Bad Writing Advice

I think it’s fair to say there are two broad camps of novice writers: “I know what I’m doing” and “I’m terrified of messing up.” The former sometimes yields people who either can’t take criticism (ego-driven perfectionists) or (less often) create truly experimental art. In the latter we’ll find more technically competent artists who sometimes lack the “spark,” as well as anxiety-ridden perfectionists. It’s trial-and-error that drives us toward the middle ground.

The second crowd, swollen with eager beavers, seeks out “writing advice” in the form of blog posts, short videos, and On Writing by Stephen King. I personally must have close to a dozen books from other writers all contributing theories about technique and story development, some of which I do jive with. And there is also (especially online) a counter-movement lashing out against “bad writing advice,” a phrase which here means the same dozen three-or-four-word phrases that everyone agrees isn’t “actionable advice.”

I told myself I would take more risks and fully commit, so I’m truly sorry if this comes across as sanctimonious, but if I may date myself for a moment: I think a lot of the backlash against “bad writing advice” ends up as shallow as the clichés themselves. Not that I usually disagree with the criticisms, and I know people do it out of a desire to help each other and provide better guidance. It’s just that in practice, this manifests as everyone repeating the same critiques without adding much. People (myself included) enjoy being able to pick on an easy target, but—maybe it’s the post-modernist in me—I’m much more interested in the development process of failed rhetoric.

It shouldn’t be too controversial to say that through repetition, comprehensive ideas are flattened into easy answers and thought-terminating clichés. Consider the way people react to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave by concluding they’re more enlightened than those who don’t think like them. Words like Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Communism, Centrist can basically be removed from everyday political speech without affecting most arguments; instead of simply saying what they mean, people rely on your gut reaction to politically-charged terms to identify you as an Us or a Them. And if you ask ten pastors what any particular section of the Bible is supposed to mean, you will likely get ten self-serving answers, even if they’re trying their best to be impartial.

But let’s look at some of this bad writing advice in detail.

“Show Don’t Tell” is one of the most repeated and hated phrases, attributed to Anton Chekhov through the quote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass,” though this is likely paraphrased. It’s rather tame for how controversial it’s become, the kind of thing you say once while giving feedback and forget immediately after. I’d wager people chafe against this saying—most advice, even—because it feels more restrictive than it is. The surface-level rebuttal is to say we must blend showing and telling, but this is even worse, because while “show don’t tell” is liable to create overwrought prose, it’s easier to picture doing than “finding a balance.”

Since we’re here, I may as well offer some theory of my own. (It’s not an exclusive club; anybody can join.) Showing and telling are both actions of the narrator, who is an agent in the story whether or not they’re a character, so what they choose to explain or describe is meaningful in how it affects tone, themes, and so on. “The moon was beautiful. The Earth was dull,” is significantly different from “The full moon hung low in the sky, a halo in the darkness watching over me, radiant and blissful. It gazed down on a dry, brittle soil that hadn’t felt rain in months.” And these are different still than if you swapped each sentence’s partner. It’s all matter of capturing the narrator’s intent.

“Kill your darlings” and “make your characters likable” are interesting to me because they’re almost always followed with “which actually means,” showing people do fight against the flattening of ideas but still feel like they need clichés to hook audiences. This hedging is done to prevent people from reading “kill your darlings” as “never add anything to your story just for fun” instead of the more difficult lesson of “even if you really like something, you may have to recognize that it doesn’t fit this story.” That’s good enough, but I do wish people would take it one step further: if you want to include something in your narrative just for the fun of it, there may be a way to make it serve the story. John Truby, in The Anatomy of Story, spends a lot of time discussing the power of symbols: story symbols, symbolic characters, symbolic actions and objects, thematic symbols, microcosms. Odds are good that if you’re thoughtful and patient, your silly fun idea might actually enhance the narrative.

(I have nothing to say about “make your characters likable” that other people haven’t said better. A character only needs to be compelling for an audience to feel engaged, and there are many ways of doing that and many people who want to tell you about them.)

Let’s finish on “your first draft is going to suck” and “just write,” the latter of which is almost as maligned as “show don’t tell” but for reasons I sympathize with more. It’s a very kitschy saying that hits the same as telling depressed people to “cheer up.” The obvious refrain is that a writer wants to write, but life and health problems get in the way. I get why it’s a popular phrase: anxiety drives people to avoid writing and make excuses for why, and their peers want to be encouraging. Resources for time management and therapeutic techniques would probably help more, as would a general understanding that it’s okay to defer goals to the future if they just can’t be pursued in the now.

What does surprise me—though perhaps shouldn’t—is when people negatively respond to being told a first draft will probably be bad. I do understand; editing can be difficult to learn how to enjoy, and it adds a lot of time to a project; we all want to feel accomplished for having completed something we poured our heart into, and criticism can feel like an attack. What really caught me off guard is seeing people treat it as an instruction to follow, who puff out their chest to say, “Don’t listen to those assholes. Your first draft doesn’t have to be bad.”

The idea that a first pass at something will be flawed should be the least controversial thing anybody has ever said about art. Editing is so much easier than creating from scratch. Every artist has a story about how they over-committed to getting a project just right the first time only for it to never fully materialize. “Your first draft will be bad, just get it down on paper” isn’t an insult to anyone’s creative skill, but it does hurt the perfectionist’s ego. The goal is to prevent aspiring writers from becoming the person who has a perfect, ground-breaking novel mapped out in their head but can’t produce so much as a half-page narrative for fear of criticism.\

That’s about all I’ve got right now, but I want to be clear I’m not opposed to any of this “bad advice” per se. They all do mean something, or at least did, but they share a common problem of bein sg unhelpful. You either understand these things intuitively from experience, and thus don’t need it explained to you, or you don’t yet understand and thus get nothing from them. They are bad advice even if people sometimes struggle to explain why. It would be better for us to say what we mean instead of using pithy sayings, but I suppose that’s not as clickbait-friendly.