Writer Responds: Writing Advice

It seems that, due to writing being a very difficult endeavour, writing advice articles tend to do well on the internet; especially in these times when everyone is stuck inside and decides that they have nothing better to do than to write that novel they’ve always wanted to.

However, as with anything that starts to spread fast and wide on the internet, there’s a whole slew of bad writing advice out there. This can range from a typical “might work for some but not for all” bad to the extreme “do not ever do this” kind of bad.

So, in my efforts to help new writers (and honestly, in my quest to start another writing series), I’ve decided to take a look at some of the most popular writing advice that I’ve seen on the internet, and break down how helpful it is. Some of these will be good, some will be bad, and hopefully by the end of this article you’ll be able to break down the advice that you come across all on your own!

FOCUS ON NEW WAYS TO PHRASE COMMON VISUALS — Self-Publishing School

I must admit, I’m always a little apprehensive about programs that promise to teach you how to be a major success only by self-publishing. While self-publishing can be a very fulfilling adventure, it often doesn’t lead to the same type of profits/recognition that traditional publishing does. This isn’t to disparage the idea of self-publishing, which can be an incredibly lucrative venue, but typically you’ll have better luck with traditional publishing. That is, if your writing is any good.

While this list (linked above) did have a lot of good tips, this one can be dangerous. Here’s what they say in their article:

You want to make people see that common item or situation or visual in a brand new light.

The way you can do this is to pause when you’re describing something in your writing and think to yourself, “how else can I explain this to create a stronger emotional impact?”

Here’s an example of this writing tip if you’re still a little confused:

“The sun set behind the trees and the world fell quiet.”

Is this a bad way to describe a sunset and night beginning? No. However, you can easily get more creative about how to illustrate this to readers through words.

Like this:

“Night yanked the horizon over the sun, silencing the world with its absence.”

This is saying relatively the same thing, but in a way that stops and makes someone appreciate the way in which it was crafted.”

While there’s nothing technically wrong with this wording, you have to remember that you do change the meaning a little bit, and that little bit can be incredibly distracting.

You see, words not only have their traditional dictionary meaning, called “denotation”, but they also have a mental meaning as well. This secondary meaning is called “connotation”, and while it can be slightly different for everybody, it’s real as the rain, and you have to be careful about alluding to a certain situation simply through connotative meaning.

The first sentence is describing a serene sunset, one that almost seems to be setting up a peaceful, almost loving, scene in your story. With the sun doing the setting, and the world seeming to slowly fall quiet, everything looks to be as it should.

However, the “rewritten” version, through the use of “yanked” and “silencing”, make the nightfall seem much more confrontational and aggressive. It should also be noted that, while personifying can be good in theory, too much (and I would argue this is too much) is distracting, and almost has a comic effect on your reader.

The First Draft of Everything is Shit — Ernest Hemingway (qtd. in Thought Catalogue)

While this piece of advice didn’t come from the website itself, they still published it, and they should still be aware of its effectiveness.

And honestly, kudos to them.

In my opinion, the biggest hurdle for new writers to overcome is the fear of the first draft. Not only do we see it as this daunting task, but it’s so impossibly hard for us to overcome just how awful our first draft reads. And notice the pronoun I’m using: we. This is something all writers experience, not just new ones.

But, and here’s the kicker, it’s ok. You need to keep going.

I revise everything that I write. Genuinely, I mean everything (well, ok, not tweets. But just about everything else!). Over the course of writing this article I sent an email and I revised that twice before sending it.

First drafts are meant to be bad, because they’re not meant to be read. I picture the first draft as being like a lump of clay. Nobody’s going to see it except the sculpture, and there’s not a critic in the world who would chastise an artist for having an ugly clay lump, but he needs to have that lump so that he has something to build his amazing sculpture out of.

Until you put your work out there, you’re only screwing around. Write for real. — Goins, Writer

This is one of the tropes of online writing advice that really gets under my skin. The “5 tips to make you a better writer,” “3 tips for writing the next great novel,” and “10 things the best writers do,” are all titles signifying that the writer doesn’t actually have any productive advice, but rather just wants to make a quick buck from an article like this.

I see this idea all the time on the internet, the sentiment that until you are published you can’t be a good writer, and it’s so incredibly dangerous.

Let me say, and I’ll put it in all caps for emphasis, there is NO SHAME in simply WRITING FOR FUN. If you write and it doesn’t so the light of publication, so what! Now you have this cool story for you to read, and to share with your friends. Plus, there’s this great feeling that comes with completing something, and if writing makes you feel like that, and you don’t feel like you need to publish, all the better!

Writing as a craft and as a profession begins with passion. If you’re going to do this thing, you need to love writing. Love it like a spouse, because at times, it will make you angry like one. If the only point you see to writing is publication then you’ll never get any enjoyment out of it. It’s like marrying just to have children: is having children a part of a traditional marriage journey? Yes. Should we make fun of people or look down on those who marry and have no children? No. Should you have children simply because that’s what all married people do? No. There needs to be love there first, otherwise nothing productive (or, reproductive…hehe) will ever happen.

Keep your Sentences/Paragraphs Short — Copyblogger

Yeah, “11 Tips for Brilliant Writing” is another one of those titles that should always raise a red flag. Fortunately, this article did have some good advice, but the two pieces of advice saying keep your sentences and paragraphs short aren’t one of them. Here’s their argument:

You should keep sentences short for the same reason you keep paragraphs short: they’re easier to read and understand.

Each sentence should have one simple thought. More than that creates complexity and invites confusion…Look at any newspaper and notice the short paragraphs. That’s done to make reading easier, because our brains take in information better when it’s broken into small chunks.

In academic writing, each paragraph develops one idea and often includes many sentences. But in casual, everyday writing, the style is less formal and paragraphs may be as short as a single sentence or even a single word.

While this is generally a good idea, there’s also some advantage to having long, flowing sentences as well as beefier paragraphs. Having a sentence go a bit longer can force the reader to become more invested in the writing, as well as slow the pace of reading down. And yes, there are times that you want your reader to read the story slower than other times. A story which zooms by at 100 miles per hour all the time will exhaust the reader just as much as one that drags on at 5 miles per hour, and that’s something to be cautious of.

Longer sentences and paragraphs are usually reserved in writing for scene descriptions. There’s a natural pause whenever we end a sentence or a paragraph, and lumping your setting details in with one another can help the reader feel as if they are taking everything in at once.

So long as there are writers, there will be articles proffering up some “crucial writing advice” that you “need to know”. Is it a horrible side to what we do? No, not entirely. Sometimes the authors of these articles go to genuine lengths to make sure the advice is fair and accurate. However, too often, someone simply sees an opportunity to make a quick profit off of an article like that, and those are to be avoided at all cost.

Finally, just remember that all writing is subjective. Any article that gives you writing advice, including this one, is never going to be able to give you the trick to handle every situation or figure out every problem. The best way to do this, honestly, is to sit down and simply start writing. The more you do it, the more naturally it will come to you, and the less you’ll need other people’s advice to help get that next great novel started.