Awful Writing Handbook

The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy cost over a billion dollars to produce. The writers had unlimited resources, the best visual effects in history, and characters audiences already loved. They still made Rey a Mary Sue.

Not because they wanted to. Because nobody in the room could name what they were doing wrong.

Rey wins every fight without training. Her failures don’t cost her anything. She receives competency as a birthright rather than earning it through struggle. The Force works when the plot needs it to. Other characters exist primarily to validate her. Audiences sensed something was off from the first film and couldn’t stop arguing about it for a decade, because the problem has a name that nobody on that production team ever said out loud: Mary Sue. If they’d been able to name it, they could have fixed it. They couldn’t name it, so it made it to the screen and cost the franchise billions in goodwill.

The same diagnosis applies across a decade of committee-written spectacle. The Disney live-action remakes removed every flaw from characters whose flaws were the point — Belle’s stubbornness, Ariel’s recklessness, Simba’s guilt — because the writers knew “don’t make her unlikeable” without knowing that earned flaws are what make characters worth following. The Rings of Power stops every twenty minutes to explain what’s happening in the world because nobody flagged the info-dump before it went to camera. Netflix series run four seasons on material that had one good season because nobody could diagnose where the story actually ended.

These aren’t failures of budget or talent or intention. They’re failures of diagnosis. The writers couldn’t name what made the originals work, so they couldn’t see what they were breaking. Breaking Bad earned Walter White’s transformation across five seasons because the writers knew what consequence-free storytelling looked like and refused it at every turn. The original Star Wars worked because Luke failed, struggled, and earned his victory. Mad Max: Fury Road works because every character has something real to lose and the story makes them pay for every mistake.

I cataloged 68 writing sins because I kept watching $500 million productions commit every one of them and finally understood the pattern. It wasn’t incompetence. It was the gap between recognizing good writing and being able to diagnose bad writing in your own work. Those are different skills. The first one you develop by consuming great fiction. The second one requires vocabulary — specific names for specific failures that let you see what’s broken before it makes it to the page.

I’m Richard Lowe. I’ve published 113 books and ghostwritten dozens more. My clients have secured over $30 million in venture capital. I’m also AuDHD, which means my brain doesn’t accept “just make it better” as methodology. When I realized I’d been committing the same sins for years without seeing them — the same sins killing franchise after franchise — I did what my brain demanded: I cataloged every way fiction goes wrong, named each one precisely, and built the diagnostic system that lets you find them in your own work before readers do.

This is that system. If the writers on those productions had it, Rey would have earned her victories. The Rings of Power would trust its audience. Netflix would know when to stop.

Questions

The original Star Wars worked because a farm boy with no special destiny except the one he earned had to lose his mentor, fail his friends, and fly down a trench with no targeting computer and nothing but his own judgment. That’s not a Mary Sue. That’s a character whose victory costs something and means something because we watched him earn it.

The Sequel Trilogy forgot what that felt like. The Disney remakes forgot why the flaws mattered. The Netflix series forgot where the story ended. None of them had a name for what they were losing, which is why they kept losing it.

You can’t fix what you can’t name. This handbook names everything.

Part of the AI Writer’s Library Series. See also: Character Handbook | Revisions Handbook