Writing like Colleen Hoover, what makes a great opening line, and Nanowrimo's stance on AI - Recent favorites
I’ve wanted to share some favorites here for the longest time, but I either don’t take note of my favorites, or wait for so long to write about them that they’re not relevant to me anymore. I also don’t do it because I don’t see much value in just talking about stuff I’ve liked, but I have to try to stop overthinking it, so here we go I guess!
Even though I haven’t written a lot of fiction here, it is one of my passions and I’ve spent countless hours watching YouTube videos about writing. Usually, I discover a channel in my YouTube recommendations and stay for the personality of the creator. Here are some videos I really enjoyed recently!
In Defense of Colleen Hoover (Sort Of?) by SAVY WRITES BOOKS
Savy is a writer, youtuber and small business owner. I particularly like her videos about MLMs (I’m referring to multi-level marketing unfortunately, not the other one!) and LGBT issues. After making several videos analyzing and critiquing Colleen Hoover’s books (which I have to admit I haven’t watched yet), she just released a writing vlog literally writing an entire romance novel in the style of Colleen Hoover, in just two months! If you don’t know who Colleen Hoover is, she’s an incredibly successful romance writer, but many people complain that her books don’t advertise enough the fact that they depict very heavy subjects including domestic abuse.
After reading many of her books, Savy decided to make an experiment and write an entire romance book in the style of Colleen Hoover (without touching on any heavy subjects), including the very on-the-nose character names, and ridiculously high-stakes plot elements.
What I particularly enjoyed about this video is how in-depth she shows us her writing process. Everything from outlining, to setting up the book for pre-order on Amazon and setting up the ads for that, as well as formatting and making the cover art. Showing that much behind-the-scenes is very instructive (even when there is an unfortunate plot twist as is the case in this video!).
Some of the resources she mentioned:
- Story Planner, a website with interesting prompts to help you outline your novel
- Canva for the cover art
- Atticus for formatting the book itself
- And I really liked the questions she asks when she splits the outline into chapters:
- What action does the hero take toward achieving the goal?
- How is the plot forwarded?
- What does the hero know/feel that is different from the start of the chapter?
- What does the reader learn?
how to write iconic opening lines | an investigation! by Kate Cavanaugh Writes
Kate has been one of my favorite youtubers for a long time. Her vlogs about writing, especially the ones where she tries different challenges and other writers’ routines are so entertaining. In this one, she compiles many recent and successful books’ opening lines and tries to find what makes them iconic and gripping.
First off, I have to say that I feel her about forgetting about a project for a year and then coming back to it a year and a half afterwards! The work she accomplished in compiling all that information as well as her insight made me want to put more thought into my opening lines in the future.
Here are some things she considers make a great opening line, that also resonated with me:
- It makes the reader want to continue reading, begging some questions
- It instills a sense of danger
- It should have a strong voice
What makes a great opening line will also depend on the genre you’re writing in (a romance book will not start in the same way as a thriller), and of course taste plays a big part too.
I feel like I should add that coming up with a first line can be very daunting, so if you find that that’s preventing you from starting to write the story that lives in your head, don’t let it stop you. You can always find that perfect first line later.
“criticizing AI is racism,” says AI-backed writers group 😐 by D’Angelo
This one is not strictly speaking a video about writing, but it is a video about Nanowrimo: an American non-profit centered around the concept of writing a 50 000 words novel over the month of November. I hadn’t heard about the whole Nanowrimo AI fiasco before seeing this video pop up in my subscriptions, and D’Angelo provides some very interesting context around Nanowrimo’s new sponsors, and its already existing issues with other sponsors and with the Nanowrimo forums that they had to close down.
Long story short, Nanowrimo released a statement, visible in archives, now updated. The statement defended the use of AI as an aid to complete this challenge, using, to say the least, dubious arguments. All of this just one year after saying it was pretty much cheating to use software to boost your word count using a LLM, and after being sponsored by a generative AI company. I’m very sad to see the direction the organization is taking, as Nanowrimo was what allowed me to finish my first ever novel draft.
Their use of the concepts of ableism, classism and racism was misplaced and harmful to those that those terms stand to defend. AI companies are stealing the work of others to build artificial parrots that have a huge impact on our planet, and the people who have to train them to make sure they don’t show any harmful content, going very much against the values Nanowrimo are supposedly defending. The LLM models themselves, trained on our biased data, perpetuate ableism, classism and racism. If you want to learn more about AI’s issues, I recommend listening to some podcasts by Better Offline: How the AI bubble bursts and Tech won’t save us: Generative AI is a climate disaster.
That wraps up these recent favorites, I hope you liked it! I was hesitant to make this kind of article as I feel it maybe doesn’t bring as much value as more original content, but it’s still a good exercise and can still hopefully make you want to explore one of these topics a big more.