Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-25266931-20161119192054/@comment-26397825-20170211062631

There's guidelines in every walk of life. If you stray from them, you'd better do it well because otherwise no one is going to like it except you, and you will receive harsh criticism.

With writing, the biggest thing is to put feeling into it, and have it flow. It doesn't have to flow as in have long sentences that tell whole stories within themselves, the words just have to come after each other in a way that is pleasing to read, or evokes emotion. Dissonant poetry or music is excellent because it purposefully sets people on edge; it makes them feel anxious or tense because that is how it was written. But poetry that doesn't have an emotion behind it when actually written, and is instead just slapped together to vaguely rhyme, doens't evoke that emotion because the reader can feel that there was no emotion poured into it.

As Lucas said, the same goes for writing. People love the characters that make mistakes and the things that go downhill for so long and yet people still cling to hope because it evokes emotion in them; when things are handed to the main characters too easily or things just always go their way, or the main characters 'just happen' to meet someone who gives them all the answers or pull out something that saves the day at the last minute, people don't like it because it breaks their immersion. Their emotional connection is cut with the characters because everything the character went through was just invalidated and made worthless by this Macguffin.