Since I’ve joined the public writing space, I’ve had a huge variety of writing related content forced onto my feed by Big Algorithm. I am not on social media very much; my tolerance for the shenanigans is low, and my bandwidth is also low, so I just don’t spend much time there. As a consequence, I spent my first two months on Instagram being extremely down about everything.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not terribly aesthetic. I missed some fundamental Millennial education, and have only a remedial understanding of how things work, and I’m also awfully trusting as a person. So, the beautiful pictures and neat homes and polished videos really did get to me. I’m fully aware that the vast majority of folks my age went through something similar about ten years ago, but I’m doing it now, and I had to limit my Instagram time to twenty minutes a day because it was giving me a bad case of The Sads.
Seriously. I went into the parental controls on my phone and set a timer.
I had my “Get of my lawn” moments where I wondered what ever happened to Authenticity, and then I decided that those were dumb thoughts and tried my best to move on.
The sort of posts that had the biggest effects on my mental health? The writing advice.
Every single post that started with “Your conflict is weak and I know why!” or “Here’s what’s wrong with your pacing!” or “Your characters all sound the same and I can help you fix it!” planted a little seed of unhappiness.
Not doubt. I like what I write.* I think it’s good; I have people who love it (and I love them for loving it because I’m a simple creature).
I have a mixed relationship with advice, especially broad advice like I see in those sorts of posts. The sort of advice that gets put in a book that then gets recommended as required reading for anyone who wants to write fiction. You know the ones.
It’s not that it’s bad advice; in fact, I can’t think of much that is, in my opinion, detrimental or harmful.
It’s the very broadness of it that gets under my skin.
Part of it is defensive, and I’ll cop to that. How dare you come onto my algorithmically defined scroll and tell me that my characters are flat? You haven’t even read my book!
Part of it is conflation of credentials with competence. I’m very happy for your seventy five years of writing experience and four hundred NYT Bestsellers, I am, but that doesn’t mean that your goals align with mine. Even when it’s commercialized, writing is art, and you can get a Bestseller by writing something that happens to hit at the right cultural moment, just like you can by writing something beautiful and timeless. And if you’ve ever received parenting advice, you know that people can spend a lot of time doing something and still not be someone you’d take advice from.
Reddit is my primary social media, and on there, I see a ton of people trying to apply the broad advice they’ve seen from posts like that, and getting profoundly frustrated. “Show don’t tell” is probably the most infamous example. Yes, yes, the moonlight glints on the broken glass, but sometimes other things take priority. Pacing, for example. In most things with specific choreography (fights, for example), I want the language to be invisible, to fall away and leave me with an intuitive understanding of the scene.
Which is why mentorship and peer groups are the superior forms of self-improvement when it comes to the arts.**
When you’re first learning anything, you have to actually do the thing so you can look at it and go “Man, I suck.”
When I was learning to cook, my first few meals were… not inedible, but it took some fortitude. But the concrete knowledge that the attempts provided were invaluable when it comes to improvement.
When I first learned to play the flute, the first few weeks were rough on everyone in the house.*** But the specific knowledge gained was absolutely crucial for improvement.
Writing something, anything, and then showing it to people and finding out the hard way whether or not you have successfully done what you set out to do is infinitely more instructive than any number of books on plot construction. Failure, or, even better, near success, is a wildly effective teacher.
So, if you’re interested in irony, here’s how I go about deciding what advice**** to take, and what to ignore.
- Evaluate the person. Do we share goals? Are they working in a related field? Have they actually done the thing, or is their business ‘helping others do the thing’? Are they yelling at me because something something engagement?
- Consider the content. How close is their area of expertise to my goals? If they’re a writer, but they write for television, and I write romance novels, then there’s probably something useful there, but I’m not going to take their word blindly for everything.
- Applicability. Can I think of something I’ve written that I can apply this advice to right now? If I did apply it, would I like what I wrote less? There are degrees to this one. I’ve seen several Instagram reels where, when I compare the advice to things I’ve written, I can see that I’m already doing that, but it’s a matter of degrees and I can put more emphasis on it.
And also, vibes. If I see some writing advice or a set of reels, or something and I come away feeling vaguely bad, then I don’t take it. I usually mute that person and move on. I think that it’s easy to feel pressured by time, to try to improve as much as possible, as fast as possible, especially when you are (like I am) trying to turn writing into a job but you’re not there yet.
Nobody out here is unique. Not me, and not the guy on Instagram who is constantly yelling at me about my writing. There is someone else who is delivering the same material in a way that is more compatible with my mental health, and I’ll find them.
I don’t think there’s much point in becoming The Best unless you’re becoming The Best For You. That’s the subjectivity part of it.
Recent Writing
Thinking of the way she shifted, the natural ease of it, her fine control over each pinion and bone, Aubrey reached for the wind again, and this time, she didn’t ask it.
And it dipped, brushing the surface of the water and rising again, white with moisture.
Next time, I’ll share how I build characters, how does that sound?
Do good, friends.
*In an attempt to ensure that I am not misunderstood: I am under no illusions that my writing is perfect. I do not think that I have nothing to learn. I understand that there is room for improvement. There are a great many authors I admire and study in an attempt to improve my work.
**In my opinion.
***My sister learned the clarinet, and my brother the saxophone. They terrorized the block, not just the household.
****This is specifically for generalized advice or craft books, not for the feedback you get from readers or editors. That is a completely different thing that I approach very differently.
Then They Kissed 