Writing Fiction in the New World (Part I)

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This post is the start of a new book, of which I haven’t settled on a title yet. It’s inspired by the simple fact I wanted to do another writing book that would scratch my intellection side and maybe get into Story Bundle again next year. You can still pick up 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle that I’m in with lots of amazing authors.

Onward with the first chapter…

This book is for the writer who wants to learn how to be better but is frustrated by the lack of information on how to progress past form rejections. It is not a step-by-step instruction on how to write a novel. It is a book that will tell you how to find information to push your skills and what kind of information to look for, as well as traps to avoid. That’s sadly lacking in modern-day fiction writing advice.

With so much information available to us, it’s surprising how narrow the information on writing fiction has gotten. Writers submit to agents and wonder why they receive maddening form rejections that don’t explain anything.

If you’re learning to write in this new world, you start out with five strikes against you.

Beginner Culture

This is a huge problem with today’s craft advice, whether it’s a book on how to write a novel, classes, or bloggers. In the late 1980s, as the writers from the pulp era passed away, the industry flipped to selling only to beginners.

And not just beginners, but the ones who say, “I want to write a novel someday.” These craft books were written to appeal emotionally to this audience. They held hands, suggested it was easy to learn to write, and implied that all the writer needed to do was follow their advice to be published. The writers of these books knew that most of these hopefuls would probably never finish a book.

In actuality, these resources do not provide any skills that would help you get published.

Imitation Culture

Any time someone develops a new concept, everyone else jumps on board to come up with their own spin. You can see this in the time management book industry. Open any new book and the writer will explain all the things you need to do—and present nothing new.

Sometime in the 1980s, there was likely one professional writer who wrote a book on his process of writing. The process included outlining, along with the typical advice for the beginner culture. Until that point, most advice did not mention outlining! (This is based on reading many issues of The Writer Magazine from the 1940s through the 1960s, as well as craft books published before the mid-1980s).

Every non-fiction writer created a variation of that book, having never written fiction. Copies of a copy. Today, we have spotty, muddy, crooked copies of those copies.

Expert Culture

This is something that emerged when the internet was new. Marketing novel is hard. Reading fiction is a want, not a need like other topics. When fiction writers asked non-fiction writers how to market, they were told the befuddling advice, “Be an expert.”

Every time I was told that, I scratched my head. What did it mean? The answer was often something like, “If you’re writing a wine mystery, write about wine.” What if you write in multi-genres? What if you write fantasy? What if common sense intrudes and tells you this will be a waste of time? By this standard, I should have blogged about Hawaii as an expert for my alternate world fantasy. But I would have gotten tourists, not future readers.

The result? Many writers blog on how to write, regardless of experience level. You can see this most prominently in blog posts on pantsing. Just search for pantsing versus outlining. A new writer will try to explain the difference between these two writing processes. They’re puzzled by pantsing, struggling to understand why anyone would do something they believe doesn’t work. They’ll regurgitate what they read on another blog about pantsing (the spotty copy again). Then they explain their writing process. All of this possibly without ever having finished a book.

Anyone can declare expertise. It doesn’t mean they are experts.

Tip Culture

The tip culture for writing started in writing magazines, well before the internet. Writers flocked to the magazines, looking for answers on form rejections from agents. This was an impatient audience; they wanted to know how to fix the problem without doing a lot of work.

Agents were interviewed for the top ten lists of things that would cause them to reject a manuscript. There were a bunch of common skills that writers did badly that wound up on this list, like flashbacks, dream sequences, and prologues. Instead of advising writers to learn to do them correctly, these important resources advised “Don’t.” The result is that these advanced skill areas are being lost. Most of these skills are barely discussed today.

Tips really took off with the internet. It’s hard to read on the screen, so we’re all advised to do a lot of bullet points, leave lots of white space, and keep posts under a thousand words. Tips fit well into those guidelines.

While this works well for simple things, it’s terrible for anything where a deep dive is required. All but the very basic level of writing requires a deep dive.

Rule Culture

Rules are a safety net that comes out of our days in school. If we followed the teacher’s rules, we passed the class. Many people come into writing looking for someone to explain the rules. They figure if they follow the rules, an agent will buy the book and fulfill their dreams. In many respects, it’s another form of hand-holding.

Rules can also be a way of keeping a writer who wants to advance in their place. On the message boards, I regularly heard, “You have to know the rules to break the rules,” but they never explained what rules they meant so it could be randomly applied. As a pantser, I kept running into the “rule” that you must outline.

Yet, writing fiction doesn’t have any rules. There are aspects of writing that you should probably do to keep from being rejected. Or if you’re being experimental and trying something like a prologue, you should know that the risk is that might be rejected if you don’t do it well. But the rules police aren’t going to scream, “You used a prologue! You have sinned!”

I didn’t read any of the above in a book, or on a blog. It’s from experience. I grew up wanting to write. The craft books available to me were a handful of ones from pulp writers that are long out of print now. By the time I started writing for publication, the industry had shifted to marketing to beginners. Unless you had a professional writing mentor, you wouldn’t have been able to see the problem.

Still, having read those older books, I felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction.

But all these books were about writing, so I soaked them up. One day, I ran across one that had clearly bogus information. I checked the author bio and discovered he hadn’t written any fiction. I started screening for authors with a fiction background. I was surprised how many books weren’t written by anyone with that experience.

I submitted short stories and received many form rejections. I’d get an occasional personal rejection, often by a first reader who seemed more frustrated by the slush pile then offering anything useful.

When the internet took off, I thought it was a great place to connect with other writers. Advice was everywhere. I soaked it all up. One of the things I picked up from the early books, though I didn’t know it, was that describing the setting is important. Yet, description landed on those top ten lists because writers wrote description badly. Thus, it was deemed to do as little as possible. “Drips and drabs” is common advice. So I advised writers to do more than say a character walked into a bar but didn’t do it myself.

I frequented the writing message boards, reading advice, giving it. As a pantser, I found it was best to keep my mouth shut on how I wrote. Though, eventually, all the commentary against pantsers made me question how I wrote and I would eventually try outlining. It was a complete disaster and went against how I naturally wrote. Yet, the other writers merely told me that I must not be doing it correctly.

Once a well-published writer started a series of online courses, I jumped in feet first and walked away from the writing message boards. To give you an idea of how narrow the beginner culture focused, the message boards routinely dissed this writer as not knowing what he was talking about. Because he didn’t follow the beginner advice rules.

Yet, no one noticed that he was published and they weren’t.

I realized that everything I had been reading until then barely scratched the surface. Worse, I’d subconsciously picked up on bad advice that I knew was wrong and it had corrupted my writing. I had to go through a painful process of unlearning everything.

But once I’d learned more from this writer, I ran into different problems. What he teaches is his opinion. That’s okay. All writing advice is opinion. But I didn’t always agree with his opinion. I also discovered later there were some skills that dropped off his radar because they weren’t for him, but they were of interest to me. I was hungry for diverse opinions.

Except that there were very few talking about advanced skills. He was the only one teaching classes; the others did it once a year at conferences.

So how in the heck do you navigate this complicated mess? How do you find new skills to learn when they’re being lost?