Typical Writing Advice and my Take on it

As I wrote my first collection of prose fiction, Idiot! And Other Tales, I felt myself unlearning all the typical advice that was foisted upon me so that I could tell a half-decent story. It took me, admittedly, a tremendously embarrassing amount of time to realize that the goal of writing fiction is to tell a story. Almost nothing else matters after that. And why should it? Tell the story at any cost.

I’m just going to go over the more mechanical advice, things about what words to use and not use, and the act of writing itself. Nothing about character development or plot is here, though I have some interest in touching upon that in the future (also what I consider to be good and practical advice). But for now, here are my thoughts on things like to-be verbs, using adverbs, avoiding the passive voice, and “show don’t tell”.

• SHOW DON’T TELL. It really depends, but I think this is extremely overrated advice. You need exposition in a story. When this advice is taken seriously a lot of times you’ll have characters sitting around doing nothing. Essentially the writer is dramatizing what is not worth dramatizing, which I think is one of the most common faults in today’s writing. So you’ll get details about how the smoke lingers in the air or things of zero consequence to the flow of the story. You’ll probably start sounding like David Foster Wallace and going on for pages about door hinges or the twitching of some minor character’s little finger or characters who shift the individual muscles in their butt cheeks; things like that. If a story is about a character sitting on a bench, it should not exceed 2500 words. That would be too much showing. Read Chekhov. Read the Russian masters. There’s plenty of telling. There’s more telling than showing. That doesn’t make it bad. Stephen King would agree to show and not tell, but do you want to write like him? Are you writing genre fiction? If you are that’s ok, but even then, it’s not like he’s the greatest writer of all time. So, I think this advice is overrated but not worthy of total ignorance. Things do have to happen. But it has to be worth dramatizing. If someone picks up a coffee mug and shatters it against the wall, then yeah, go ahead and show that. But if a character walks to the store, we don’t need to count his steps.
• KILL YOUR DARLINGS. I’m on the fence with this one, mostly leaning towards the side of ignoring it. I think it’s supposed to mean you should keep an open mind and question everything, but that’s not what it says. It says to get rid of what you think is good. It sort of insinuates that you don’t know what’s good and makes you doubt your intuition. A beginning writer shouldn’t begin their writing adventures by constantly doubting themselves. Better to forget than to remember this advice. It also sounds so incredibly Disney, in the worst way.
• WRITE EVERY DAY. Amazing advice. You can’t be a better writer if you don’t write. It’s pretty difficult at first, but it’s always good to set a realistic goal (for me, that was 250 words a day) and stick to it. It’s a funny thing, the mind. At first you’ll dread the hell out of it, but give yourself two weeks and your brain will come to enjoy the time you have set aside to write. If you feel you can’t set aside a time to write 250 words, then there’s not much else I can tell you except don’t write. You have to sacrifice your time to do it.
• WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. On the fence with this one, too. I think most people take this too literally, which is not helpful. You know a lot more than you think you know. If you have a father who is a chef, you know the details of being a chef pretty intimately. You could write a first person point of view story from that of a chef and have it be pretty convincing. You know enough. And, writing about what you know is great. It is. But there’s nothing more stifling to a beginning writer than to not explore this world and learn about new things.
• REWRITE AND EDIT. Very important. First off, there are some stories you write that force you to live life before coming up with a decent ending or interesting characters or some change in plot. I’ve had plenty of those. Secondly, and probably most importantly, it gives you some distance from the story. And by distance I mean it loses its sentimentality, and you can look at the story with a clearer mind (I think perhaps this is what the advice “kill your darlings” is aiming for), which of course makes for a better story. Readers pick up right away from what a writer thinks is cool (sentimentality), and that of course detracts from the story. And you want people to be interested in your story, not what you think is cool. So this is great advice. I’m probably not alone with this either, but my first drafts are nearly undecipherable. Rewrites and edits are a must.
• KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE. This is again a stifling thing. I think the more vague your audience, the better because you don’t want to deter any potential reader. You either want children or adults to read your fiction. Cheever said his target audience were adult men and women. I wouldn’t consider this advice too hard.
• READ. Probably the greatest advice. How would you know a good story if you have never seen one. The classics are a great place to start, but you should read wide and far. If you find a writer you like, try to find the things they like too. Raymond Carver turned me on to such great writers as William Humphrey, Vance Bourjaily, Mona Simpson, William Kittredge, and Richard Brautigan (to name a few). I suggest any writer to read those I have named, but personally I love the works of Sherwood Anderson, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Franz Kafka. My tastes are obviously skewed because of my preference for short stories.
• USE SIMPLE WORDS INSTEAD OF COMPLEX ONES. I’m on the fence with this one too. I know recently this has become a very big controversy because of the literacy crisis and the demand of certain readers. I mean, who determines what is simple and what is complex, anyways? Going back to the Russians, they use plenty of complex, multisyllabic words, but only when no other word would do. That doesn’t excuse the use of sentimental words, though, words that seemingly are made up or just plain silly. I think most people know what I’m getting at here: words that describe the emotion one gets while perceiving the scent of rain. Words like that are just unnecessary. Typically you find them on websites that have a word-of-the-day. The best advice for those who want to improve their vocabulary is to get a dictionary and rifle through it for words you already know but seldom use, then write them down and try to use them, not forcefully, in your writing and daily conversations. What I’m saying is, use the right word. If it is complex, then so be it. If it is simple then it is simple.
• PREPLAN. I think it really depends on the length of your story. If you’re writing a novel, I think you should more or less have some idea where the story is headed. If you write short fiction, it’s ok to write blindly. There’s an adage I got from John Gardner, one that I think is truer than most, and that is: if there’s no surprise for the writer, there’s no surprise for the reader.
• SEEK HELP/ GUIDANCE. You have to be very particular from whom you seek help.I strongly advise against submitting something onto Reddit, for many many reasons, particularly because they seem to be a self-gratifying and one-dimensional bunch. All the advice I’ve gone through already, they adhere to as one adheres to scripture, and that is without question. I would extend that to most websites, including Substack. There are plenty of writers, decent ones too, who will give you advice for a cost, and from my experience they typically are extremely thorough and helpful. So find a writer you like and see if they would be willing to go through a manuscript of your own. Though, of course, don’t submit anything unsolicited. Writers don’t like that. Also, be careful with posting things on Substack. Be wary of those posts that are like “Writers! I need to read your newest story” or anything like that. This is obviously a way to drive traffic to their post, and any comment the author has is useless: “My jaw hit the floor!” They really don’t care. Or it’s being used to train ai. Be extremely careful.
• USE THE ACTIVE VOICE AND NOT THE PASSIVE. This is mostly good advice, especially for the young writer who thinks using the passive voice is a means to sound mature and sophisticated. In most cases, using the passive voice makes one sound like they’re in a commercial, or it seems like they’re avoiding responsibility. Using the passive voice, though, is by no means a crime. Sometimes you have to do it to avoid repetition and to not bring attention to people who don’t need it. It’s fine to say “the house is being worked on” if you don’t wish to tell the story of contractors and carpenters. There’s also the matter of suspense, especially when you don’t know how such a thing happened. If two characters come home to see the vase broken on the floor it’s fine to say “the vase was broken on the floor.” Which leads me to the next advice.
• AVOID TO-BE VERBS. You have to be careful with strongly adhering to this advice. Because if I said “Smoke lingered in the air” it anthropomorphizes the smoke. Though, that’s not the worst sounding version of anthropomorphizing, you have to be careful. Does smoke linger? Can animals contemplate? And so on and so forth. I also group this advice with the advice to use “stronger” verbs. It can put a lot of undo emphasis on character movement. Think about “She walked” versus “She lifted her feet one after the other.” “She walked” is obviously the better version. We don’t have to redefine the word “walked”. But if she stomped or ran, then say that. Just make sure you are conveying what you want to convey and you’ll be fine. Use to-be verbs instead of sounding insane. I see the abuse and manipulation of strong verbs in a lot of poetry today, which is one of its major problems. In such poems, the ocean water becomes sentient and breathes, and the sun does things to people that serial killers wouldn’t dare do.
• USE CORRECT GRAMMAR. This is a must. I’m not going to go over each piece of grammatical advice, but I will say that it helps to understand the basics, especially what constitutes a sentence. I’m sure there are car mechanics who don’t know the names of every part of a car’s engine, but it sure does help if he does. He might understand what a “doo hickey” is for himself, but he can’t tell another mechanic to hand him one without some issue. Usually one book on grammar will help. I suggest An American Rhetoric by William W. Watt. This book also goes into the basics of rhetoric.
• FEW ADJECTIVES AND NO ADVERBS. I think this is very lame advice. How else am I to describe something which is very funny? “Humorous” won’t do. That’s a crazy word. “Silly” is silly. “Amusing, comical, hilarious” have their own sort of flavor. If a man or woman makes me laugh, I find them to be very funny. A situation can be hilarious yes, but if a person is hilarious it seems too commercial to say so. Hemingway was very fond of the word “very”. If I had said “admired” there, it would have sounded like he wrote love letters to the word “very”. I don’t want that. It all depends on the story. If a woman stomps around the house, or walks noisily up the stairs, I see two different women. Does that make sense? I’m saying, people do things differently. And that’s fine. And I really don’t know why people would be determined to write fewer adjectives; the less said about that the better.

All that I am saying is that a writer should question ever bit of advice they receive (I know I’m supposed to say “he or she” but for the sake of not sounding insane, I’ve written “they”, and I’ve done so throughout the article. Since this has been all general writing advice, I have to say “the writer” a lot, which of course demands constant reference to them, and the repetition of “he or she” or “him or her” would just sound bizarre. Saying it once sounds too formal for what I’m going for here, too).

It’s more important to abjure any sort of writing advice in order to tell a good story. Because that’s the focus of a writer’s duty. You have to tell a good story. And it should be at any cost. So, question the world around you. Question what is considered good. Question what is considered bad. Be open minded and leave plenty of room to allow yourself to be wrong. You see more of the world that way. There are some tenements to live by, though. Get along with your family, love those who show you love (try to love everyone and everything really), and respect yourself. Other than that, experiment.

Too often I see readers turned off by some story or another because it has broken one of these esoteric and obscure rules. So and so will point out “He used too many to-be verbs” without considering how nasty or unnecessary the alternative to be. What matters is that you tell the story the way it needs to be told. Period. If you have to bend the rules a little, or a lot, then by all means go for it. A good story is a good story regardless of what sort of arbitrary rules it breaks or adheres to. On the opposite end, I’ve never heard someone say that a story is good because it avoided using to-be verbs or used the active voice or knew its audience or was perfectly preplaned or showed instead of told. A good story is a good story because it’s a good story, regardless of the rest.

Thank you kindly for reading. Idiot, and Other Tales is available on Amazon now. Have a great day and thank you for being a reader.