I tend to bristle against any kind of storytelling advice because it often boils down to one (or both) of these:

• make sure to always avoid [thing that I love] because it’s really boring and nobody likes it
• make sure to always do [thing that I don’t like and that very often hurts me] because your story will be boring and/or pointless if you don’t

and first of all that’s invalidating. but second of all I also want to tell stories, but I definitely don’t want to follow mainstream advice because then I’d probably just end up creating more art that hurts me

for example, the advice that I’ve heard about exposition is “only tell the audience things that are 100% necessary to the story. ideally tell it to them in an indirect way. also, spent as little time as possible telling them things because the focus of the story should be about characters and emotions and drama”

but, some of my favorite parts of books like The Martian or The Fellowship of the Ring are long infodumps that serve little or no plot purpose at all. if Tolkien had followed this advice then I wouldn’t have gotten to enjoy reading about Bilbo’s birthday party or the origins of pipeweed or a whole bunch of cool worldbuilding about hobbits

also I don’t really like stories that focus on characters and emotions and drama. that’s a danger zone for me. it isn’t inherently hurtful, but it makes me feel like I could be hurt at any moment, and more often than not I am eventually hurt. I’m much more comfortable with stories that are about things or ideas or worldbuilding. that’s where I feel safe

anyway what I’m trying to say is that if/when I end up writing stories again, I’m going to have to figure out how to write a good story from scratch, because mainstream advice doesn’t apply to me. and that sucks. and I’m very upset about that and several related things

@kasdeya yeah, a lot of my recent writing projects have basically been exercises in going "oh. that writing advice i learned in school was bullshit? cool" and proceeding to just write whatever i want

@smolcasm that’s amazing. I really want to do that eventually. I have A Lot of Issues that are stopping me for now but I would love to start writing again