The Only Writing Advice I Give

I just finished revising the third book in a trilogy I’m calling The End of Forever. It’s an Urban Fantasy about a woman who awakens to the magical side of the modern world and gets tossed into the deep end of a struggle for—and against—existence. Think of Supernatural and Lost Girl getting into a car wreck with American Gods.

Book One, The Hero’s Ordeal, is currently being demolished by beta and sensitivity readers. Not demolished. The readers and editor I hire are wonderful. Very seldomly do I feel their advice and suggestions don’t align with the story I’m trying to tell.    

Oh shit! He wrote ‘advice’. It’s in the blog title. Do you think he’s going to use a rhetorical device (like ethos) as an appeal to authority and credibility and segue into the advice stuff?

Gosh, you’re smart.

I started writing fiction in the pre-interwebs 90s. Horror and fantasy. Of course, everyone had something to say about everything of mine they read. Not all of it was helpful. In retrospect, the only people who gave me constructive feedback were the people who spoke the language of the craft of writing. Even then, not all their advice resonated.

In grad school, I did a little teaching—screenwriting, mostly—but spent about four years as a tutor in the University’s writing center. That job was nothing but coaching and advice and reminding people that it wasn’t a place where they just dropped off their papers and waited for feedback or corrections. Almost everyone who came to see me asked for tidbits of writing wisdom, as if there existed some great secret to good writing.

That’s what stuck out to me the most, in this context. People constantly seek out advice. How to do this or that. How to write. What’s the secret to being successful. We ask people for their experiences to solicit some kind of indirect advice from them. We want to learn from them. To hear their successes and mistakes, so we can either test what they did to see if it works for us for good or ill, or we take their advice at face value as some kind of gospel truth. Example: Despite what Stephen King says, adverbs are not poor writing, they’re just the easiest to overuse and the easiest to point out. I argue that using too many words like 'just,' 'like' (similes are almost always stronger when changed to metaphors) and 'very' are more indicative of poor writing habits than adverbs.

It's important to remember that writing isn’t science. It’s art. There are rules for being 'effective' and 'persuasive,' but even those have changed over time, because people catch onto the patterns and formulas. Once people notice the curtains and the crowd, the play on stage is no longer owns their attention. In the case of writing, it breaks down what John Gardner calls the "vivid and continuous dream" of fiction. Once you wake up, it’s hard to get back to sleep.

So, what can you do to make sure you are writing stories and honing your craft to the best of your ability?

I've no idea. But here are the things I focus on the most in my own writing life.

First, realize and accept that free advice is worth exactly what you’ve paid for it. Take this blog and everything you read in ‘the craft of writing’ books with a big grain of salt. Find three or four good books, pick and choose from them what works best for you, and sod the rest.

Second, embrace the fact that every author, tutor, writing instructor, and master of the writing craft who has ever lived can teach you every single rule of writing, can coach your manuscripts to near perfection (or an acceptable level of failure) and can give you the most radiant examples of where other writers have successfully and effectively broken or adhered to the ‘rules of writing’, but none of them can teach you or anyone else to be interesting. Being interesting is what keeps readers reading. Write what interests you.

Next, love your story. Love writing. Love your characters AND TREAT THEM WITH RESPECT. Even the shitty characters.

Hot Demon Bitches Near You is filled with heavy-handed analogs of sitting political figures. Some of them are just there to take up space and be victimized, but the two most important villains—Donald Card Sr. and Donald "DJ" Card Jr.—I humanized a bit more to reinforce the notion that the cycle of emotional and physical abuse, social biases, and prejudices are nurtured, systemic, and/or familial. I didn’t necessarily want a reader to sympathize with the villains, I just wanted them to be human. Two dimensional characters are rarely human.

If you don’t love your characters and your own story, then you can’t expect readers to like what you’ve written.

Last: Write every day. I’m not talking about the physical act of writing, putting pen to paper or typing. What I’m talking about is visualizing writing in your head. It’s one thing to put yourself into your characters’ POV and vicariously live their story to retell it later, it’s another to describe it to yourself in the same way as a narrator would. Turn your daydream into an audiobook, or think of putting a transparent overlay over your characters’ actions and writing prose on that overlay. Envision how many ways you could describe your character picking something up off the ground beyond simply describing the series of actions:

• Tim reached down and plucked the flower.

• Tim pulled the fragrant rose from the dewy July grass.

• He yanked the thorned invader away, impaling his fingers with the crimson vision of his wife’s ghost; the image he desperately wished to excise from his mind with the same austere finality as pulling the rose from its resting place.

  
  

There are an infinite number of ways to say something, so focus on how you would write something your way. If you end up liking it, jot it down. Do that as often as you can. Just because you can’t physically write every day, doesn’t mean you can’t "write" every day.

Again, take from this what works for you. If it doesn’t work, don’t use it. If it does work, give me millions of dollars and pronounce me as your deity.

Or not. It's really up to you.