I wanted to write fiction, but I didn’t know how. I hardly even knew where to start. When I tried to wing it, I got nowhere.
I picked up a few books about writing, and then a few more. There was a lot of overlap among them, plenty of recurring themes, but none of them quite seemed to answer my questions. Soon I had dozens of books but I was as confused as ever.
Today, I’m ready to charge the existing collective writing advice industry with three crimes.1
First: many writing-advice-givers make assumptions – they assume you want to write the same kind of fiction as the author of the book. But many of those writers, particularly the literary ones, never say so explicitly.
Take this guy, Robert Olen Butler. I enjoyed his book From Where You Dream immensely. But he certainly has a point of view:
If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, we’re going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from. But if you have this aspiration and an open sensibility, and if what I’m saying makes sense, then you have to tell your mind to back the hell off. It’s another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art. And I’ll wager that virtually everything you’ve written so far has come from your head.
Nowhere on the cover of that book does it say “this book is for writers of sensory-based literary fiction drawn from the subconscious; many other kinds of ‘fiction’ exist, but we look down upon them and dismiss them as unworthy.” You have to put that together from context.
To acknowledge that some people might want to tell a more straightforward kind of story would be like if you walked into the Culinary Institute of America and the instructors clarified that they were not going to teach you how to make a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. In their minds, it goes without saying, it’s beneath everybody in the room. But the thing is, I love Kraft Dinner. It’s delicious. And you don’t have to follow the directions on the box exactly, there’s a lot you can do with it.
If the only issue was that I wanted to write lowbrow fiction, I would have been fine. There are books of advice for that as well! The problem was how narrow each individual book of advice was — and how unaware of its own narrowness.
This is the first writing advice crime: bossy, judgmental, narrow advice, packaged and sold as if it were applicable to everyone at all times.
To combat this problem, it helps to have a map of the kinds of writers and the kinds of writing, and then to situate yourself within that map, to know yourself as a writer. I’ll get into that in in a few days, in Fiction Varies and Finding the Right Advice.
Second: writing-advice-books tell you what to do, often in the strongest possible terms, but they give no models of why that advice might work, or for whom it would not work. They say to “write every day,” but they don’t tell you the mechanisms by which that changes you as a writer. They don’t explore different cadences — three times a week, say, or three times a day — and observe what happens as a result. The advice is flat and incurious, and as a result I found it hard to believe in.
This is the second writing advice crime: terrible epistemics.
These kinds of errors frustrate me a lot! The whole second arc of this series, Advice About Being a Writer, is devoted to examining each of the major claims of the advice-givers and trying to reason about them in a more systematic way. It helps to think about each problem from first principles, to do experiments, and again, to consider “What kind of writer am I?”
Third: these books fail to address a whole class of important writing problems, and they don’t seem to engage with that gap. Specifically, what makes a writer? Do you need innate talent or passion or drive or creativity or any other trait? Which of those traits can be learned or adopted on purpose, and which must be intrinsic? How do you know? Are you sure? Some writing-advice-givers take a stand on these questions and assert that “you have to be born with the passion,” but again, they don’t really dig into why they believe it. They just make the assertion and move on.
I’m probably being especially silly about this third “crime.” After all, if I picked up a dozen books on woodworking and none of them addressed the question of “drive to do woodworking,” I wouldn’t feel especially put out. If you don’t want to do woodworking then just… don’t? Why isn’t it the same about writing? Why am I salty that writers abdicate on the question of motivation and drive?
The answer to that is complicated and probably reveals a lot more about my own internal psychological tangles than it does about the failings of writing-advice-givers — but I’ll hazard a guess that some of it is also pervasive and cultural.
Writing is both admirable and accessible to nearly everyone. Almost everyone reads, at least a little bit; almost everyone writes, at least a little bit. We all do these things every day. It feels within reach, to be a writer. And yet — most of us know, we’re not Writers, with a capital W. Not in any lofty or admirable way. It’s cheap to try, but you’re likely to fail.
Haruki Murakami puts it like this:
The world of the novelist is like a professional wrestling ring that welcomes anyone who feels like taking a crack at it. The gap between the ropes is big enough to pass through, and a step is provided to make your entrance easier. The ring is spacious. No security men block your way, and the referee doesn’t bark at you to leave. The wrestlers who are already there — the established novelists, in other words — are at the very least resigned to your presence: “No worries — come on up and take your best shot” is their attitude. The ring is — how shall I put this? — an airy, easy, accommodating, altogether laid-back environment.
While entering the ring may be easy, however, remaining there for long is hard.
What’s the magic fairy dust, that makes a writer into a Writer? What accounts for the difference? A lot of it is practice, but is that enough, is that the whole list of ingredients? Most people don’t think so, most people think there’s more to it than that. But what?
This is the third writing advice crime: abdicating on the question of motivation.
I’ll start to tackle that question tomorrow, in Drive to Write, and I’ll come back to it a few days later, in Allegedly Unsolvable Writing Problems.
It’s a running joke2 in my professional circles that the best way to get other people to do work is to do their jobs for them, poorly. They’ll see your terrible, flailing attempt and be disgusted by it. Then they’ll redo the work, much better this time, out of spite.
In that spirit, this entire series of articles is a hate-letter, my performance improvement plan for the writing advice industry.3 You let me down. Let me show you how you disappointed me, and point in the direction of better.
I don’t claim I’ve solved all the problems, made restitution for all the crimes. Not even close. You are welcome to follow up with a hate-letter of your own, improving on my shoddy contributions.
And so we learn and grow together, over time, snarling scornfully all the way.
Yes, of course this is silly. After all, each writing-advice-book is just one writer’s take. No one is responsible for surveying the field as a whole, for coordinating, for asking, “have we covered all our bases, here?”
That is, no one was responsible, until now! I hereby take on that responsibility.
Temporarily. Only as long as I’m having fun.
Important: it is a joke. In most of my dealings, personal and professional, I strongly prefer a spirit of mutual respect and camaraderie — but also enough respect that we can be honest when work is not good enough yet.
My real performance review is that a lot of these books are pretty good, actually, and I learned a lot from them. They just have conspicuous blind spots and gaps.