Help me not be an idiot: writing

[Finder]

Working on a sci-fi piece with a dystopian America split into two extreme factions: the left and the right. Protagonist is a young girl captured by an enemy sect.
I haven't read enough sci-fi (working on it) to know what clichés to avoid. Help would be appreciated if you could provide examples as to what a writer should or should not put into a sci-fi work.

[Ancient History]

My initial urge is "fuck thinking about cliches, write the damn thing first and then you can go back and edit it later." That said, this may or may not be helpful: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... ionCliches

[...You Lost Me]

Bah, cliches are awesome story material. That's why everybody uses them.

[Finder]

@ the TVTropes link
Wow, look at them all.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well the first thing to avoid is the TVTropes site.

[Finder]

Why, because it will consume all my time?

[Maj]

I would argue that it's not necessary to attempt full avoidance of every cliche. I actually don't think it's even a good goal to strive for. If (when?)you're going to include some, just make sure you do a damn good job incorporating them into your story.

[Username17]

TVTropes has thoroughly jumped the shark. Originally it was a collection of cliches, but in their never ending quest to categorize all things, they have filled page after page with things that are not cliches. There are TVTropes pages for incredibly specific fictional items that aren't archetypes or tropes at all. I mean seriously, what the actual fuck is this?

-Username17

[Meikle641]

At least they deleted the troper tales sections.

[Koumei]

Indeed, but it went from "tropes and cliches (needn't be on TV)" to "terms that will crop up, often by fans" (shipping, tsundere etc) to "a wiki for media" - so each show/game/thing gets its own page, as does every character, and then they cross-link to every possible related thing.

[tussock]

wikis are infinite. Just the way it is. There's pages on wikipedia for D&D monsters that only appeared in one module, and a wikibook full of all the same things again because none of that shit's supposed to be on wikipedia. But it is.


Anyhoo, having two sides at culture-war is a cliché, and having a young girl captured is a gigantic cliché. Dystopias are cliché. If you're going to write anything, it's going to be full of them. The trick is your dystopia has to be uniquely cliché, with a hook. The girl has to be an actual person readers might care about, with a hook so you can start caring early. A dystopia just has to be not stupid, it's generally better to not explain how it got that way, so as to not turn off all the people who know why that's wrong.

[Ancient History]

"No one knows the cause of the Great Maple Blight, but all remember the terrible plague of the undead that swept over Canada as a result of the Black Syrup."

[Finder]

So how bad is it that now I want to watch Mermaids: The Body Found?

@Ancient History
Don't you know--apocalypse never happens in Canada. They're too wholesome. Some long-dead god would have to come up out of the earth to make that kind of shit happen.

@Everyone
OKAY so we've established that clichés are not The Devil™, but there's still the problem that--as tussock said--the "dystopia has to be uniquely cliché," (oxymoron?) "with a hook."
I am very literal. When I think of hooks, I think of like, fish hooks. Or maybe the hooks that you're supposed to use when you begin a chapter to get the audience to read on. What is a hook in a setting/plot? What kind of hook could a dystopia have? What does that even mean? Now all I can think of is I Know What You Did Last Summer.

[Avoraciopoctules]

A literal hook? The young girl is a Pirate Prodigy, whose airship has plundered millions of neo-shekels for the Right. But then a Left saboteur snuck into the Minority Oppression Pit in her home base and everyone started paying taxes and getting gay-married! It was horrible. She was captured and put in a FEMA detention camp.

Will our hero and her hook-hand be able to convert the Left to a gold standard? Or will she be forced to concede that illegal immigrants may in fact have rights? You have to buy the book to find out. Shiver me timbers!

[Username17]

A hook in this case is a "plot hook". A plot hook is a literary device to compel the reader to continue reading. It's similar to a "macguffin", which is a literary device to compel the characters in the story to continue moving the plot forward. Often, a plot hook and macguffin can be the same thing.

-Username17

[sabs]

Not to be a doubting nelly and all that. But if you don't know what a "Hook" is. You might not want to worry too much about writing a good story, and just write stuff. Every writer I've ever met, or heard speak, has basically said that the early stuff they wrote was unmitigated crap. You just have to write, and write, and work at it until you move up from unmitigated crap, to just plain ordinary crap.

[Maj]

Not to be a doubting nelly and all that. But if you don't know what a "Hook" is. You might not want to worry too much about writing a good story, and just write stuff.

Or perhaps English is not a first language?

[Finder]

Oh come on, English is my bloody first language. Jesus Christ. Trollman's the only one who made any effort trying to convey what a hook was, so good job to the rest of you. Actively unhelpful.

[Chamomile]

After Frank responded there wasn't much reason to add another response restating what he'd already told you. So the discussion was left to how bizarre it is that you don't know such a piece of extremely common knowledge.

[Drolyt]

Working on a sci-fi piece with a dystopian America split into two extreme factions: the left and the right. Protagonist is a young girl captured by an enemy sect.
I haven't read enough sci-fi (working on it) to know what clichés to avoid. Help would be appreciated if you could provide examples as to what a writer should or should not put into a sci-fi work.

There is no grand list of things that should or should not go into a sci-fi work, it all depends on what you want to do with your story. The issue here isn't clichés but stereotypes. Cookie cutter situations genuinely are bad, but as long as you flesh out your characters and your situations it isn't terribly important whether or not it shares elements with prior works, because honestly complete originality is impossible. But if you do want to find out what people have done before (and you should) then you really need to get to work reading more sci-fi (and literature in general) because that is the only way for you to learn that stuff. Besides, the more you read the better writer you will be.

As for common pitfalls writers face I suggest reading How Not to Write a Novel. It is fun to read and might help you.

On TvTropes: don't go there for writing advice. Their conception of literature is amazingly warped. They literally think that poetry is just pretty words and that Animorphs is the equal of Hamlet. The level of anti-intellectualism they have crammed into a site ostensibly devoted to literary analysis is astounding. And that is without going into the pedophilia and rape apology.

[Avoraciopoctules]

It is the dystopian future, and the United States has balkanized into mutually-hating Neo-Confederates and Neo-Hippies. Things take a turn for the even worse when Earth is invaded by alien fish & game enthusiasts, who see hunting humans for sport and introducing genetically engineered monsters to the ecosystem to make things more "interesting" to be perfectly fine.

The protagonist is a child who grew up in an under-ocean transhumanist compound. She gets pulled up by accident by a spaceship trawling for plasma-breathing megalodons and one of the aliens adopts her as a pet because she is so cute and harmless. A year later, she manages to hijack an escape pod back to Earth's surface, and uses her new knowledge and freaky alien bio-augmentation powers (it started with healing the monofilament fishhook injuries, but that turned out to be slippery slope inevitably ending with laser eyebeams) to unite the human rival factions and reclaim Earth's independence.

The story's climax is a bout of the Most Dangerous Game between the alien leader and the girl's crazed survivalist father figure. The fate of the world is staked on the outcome.

[Koumei]

I am confused about one thing here:

Working on a sci-fi piece with a dystopian America split into two extreme factions: the left and the right.

So far that isn't sci-fi, it isn't even -fi. Haven't you just described current America?

[Drolyt]

I am confused about one thing here:

Working on a sci-fi piece with a dystopian America split into two extreme factions: the left and the right.

So far that isn't sci-fi, it isn't even -fi. Haven't you just described current America?

Wait... that has to be on purpose.

Also, Koumei has a good point. What is sci-fi about this?

[John Magnum]

America doesn't have an extreme left.

[Koumei]

Sure it does: everyone the extreme Right doesn't like :/