And while a genius remains a genius whatever idiom they're writing in, clumsy derivative work remains the majority of what you see in any venue, unfortunately "Writing to avoid a cliché" IS A CLICHÉ The bag o' tricks to say a thing without saying it isn't that fucking deep
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Yeah, I can sit here too and think of maybe six or seven ways to say something like "What is grief but love persevering?" without actually saying it ("Like a slogan on a Hallmark card, barf") So can anyone who's come up through this kind of writing community
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I'm actually kind of interested, where would one learn the tricks for how to do this? All my brain does is regurgitate synonym swapped garbage.
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Replying to @jamari_oneal
Well if you have a lot of money and time to spend you learn this kind of thing doing playwriting workshops
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Fair enough, I guess I'll do my broke college student substitute and just look up some syllabi. That's typically how I learn about new special interests. Which the discourse around WV has really made me want to do. Dialog is *hard*.
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Replying to @jamari_oneal
I mean, I'm not claiming to be some great writer but if you made me try to think of a way to do it I'd probably go with a running core metaphor of some kind and then try to refer to that metaphor as obliquely as possible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
Spitballing here - wife is in car accident, husband dies, wife's phone is also badly damaged and has its screen shattered
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
Phone gets janky and hard to use, wife refuses to replace it, tries to get the screen repaired but warranty won't pay for that, refuses to accept warranty money for replacement or upgrade because "I shouldn't have to transfer over all my apps and data"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
Eventually has a breakdown yelling at some customer service rep who loses their temper themselves and says "Ma'am please why do you have to make this so hard" "WELL WHY SHOULD I MAKE IT EASY"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
There, see, I said basically the same thing but I talked around it and never directly said it (Note that this idea is, itself, now very much a cliché that gets slammed as corny but still wins awards when done well - it's the point of Pixar's Up)
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A fancy poem that says roughly the same thing as the line in WandaVision is WH Auden's "Funeral Blues", which I think is a very good poem but if you wrote the exact same thing today with the same level of explicit rawness would get you dinged for cliché
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
Like, what is The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good. if not hitting you over the head and being extremely on the nose etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jamari_oneal
If I were trying to write a modern version of Funeral Blues it'd be much more understated I'm an Internet addict so I'd riff on his first line, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone"
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