RSS

Zombies Are Sooooooooo Overdone

26 Jul

Writer’s Note: This is the final catch up piece…now we are all caught up to date on columns….yeah!

I love zombies. I love the idea of zombies. I have seen every episode of The Walking Dead and I have read all the comics. I have seen all of the movies and I can’t wait to see what they do with Lincoln as a zombie…but here’s the thing…I would NEVER write a book about zombies…because it is so overdone.

There are a lot of writers out there who watch the trends and then write towards them. This, my fellow writers, is a very bad idea. First and foremost, by the time you finished the entire process for a book that you started now about zombies, they will be very yesterday. Second, maybe zombies aren’t your “thing”. Maybe unicorns are your “thing”. Whatever your “thing” is…don’t force a zombie on it just because you might think they are cool.

I admit it is a grand temptation to follow the writing crowd. Let’s face it, right now; zombies are “working” for a lot of people. That’s where the money is at for those writers who are good at zombie stories but just because it is working for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. You have to write what is in your guff, not someone else’s. (Trivial Pursuit Alert - A “guff” is historically the place where souls wait to be born)

So before you go forcing your main character to munch out on the rest of your characters…stop and ask yourself…am I a zombie writer…chances are if you have not been munching on people all along you aren’t so move on and write what you write….

 

© The Writer’s Advice, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.

 
3 Comments

Posted by on July 26, 2022 in Writing

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

3 responses to “Zombies Are Sooooooooo Overdone

  1. July 26, 2022 at 8:24 pm

    I’m sick of Zombies like I’m sick of vampires. Icky!

     
    • thewritersadvice

      July 26, 2022 at 8:27 pm

      They are getting to be a little more than overdone. I think that is a big problem in the writing world today…something works and everyone jumps on it.

       
  2. July 28, 2022 at 11:29 pm

    I cannot believe you said that!!!

    Actually, I’ve read a couple of hundred zombie novelsand very few stood out. Day by day was a good duo when it all started (third book coming soon apparently to wrap it up)

    Then I read Marc Clodi’s series, brilliant! Smart zombies!!

    Than I read a horrible book called world war z… It wasn’t a book really… It was a collection of articles written for a script… Don’t get me wrong. He’s done good for the.zombie world, his zombie guide is alright but full of holes and death sentences, he’s created an organization to fight zombies. But WWZ just really sucked.

    Then I see copy cats of the same unique ideas these original (before zombies were cool) authors created for zombies. Passed off as second hand revamped stories… This is what is killing zombie authors.

    Actually, its what is killing post apocalyptic / apocalyptic authors in general, I reckon.

    But vamps, werecritters, demons, aliens, dragons, wizards. Psychics and super heroes have always been rotating as the “now” theme for a while…

     

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
%d bloggers like this: