Although I think I talked about something similar to this a while ago, I want to talk about when NOT to look at writing advice. Yes, you heard me correctly. Although – especially if you’re new to writing – there is certainly a place for advice and study, looking at it can actually be counter-productive in some ways.
If you look on a site like Youtube, you’ll find mountains of videos telling you about mistakes to avoid in your writing, things that can “ruin” your stories and stuff like that. And, yes, giving advice about writing can be a useful and satisfying thing to do. In the very early days of this very site, it consisted of almost nothing but writing advice at times. Again, writing advice isn’t an inherently bad thing.
But there is also a very good case for NOT looking at it, or at least too much of it.
The trouble with writing advice, especially from professional editors and authors – is that it can put you into a perfectionist mindset. You’ll hear about all of these different mistakes you have to avoid, how you should *groan* “Show, don’t tell!”, how your opening chapter has to include this or that… or literally every reader will angrily throw the book across the room. And it can be overwhelming, it can set an impossible standard and leave you feeling absolutely frozen. “Why should I even try? It could go wrong in too many ways!“.
Seriously, if you’re doing anything creative, perfectionism is a VERY bad thing. Do not be a perfectionist! It will leave you frozen with indecision, constantly discarding really good ideas in the hope of getting a “masterpiece” idea that many not even ever show up. Perfectionism in general is an evil thing, it is an unreachable, impossible standard which will always make you feel terrible about yourself and the things you create.
And that isn’t even talking about the topic of publication. Maybe it is the hyper-competitive side of US culture – the culture of the internet – but there definitely does seem to be this “Oh, only the best of the best of the best should even try” attitude. Those who support traditional publishing tout it as some sort of gruelling test or ordeal that writers must subject themselves to in order to “prove their toughness or tenacity” or whatever, as if the suffering is the whole point. Even with indie publishing, there’s still this strong hyper-competitive element to a lot of the advice I’ve seen – how to “stand out” and get one over on all of those other authors.
The point of a novel or novella or short story is to entertain the audience. That is it.
If you go on a site like Goodreads and look at reviews of novels you’ve enjoyed, just look at the one-star reviews. You’ll see people moaning about how “badly-written” a novel that you really enjoyed was. Yet, the fact remains that you still enjoyed it. You still eagerly read it and had fun with it. Maybe the plot was gripping? Maybe the characters were interesting? Maybe you just liked the atmosphere or the writing style? Who knows? But you still had a lot of fun reading a novel that others have lambasted as “badly-written”. And you probably aren’t the only reader who enjoyed it.
At the end of the day, if you’re writing for publication, then it is your audience that matters the most. You can write something which will perfectly impress a team of professional writers, which perfectly meets the perfectionist standards of all of the writing advice you’ve heard… and, if it isn’t entertaining, thrilling or fun, then your audience won’t like it. The novel actually being interesting, compelling or fun to read matters a lot more than whether there is a small “info dump”, or some “telling” narration or a hundred other things – which used to be common features in novels – that are seen as hideously unfashionable amongst slick online writing tutors these days.
And, honestly, half of the best training for writing fiction is just to read a lot of it. Not only does reading lots of novels get you used to the cadences and rhythms of writing fiction, but reading lots of different authors that you like will help you to shape your style, and you’ll get a sense of what you do and do not enjoy reading. You’ll also spot things which, whilst often considered “mistakes” or “bad form”, are occasionally done by actual published authors in stories that you still enjoy reading.
The other half is just actual practice. Earlier, I mentioned that I had formal training. These were creative writing modules when I was at university. Whilst there was occasional formal teaching, the main part of it was just the weekly writing assignments and the seminars where everyone discusses last week’s assignment. The key part here was frequent, regular practice. Like any creative skill, you need to actually practice it. And, when you practice, you’re going to make mistakes and fail and stuff like that, because this is literally the point of practice.
I guess that the main lesson here is not to be perfect, but to be entertaining. That – whilst a certain amount of writing advice can be helpful – too much of it can leave you feeling totally frozen, constantly afraid of making mistakes which – in many cases – your audience won’t care about as much as you might think that they will. Yes, you should try to write something you’ll enjoy reading, you should try to write something good. But the instant you aim for “perfection”, you’ll start doubting yourself or feeling frozen.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
