

Thank you for the in-depth reply. I do really like the perspective of splitting up any sentence into many more minute fragments. As for myself, I have acted upon the premise that each sentence should carry a distinctive sound to it─may it vary in rhythm or used cadence depending on the written theme.

Read aloud I find it easy to quickly spot the details that do not fit into the established sentence structures. Although that raises another concern that I wanted to bring up.

There seems to be a great rift between the ability to carry the aforementioned pizzazz when feelings are involved, since sometimes in regard to those sentiments, less can be more.

As someone that mainly uses first-person POV, details can sometimes hinder the flow of, arguably, subjective interpretations from the readers.

Have you made similar experiences? If so, what are your tips and tricks to avoid the issue at hand?

Thank you for the initial answer; it was very helpful.

...

I do think that the post is to be verified by submitting the proof to the moderators in question with a direct message, but I do not want to spread any falsehoods here.