Writing Advice

Disclaimer: this isn’t me giving writing advice, this is me discussing writing advice.

Questions in the vein of “How do you write?” often come up when I boast (or mention) to someone else that I’m a writer. Since I’m not much a fan of giving advice, I often make a joke about using my fingers to maneuver a pencil across a piece of paper or to press down on certain keys on my computer and create letters which in turn create words and subsequently sentences and, voila, a story. The words of Shia LaBeouf also echo in my mind: “JUST DO IT!” Honestly, another part of the reason I avoid answering straightforwardly is because such questions are themselves ambiguous. The question’s meaning ranges from what my personal inspirations are (which varies day-to-day), what my personal process is (which varies second-to-second), what inspiration they can find (which depends on the person), what process they should practice (which depends on the person), and more. So, rather than actually being helpful, I’d rather look at some writing advice and muse on what I think is good and bad about it.

Show, Don’t Tell

This is fine advice. It’s often more engaging to experience a story through sensations, personalization, and implications rather than a dry, straightforward narrative. Notice the difference:

Bob woke up. He went to the store and bought some apples. He returned home and ate one. It was yummy.

Bob’s stomach growled when he woke. I could go for something sour. His trip to the supermarket was delayed briefly by a carefree biker weaving between the street and sidewalk, but soon enough he returned back to his cozy den with a Granny Smith in hand. Without bothering to run it under the tap, he bit into it and savored the fruit.

Of course, in the grand scheme of a story maybe Bob’s excursion for food wouldn’t matter compared to his job being on the line, his wife threatening a divorce, and his child starting to dabble in hard drugs. In such cases of minor details, telling would probably work better. As with any advice, moderation of its use is important, but overall I’d say “Show, don’t tell” is solid as it avoids unsensational, unimpressive types of storytelling.

Write What You Know

I mean… It’s okay advice, I guess. On one hand, obviously you can’t (shouldn’t) write about the nitty gritty of a laparoscopic surgery if you haven’t done one, seen one, or researched one. On the other hand, you shouldn’t not write about something you don’t know about if it interests you. If it’s unfamiliar, you can always become familiar with it one way or another. You don’t have to stick to what you currently know. What you know now I guarantee you didn’t know when you were, say, eight years old (unless you’re for whatever reason reading this blog at eight years old). I also think writing what you can imagine is completely fair, since sticking hard and fast to this advice would mean the genres of fiction would not exist.

Make it Dark, Make it Grim, Make it Tough, but then, for the Love of God, Tell a Joke

Here we have the Joss Whedon advice. Personally, I think people unfairly blame him because modern screenwriters took it too far and now nothing is serious. Looking back at his shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, things were fairly serious. There were episodes like The Body and Passion that were very if not entirely serious. And there were episodes like Once More with Feeling and Tabula Rasa where the overall tone was humorous—but serious elements were NOT subverted (i.e., people being betrayed, people dying). This advice I think is all the more necessary nowadays, not to follow to its horrid extreme, but to implement tonal variance in a way that is sensible and entertaining. Being too funny isn’t the takeaway, just as being too serious is what’s advised against.

To Be a Writer, You Need to Write Daily

This is advice I actually consider to be bad. I disagree with it, but before getting to that I’ll state the obvious: of course you need to write in order to be a writer. I don’t think an arbitrary frequency of writing determines your status as a writer (much). Taking the extreme example of George R. R. Martin, it’s not great to take 13 (and counting) years to write a story. But I still consider him to be a writer, and overall a good one given so many people like his A Song of Ice and Fire series. So, I agree with the idea of encouraging writing, but I disagree with the idea you need to do it as often as every day.

Don’t Use Another Dialogue Tag Other than “Said”

To be honest, this is stupid advice. Making this advice as strong as it can be, it makes sense to not over-describe as readers pick up on that sort of thing and it comes across as inauthentic if not excessive.

“How dare you?” he roared.

“How dare I?” she countered. “How dare you!?”

“Excuse me?” he exclaimed.

“You are not excused!” she crooned.

“You are being ridiculous!” he lamented.

“I am not!” she warbled.

I’ve only seen something like this in someone’s writing once, and it wasn’t this bad. This example would be better fixed with no dialogue tags at all after the first few, and arguably changing the remaining dialogue tags to “…he said,” “….she said,” would diminish the dialogue’s effectiveness. Maybe the emotions could be inferred without an alternative to “said,” but I prefer the variance in dialogue tags since it looks repetitive and unremarkable for people to only have “said” things. How they said it is interesting; an adverb could spice up the plain “said,” though that, too, could run into the trouble of overusing adverbs (which goes against another piece of writing advice: “Don’t use adverbs”). Both these can be considered to be versions of “Show, don’t tell,” as using either certain dialogue tags or certain adverbs could be doing an unnecessary thing in telling too much. But the idea of “never” using an adverb or alternative dialogue tag is, as I said, stupid.

When People Tell You Something's Wrong or Doesn't Work for Them, They Are Almost Always Right; When They Tell You Exactly What They Think is Wrong and How to Fix It, They Are Almost Always Wrong

People may take exception to the fact this advice is from Neil Gaiman, but matters about other things he’s allegedly done are moot here. This advice is something I find very much agreeable, partly due to it not being as absolutist as “They’re always right” or “They’re never right”. I also like it since there aren’t really many tips out there for handling critique. It circumvents critiques both from being considered personal and from being overly prescriptive. This speaks to the defensiveness in me when I hear someone say they didn’t like something (those bastards!) and can definitely allow more people to open up to such critique as well as disregard critique when it crosses a line into coopting how a story “should” be. Notably, this advice is a good approach to handling other writing advice.

Don’t Use a Long Word When a Short One Will Do

While I generally agree that loquaciousness in speech and writing is tiresome, the opposite end of the spectrum is that simple language is bland and boring. A quote from Dead Poets Society:

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.”

I’d add that a pervasive avoidance of long words won’t do either. I’ll admit, I got annoyed when I saw a word I didn’t know when reading at a young age. But the variety of words is wonderful—it allows people to experience or conceive an experience that is nuanced. Why would I use “vituperative” rather than “verbally abusive”? Because it is a fun word to say, and it is altogether more concise than two words. Why would I use “morose” instead of “sad”? Because basically no one says “morose” and it is more descriptive than just “sad”. English has a vast vocabulary, so why not use it? Words need not be forsaken simply because they’re long. What is writing if not playing with language? You want to communicate something? Fine, but why not do it with gusto? You need not wax poetic, but be intrepid! (And yes, be prudent alike the advice “show, don’t tell”.)

Don’t Edit as You Write

I mostly agree with this one, and I’ll echo what I mentioned in an earlier blog post that most everyone I know who writes and edits mid-draft has yet to finish their story. Though, of course, this is my opinion and my experience—other people can have a different process that works for them involving editing mid-draft. I, myself, allow exceptions to this advice when a particular word or phrase bothers me enough due to not conveying the right meaning I want (or for being grammatically incorrect), and I may go back and quickly swap it out with another one. But, in my opinion, editing is a very different mindset to the one you have when writing. It can be difficult to do both in tandem.

Experience Things

Okay, this is a paraphrase of some advice I heard somewhere from someone that I don’t remember. I do remember it’s particular to finding inspiration when you’re stuck or uncertain about just what you might want to write about. Overall, I can’t think of a significant way I disagree with it, as it’s solid advice: if ideas aren’t rapping on your brain, go get some. Read a book, see a movie, pet a random cat you come across, listen to Beethoven, take a walk in a garden, sing a song, people-watch, go do. I suppose the obvious counter-advice would be don’t overdo it by actively harming yourself or never getting around to writing.

I think that’s a decent list of writing advice I’ve discussed. Maybe I’ll talk about other writing advice another time.