I agree with Rachel one hundred percent. Creating art is a high priority for me; in fact, I’ve structured my life around increasing my time to do so. But it’s not my highest priority, and that’s okay. This truth was brought home to me recently when I was suffering from root canal complications. Mostly I was thinking, “My god, the pain, the pain, please make it stop, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop the pain.” But when I could focus beyond the immediate suffering, what did I care about the most? I wanted to spend time with my husband and my little dog, and I wanted to write long e-mails to my best friend. I’m an ambitious person, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t thinking about my writing anymore. What mattered to me was the people I love.
Taking a step back, this entire discussion was sparked from a piece of writing advice. I read a lot of writing advice every week. I even occasionally write some writing advice. It’s amazing how much helpful information about writing I can learn from the internet (although at this point, a lot of the advice I read is a reminder more than a revelation).
But this advice is not infallible, and it cannot be followed blindly. Each piece of advice requires consideration, and if you find it doesn’t work well for you, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or a bad writer or anything else. It means that advice is not for you, full stop.
People try to give me advice all the time (and not just about writing, either). Here are some examples of advice I do not take:
1. You should write every day. Yeah, I don’t write every day. I usually take weekends off, and then I come back to the computer on Monday full of fresh ideas and vigor. That’s what works for me, for now.
2. You should write what you know. Sorry, I don’t actually live in a world with working magic or a world set in the future, but I still write about them. (Yes, this advice has deeper connotations that are more helpful, but its phrasing can be misleading.)
3. You should write x words every day. Unfortunately, only I know how many words I can write per day, and this number changes over time and depending on circumstances (like, for instance, a root canal or quitting the day job).
4. You should only submit to pro paying markets. I actually kind of follow this one, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s silly. Really I should submit to any markets I feel like submitting to, right? If I’d be happy seeing my work at a certain publication, then I’ll submit. If I won’t feel happy or I think the publication is shady in some way, then I won’t submit. So this advice isn’t for me.
5. You should/shouldn’t outline. Um, really good writers go both ways on this one. So I’ll do whatever I like, and experiment with both. (For those wondering, yes, I outline for novels. For short stories, it really depends.)
I could go on, but you get the idea. Advice is in the eye of the beholder. People give advice about what works for them as individuals. But we are not cookie cutter people, and therefore some of this advice will not work for you. The trick is to learn what you can, and then adapt that learning to fit your own lifestyle, your own priorities, your own artistic strengths and weaknesses, and your own voice.
I would love it if you would comment with some advice you have read or received (writing advice or otherwise) that doesn’t work for you. It can even be something that I have said here on the blog (gasp). I can’t wait to see what you all come up with!
The Practical Free Spirit 
Dear gods, yes. Many people seem to like describing what they did for something or other as the One True Way to do it; writers seem to be some of the worst offenders in this regard. (“The only way to be a real writer is to write exactly 1000 words every day, no more and no less, before breakfast, then submit your work as soon as you finish typing it — no editing! — to markets which pay in either uncut diamonds or (if you’re not a really serious writer) gold Krugerrands.”)
One piece of maladvice which I got a lot in physics was to not say anything unless one was very certain of its correctness. The idea, I suppose, is that “real scientists” will ponder in their heads until they have something very deep to say, and will not waste other people’s time with statements which may be incorrect. (The notion of thinking out loud seemed to be anathema) The CS equivalent of this was to consider any major rewrites to be a sign of utter disaster, a comprehensive failure of one’s planning abilities.
Since I tend to work iteratively — write something very quickly, figure out what’s wrong with it, throw it out, write something else, etc., especially for really complicated things where the right answer isn’t obvious — this led to some friction for a while. Until I got confident enough to tell the people in question to get stuffed.
I don’t really know what goes through people’s heads when they offer such authoritative-sounding “advice.” The best I can ever offer someone is my experience on what has and hasn’t worked, perhaps with some thoughts as to why.
Not being allowed to ask questions would drive me insane. I often feel that questions allow me to go beyond simple comprehension of material into true mastery.
I think sometimes people get so used to thinking about doing things a certain way, they forget that other ways may be just as valid for different people. After all, in the end, it’s the result that matters, as long as the process works.
I’m not really a serious writer, so could you point me towards that Krugerrands market? 🙂
I’ve found writing to be such a slithery beast, and it’s not even like writing advice that may work for you at one time will continue to work for you. Every time I think I’ve figured my own process out, it changes and I’m flailing again.
You hit on a lot of the big flawed advice points, Amy. One big one I see a lot is that writers should keep a journal — that if you can’t write regularly about your own experiences, even just to yourself, then you’re not doing it right. But I find it easier to write 1000 words of fiction than 50 words about my day, so that one falls apart for me.
My process has definitely changed over time. It seems like I’ll always be experimenting.
Oh, the journal advice! I love it. When I was a child and a teenager, I read all these books featuring a heroine who wanted to become a writer, and inevitably she always faithfully kept a journal. And I never never could! Made me worry at the time.
I’ve also found the journal thing to be pretty useless.
The advice that I’ve found the most unhelpful is that I just need to keep trying. Because to keep trying with something that isn’t working as a story is not going to get you published it’s just going to make you feel bad.
For me what’s helped is to find various people who are making it in spec fiction and pay them to teach me what they know. And one of the side benefits of that is connecting with other writers in those classes and then us learning from each other.
Just keep trying without any more specifics does seem to be somewhat unhelpful. It’s kind of like the idea of practicing: practicing on its own might not help very much if you’re practicing the same wrong things over and over. I would have piano students who had diligently practiced the same mistakes over the week, and then it could be very hard to correct them! It’s a tricky line to balance upon.
Writing is very slippery, and there can be a lot of faith involved. Faith in oneself isn’t the easiest thing to hold onto — particularly in a domain like writing, where it feels like you’re putting yourself out there for a lot of rejection. We’re not being rejected, not really, but it sure feels like it sometimes, and that’s when writers sometimes replace faith with totems — i.e., ‘rules’ — and then need to repeat the rules to others in order to repeat the rules to themselves and keep the totems from falling apart.
Advice that doesn’t work for me:
-No one should ever self-publish. I haven’t been self-publishing, yet, but I’ve seen people do well with it.
-Write what you know. Spot on, Amy. A creative writing professor first stressed me this advice, so I wrote her a story with no spec fic elements . . . set it in Newfoundland. I’d never been to Newfoundland, but at the time my teacher didn’t know. She loved the story — loved it, that is, until she realized I’d made it all up.
-You must rewrite (x times — usually a big number). If I rewrite too often, I muddy the waters. I suspect this advice is sometimes useful for practicing editing techniques, but more often touted by people afraid to submit.
-Anything with an arbitrary number, I’ve found to contain arbitrary advice. Sometimes, however, that advice has worked without the arbitrary number. Writing x number of words each day has never helped, except when I’ve set the x. Setting up a word goal of any sort has often helped me, although many years ago I’d get paralyzed by it.
-Writing fast means writing bad. This isn’t so much given advice, as implicit in some other statements. If the voice that points this idea up was something I’d began ignoring years ago, today I might have a lot more written. Writing fast for me at present means more writing practice, more opportunities to make something good, more chances to get better — but perhaps writing slow used to be my better option; as you say, practicing more doesn’t mean practicing the right things.
-There’s others, but I can’t remember them. Good thing I can’t?
Also: At different times I would have looked on all of the above advice from an opposing angle. Advice that once applied may never again, and advice which never applied may do so tomorrow.
Thanks so much, Rich, for this list! I especially like your point at the end, about how advice can be perfect at some times and then no longer be relevant (or vice versa).
Always hated the ‘writers should read more than they write’.
Unless I’m writing a good 30k a day, I think I’ll be doing that regardless.
And I”ll echo the ‘write what you know’ foolishness. I’m not much of a war criminal, alas. Nor am I a murderer, master thief, starship captain, navy hero, detective, werewolf detective, master shipwright, so on… But I know a LOT about all of these subjects!
Huh. I’ve never heard the “read more than they write” one, just that reading in general is good for writers.
I actually do think reading is important for me, but I’ve spoken to more than one professional writer (and often critically acclaimed as well) who have told me, when asked about recent books read, that they no longer have time to read. Make of that what you will. 🙂
I think it’s important for writers to have read books, but not necessary to maintain some arbitrary ratio. I read less now than I used to, for many reasons. But having spent most of my childhood devouring every book I could lay my hands on, I feel like I’m doing okay.
[…] already written about writing advice in the past, but the more I think about it, the more I think this issue isn’t confined to advice […]
[…] mentioned in my post The Dangers of Advice that among the common writing advice I don’t follow myself is the adage to write every day. […]