Anti-Unimaginative Writers League

On the unimaginative thing: I love cliches, actually, if they're done right.

I do, ultimately, prefer realistic settings over sci-fi and fantasy, which might inform my opinion, and I think I read and I watch more for the structure of a thing (the way words and devices and production skills and all that is used) than the story itself. So I can appreciate if a story is unimaginative, but the thing itself is really well made.

Like most of Edgar Wright's stuff. Shaun of the Dead is every zombie film and rom-com cliche in a great big ball, but it's visually fantastic, and the camera work, editing and use of comedic timing is fucking excellent. There are some gems in the script too (My favourite bit has to be "there's no I in team, but there is in pie. And there's an I in meat pie. Meat is an anagram of team...")

And anything by Dylan Moran. He rehashes a lot of the same themes that every other comedian does, but he's a fucking wizard with words (like describing the German language as sounding like "a typewriter eating tin foil being kicked down the stairs" and Irish people as looking like they're "hiding other people inside of them") so I can ultimately forgive him.

I hate lazy writers more than I hate unimaginative ones. If someone puts a lot of effort into the actual structure of a thing, I care very little about the story.

But I can appreciate an imaginative story if the creator actually gives a shit about how they structure stuff, too. Like Welcome to Night Vale I like because it's well-written both because of the elements that make up the production, like it's script, acting and comedic timing and it's clever story. But even though Blade Runner was a really interesting concept, and visually pretty astounding, the acting is robotic, and the script isn't nearly as clever and sardonic as the original novel, so I can't really stand it.

A lot of the stuff I see and read nowadays is very sparse in terms of the writing itself, because I think people are too concerned with a good premise, but not good writing.

edited 25th Mar '16 2:26:31 AM by trashconverters

I am a VERY lazy writer, one who loves to come with imaginative (?) ideas but never really DO anything with them. So far, I have three distinct series ideas rumbling around in my head. The first two are weird & wacky, the last is serious and dramatic (with a few humourous moments to break the tension).

Edited by IsaacTheRed on Jul 21st 2018 at 2:34:19 PM

The thing about me is that I'm pretty good at thinking up imaginative characters and settings, but pretty bad at thinking up plots.

i have such amazing ideas sometimes. the problem, however, is that i suck at writing and maybe even making a comic out of that.

I can probably talk 'till the cows come home about how "TV Tropes has ruined my life" in how I find a lot of stories these days predictable, particularly with films... and then when something happens I don't expect, I am impressed by the the un-formulatic thing being done. Can this be a thread to praise imaginative / good writing?

Today, I saw Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them The part in it where A kid-character looked like they were about to have a redemption - with the villain tempting them to power, but also the good characters trying to talk them down. It looked like they were right on the cusp of calming and being soothed and redeemed. Then the council of wizards comes in and just plain kills them. I really thought it was going to go one way, and was impressed by the gutsiness of it going another, much sadder way. Now, there was some Red Herring setup that was a bit predictable, but the end of the matter wasn't. When the screen writers go ahead and kill an abused child... pretty dark and not the "usual" way of family-friendly adventure movies.

As far as complaining about unimaginative and lazy writing: As a fanfic reader and writer, that is why I utterly despise the "High School AU" genre. I figure that most of the people writing it are people who are in high school, but these stories always strike me as less "what they are experiencing" and more like "what they wish they could experience based upon high school based tv and movies." In other words, everyone who writes those things seems to essentially just write a modern version of The Breakfast Club . They never reflect my high school memories. Maybe I was too much "the basketcase"? In any case, yeah, there's an entire GENRE in fanfic, at least, that I've written off as not being worth my time to read long ago due to what I saw as lazy, unimaginative writing.