Home For Fiction – Blog

This is quite the meta-post: I’ll be offering you advice on how to successfully get writing advice. More maddeningly, perhaps, I’ll be partly asking you to ignore writing advice – advice which you’d have to ignore in order… not to ignore it. There are no simple answers, sorry!

Overall, what this little linguistic and conceptual wizardry underlines is:

• Writing fiction is a complex process; it’s both art and isn’t.
• Crucially, a certain level of critical thinking is required in order to know what advice to follow.

This latter part is what I’ll be focusing on in this post. I’ll offer you tools that will help you know what to do so that you get writing advice successfully. That is, what to do so that any writing advice you’re getting is actually helping you instead of misleading you.

Why People Seek Writing Advice

As with virtually everything, the idea for this post emerged with experience and observation: I noticed that people are eager to get writing advice from other authors (perceived more successful), writing advisors, bloggers, you name it.

Nothing wrong with that.

But just because someone is a good artist, that doesn’t make them a good teacher. Moreover, what works well for one artist, doesn’t for another.

In any case, it’s to an extent understandable why aspiring authors try to learn from those they perceive as “better”. The quotation marks are necessary, because no one can offer an objective assessment on someone else’s narrative. Only you, the author, can do that.

Still, we try to learn from others – as I said, nothing wrong with that. Indeed, it’s a great way of learning, as it allows us to avoid certain mistakes.

However, it’s important to keep one thing in mind: The way there can be no objective assessment on someone else’s work, there can’t be any facts, either.

There can be only opinions.

Offering Advice Is about Offering an Opinion

It can be a knowledgeable opinion; it could be a fact-based opinion.

It’s still an opinion.

To once again use my favorite example, just because Stephen King (and writing advisers out there parroting him) says the road to hell is paved with adverbs, that doesn’t mean you should listen to this piece of advice. Maybe it has worked for Stephen King; all the power to him.

You’re not Stephen King, you’re you.

Moreover, here’s the first instance of meta-advice, which will allow us to touch upon the subject of exercising critical thinking: Should you listen to me, telling you not to listen to Stephen King?

Critical Thinking in Getting Writing Advice

So, let’s assume that author A offers you a piece of advice on writing. Then comes writing adviser B, and offers you something partly contradictory, but mostly compatible. But suddenly academic C runs and points out something refuting both. Just as you’re about to go insane, content editor D offers yet another opinion – partly agreeing, partly disagreeing with the others.

What do you do?

Surely, you think, not all of them are correct? At least some of them must be wrong? The funny thing is, not necessarily. We’re talking about opinions and context. This has an intriguing consequence, which you should (aha! more advice!) try to understand well in this journey of discovery:

Writing advice is not binary; right-or-wrong.

A given piece of advice is “right” in certain contexts, in the sense that following it will help you discover something about your authorial style, it will address an issue in your writing, or it will allow you to approach a certain aspect from a new perspective.

Not so in others.

For this precise reason, I try really hard when I offer you my advice on writing fiction to be as clear about this as possible:

• Your mileage may vary.
• You need to decide for yourself.
• I can’t offer you simple solutions (and anyone promising that is lying to you).

Neither I nor anyone else knows what’s going on in your authorial mind, and so, inevitably, nobody can tell you precisely what to do or offer you guarantees of any sort.

So, how can we learn to exercise critical thinking and see writing advice for what it is, opinions?

Understanding Context: The Various Kinds of Writing Advice

Let’s quickly revisit my post on cargo cult writing, to see a little piece of wisdom I offered there. In particular, I said that cargo cult writers often follow a “shopping list”, checkbox-style way of writing, paired with adherence to arbitrary rules. They might work hard, but their efforts are misplaced – that is, they waste their energy on the wrong things. Remember that writing can be really hard when you don’t know what you’re doing (and delightfully easy when you do).

And so, with this in mind, let’s be clear about one thing: The closer writing advice is to the artistic aspects of writing (as opposed to the procedural, technical ones), the likelier it is to be wrong – and the more alert your critical thinking should be. This isn’t the only differentiation (indeed, as I’ll show you in a moment, there are several), but we could consider it a handy umbrella term.

For example, writing advice about, say, syntax and vocabulary is (mostly) alright and your guard doesn’t need to be up. Yet advice about how to write your characters, “show don’t tell” and stuff like that, need to make you skeptical. Of course, this doesn’t mean the advice might not be right for you; only that you need to assess it carefully.

There are a lot of things packed in this example, so let’s take a closer look.

Seeing Through the Advice

As I said above, writing advice comes in all forms and shapes. To make it easier for you to see the patterns, I’ll try to split the various possibilities in neatly defined polar opposites. Just remember, this is an artificial division. In reality, things won’t be quite so black-and-white. Try to get the “vibe” of what the advice is – the closer you feel it is toward the problematic sides shown below, the more alert you should be.

• Artistic vs Technical. This is the umbrella term I mentioned, and a good starting point. When someone offers you writing advice on aspects of your writing as art (e.g. how you should write characters, that you should divide chapters with a cliffhanger), you need to approach it very skeptically.
• Simple Answers vs Conceptual Analyses. When someone offers you absolute, catchy quotes, you need to be extra skeptical. “Show don’t tell” is about as useful as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” when taken out of context – and it always is, like all quotations. Good advice doesn’t deal with specifics (because they don’t exist in fiction) but with more conceptual, more theoretical foundations.
• Prescribing vs Describing. Have you ever, in any of my posts offering fiction writing tips, seen me telling you to do this or that? I only explain how my experience and expertise allows me to see a situation, and it’s up to you to use it for your purposes. This is a describing mode of offering advice, and places responsibility on you – where it should be. When someone instead uses a prescribing mode of advice, where they tell you what to do or not, they’re doing a disservice to you.
• Broad vs Specific. Another warning sign is advisers who are very specific in their advice. I’ve actually seen blog posts advising people to keep their chapters between 1800 and 2200 words, to keep the reader hooked. Incredible? You bet. Yet there are many inexperienced writers out there who fall for such fancy stupidity. This is called overprecision, by the way, and it’s an informal logical fallacy.

Good Writing Advice Is both More and Less Useful with Experience

Yeah, the heading is nutty – but allow me to blow my own trumpet (again) and offer you another sign of better writing advice: It’s when the person offering it puts you in an uncomfortable spot, creating some sort of discrepancy, paradox, and overall anything that forces you to think.

So, what this cryptic heading means is this: The more experienced you become as a writer (and reader; of advice and otherwise), others’ advice is both more useful (because you know what to do with it, weeding out the bad and keeping the good) and less useful to you (because, well, you don’t need it as much as you did when you weren’t as experienced).

There’s a deep paradox in acquiring skills, knowledge, and experience, one that old adage exemplifies splendidly: Good decisions come with experience, which comes with bad decisions.

In other words, perhaps ironically, writing advice isn’t there to help you directly, by solving your problems for you, but indirectly, by helping you see for yourself what you should do.

Bad writing advice pretends to solve your problems, while good writing advice merely tries to help you solve them yourself.

As simple, yet as complex. But there are no shortcuts.