Woowoo, Advice and You
The best advice that you can take as a writer is not to take advice.
Above my desk I have a notecard with the words “DON’T TAKE WRITING ADVICE” written in fat blue sharpie. Just in case I forget myself.
Also don't hit that light switch
Advice is called ‘advice’ rather than a ‘solution’ because it doesn’t address a specific problem, and in that sense advice is worth less than a blank piece of paper. At least the blank piece of paper has the potential to say something that isn’t murky bullshit. Most writing advice ends up as a vicous slurry of anecdata, opinion, woo-woo, tough-talk and feel-goodery.
Which is the doom of any description of an enigmatic process.
I noticed the Sorcery for Writers and Readers (and those who love them) article over at the Tor/Forge blog. It highlighted for me the perfect storm of writing advice.
The author, Steven Barnes, invokes the amateur, unpublished writer, the favorite audience of authors with writer’s block. Go to any bookstore and notice the piles of books with titles like “HOW TO WRITE SO THAT YOU’LL HAVE MORE SEX AND SHIT DIAMONDS” scattered about the reference section. The amateur, unpublished author represents the permanent underclass of the fiction writing field. They buy what amount to woo-woo-filled self-help books and their existence strokes the egos of “professional” writers.
You may have only sold three copies, and all of them to your mom, but at least you’re not like them; those filthy, unwashed amateurs!
These amateur, unpublished writers, make so many mistakes and “will not read, for fear that she will accidentally imitate this or that writer.” Because no professional, published writer has ever avoided the work of his or her contemporaries while writing a story.
Oh, wait.
Permit me to quote a long exchange that I found on Neil Gaiman’s website, featuring quotes from a moderated discussion with him and the unassailably brilliant Terry Pratchett (source):
Moderator2: What writer or kind of writing to you find now draws you the most?
Terry: These days, I am mostly reading history.
Terry: I find I read less and less fiction every year.
Neil-Gaiman: I spent 2 years on American Gods reading no fiction at all, just books of myth and books of history.
Neil-Gaiman: So I'm trying to catch up on my fiction reading currently.
Neil-Gaiman: But, for a writer, fiction gives you very little you can steal from.
Terry: Whereas you can open an old history book and - bingo!
Neil-Gaiman: Whereas reference books give you huge huge unmined fields to go and explore.
Terry: And no one else reads them now, except us...
Like any artist, Gaiman and Pratchett have their faults, but there cannot be any dispute that they are commercially successful.
Mr. Barnes then goes on to say that, rather than avoiding the works of others, the amateur, unpublished author should study the masters and experts that have come before. Not just their works, but also their beliefs, because “what you are looking for is the DIFFERENCE between the beliefs of successful people and the beliefs held by…well, not to put too fine a line on it, failures [original emphasis].”
Okay, we just did, and they’re telling us something quite different.
And now we have “failures” diminished to nothing but a throwaway noun. Good thing that we can ignore them, because they’ve failed to make a buck at their writing.
An axiom underlies everything in this article: a successful writer, according to Mr. Barnes, lies at the opposite pole from an amateur, unpublished one, no matter his or her brilliance or personal satisfaction with their craft.
I don’t pay my rent with my art, but my writing is one of my jobs. I am an indie author – none of the employees at Tor/Forge know who the fuck I am. So what? Some readers like my work and that makes me successful.
The author finishes up with the phrase “life is too short to reinvent the wheel every day.” I don’t agree. Art, and life, require us to re-invent and re-create every day. Life is too short to say and read the same things over and over again.
