Don’t Take Writing Advice

by Adam Buckley

Via Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The irony of this statement is not lost on me. By telling you not to take writing advice, I am, in fact, giving you writing advice—however!—if you follow me where I’m headed, you’ll see where I’m coming from. Age-old axioms like “show, don’t tell,” and “good characters have agency,” have kernels of truth to them; that’s why they’re so often repeated, but what comes after? How do writers really get better? My goal here isn’t to rebuke the institutions of writing criticism or education entirely, more so to make the case against generalized platitudes and advocate for contextual and self-motivated methods of improving one’s work.

You want an explanation, so I’ll give it to you: most writing advice is ineffective because it's broad and one-size-fits-all, while the art form is an individual, esoteric experience. Getting this across is difficult on my part because, quite like the generalizations I’m taking to task, there is an exception for every rule—or, in my case, every pedantic argument. Co-writers, workshop groups, online message boards, and threads are all ways that writers can lend each other a hand—and this is good! The help of others will always be instrumental in your journey, but in the end, the buck stops here. Improvement is an individual process, but rarely is advice individualized.

Going into college, I had already been writing for nearly half my life. I knew narrative genre fiction was my main mode of expression, had written enough to know my own habits and preferred methods, and came in ready to be challenged. Of course, I’m not the main character of every class I’m enrolled in, but there’s something to be said about the boiler-plate aphorisms a new writing student must endure. This typically starts at “write every day,” and often, “keep a journal.” While these are well-intentioned, meant to get the fledgling writer to develop some healthy habits regarding workflow and process, they’re emblematic of novice advice focusing more on idea generation, not improvement of craft.

"How do writers really get better?" 

So what am I really looking for, anyway? I’m so glad you asked. Firstly, I want to do away with these catchy truisms and make the conversation around craft one about skill. Just because we’re in the arts doesn't mean that discipline isn’t a factor in proficiency. Beyond this, criticism should be knowledge born from experience given from one writer to another when discussing their work. It has to be rooted in the current work and something actionable, something that sees what’s written and seeks to improve not just what’s on the page, but a habit that the author exhibits. A habit, say, like interjecting fourth-wall-breaking asides in a way to rhetorically manipulate your audience. If someone said something like that to me, I’d find that particularly embarrassing. But that’s just a totally fake example, of course. 

Without all these qualifiers, the essence of this “real advice,” let’s call it, is that it's contextual. It's not about what other writers have done; it's what you are doing on the page now. It's not about conforming to standards or even making the best thing you can possibly make, but being the best writer you can be, which has a lot more to do with instinct and attitude than it does slavish loyalty to conventional wisdom.

Here’s an example. I was once developing a short story inside an ongoing collection of supernatural detective tales, one of which was about werewolves in prison. One, a female inmate, was inside while the detective, also a werewolf, visited her. They’d spend a beautiful night together before she had to go back to the clink. It’s noir, it's romance, it's tragic. But while planning it, the entire thing felt a little…grotesque? My detective was the protagonist, so it was mostly from his POV, but that felt wrong. This story was about prison. Autonomy. Agency. The POV was hers by right, and the story was better for it.

"Improvement is an individual process, but rarely is advice individualized"

I could easily wax poetic about some unseen force guiding my hand, but in the end, it was my decision. I followed my instinct, one I’ve honed over years of reading and writing, and took a hard look at what I wanted to accomplish with my story so I could make the right call. Ideas are not what make artists, but how they execute those ideas. My minor victory over myself could have been rectified in a later draft, or when a dear friend gave it a read, but not in this reality. In this one, I made the call, and there was no one else to make it for me.

To defend the likes of adages such as “show, don’t tell” and “good characters have agency,” they help the novice find their footing and the veteran stay the course. As you can see, I gave my character agency, and I’m more than happy with how my final piece ended up. Ultimately, my most difficult challenge here is convincing you that just because they are time-honored, they are not good pieces of advice. It might be more helpful to see them as tools, “break glass in case of emergency” methods when you’re in a jam. They are the duct tape keeping the fender on, not the engine keeping this thing running.

I don’t believe in writing advice because there is no replacement for simply writing. Just doing the damn thing is a lot more enlightening than any advice the greatest authors can give you. Honing your own instinct in rhythm is the only actual way to improve because borrowing these pieces of wisdom that have to be viewed as fact only makes you as good as the next guy. They nurture greatness as much as the hammer exalts the nail. I’m not telling you what to do, only hoping you get to work.