i'm a good writer but there's things i absolutely will not tolerate in my own fiction namely :—
• pretending something normative is actually controversial (just write actual controversy)
• using bullshit or tropey conflicts for the sake of creating narrative tension (there are always better sources of tension)
• stating things with a flourish for the sake of making it appear more dramatic than it actually is (drama should be situational not a farce of prose [unless it is an actual farce i.e. comedy])
• “cheap tricks” more broadly, i.e. any technique which is justified primarily on account of what it does to the reader as opposed to what it does to the story (the story itself should justify the reader’s interest, so the job of the prose should be to support the story)
sometimes however it feels like refusing to do these things limits my potential audience quite severely, especially among straights (as the first two points are absolute mainstays of straight romance fiction)
i don’t want to just be like “straight people don’t know how to fucking read” but in a very real way straight fiction is comprised of a number of literary slights of hand which serve to artificially uphold and reinforce the myths of straight culture, and i don’t know how you can care about literature and not see that happening, and i don’t know how you can see it happening and tolerate it, and i don’t know how you can refuse to tolerate it and still maintain that you are straight
