On (Mostly Writing) Advice

Have you ever taken advice? When someone
uses the imperative on you, have you ever obeyed? Or, more likely, did you do
nothing/ the complete opposite?

When people give advice, they’re generally
giving it to their former selves, or they’re using the opportunity to educate
themselves on how they do a particular thing. Some material does transfer, but
quite poorly when given in an advice/ list of rules format. The most powerful,
perhaps the only true way to give advice, is to live by example.

Everything I’ve gotten better at, I’ve only
gotten better at when I feel comfortable to interact with the skill/ the job/
the situation at my own pace, in a relaxed manner, “listening” for what I enjoy
about the thing and heading away from what I don’t enjoy about it, and in so
doing, finding the niche and the personalised skillset. Everything I’ve ever
had to do that I didn’t enjoy, I’ve always managed (or had the opportunity) to consider
what value the activity will provide me/ loved ones/ society, so that I can
enjoy this enjoyable secondary effect of the primary unenjoyable activity.

There are so many lectures/talks and books
about how to master/ improve things that no one understands, for the simple
reason that there’s so many good properties we have that we don’t know how to
accentuate and would so love to accentuate that we’re willing to believe
someone really has the answer. “We found something remarkable: 98% of people
were better at performing X when they thought about Y.” There’s no way for me
to know in which camp I sit: 2% or 98%. If I think about Y and don’t achieve X,
even so, I don’t know which camp I’m in, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll naturally
think there’s other people out in the world achieving X more happily, more
creatively, more efficiently than I am, and feel demotivated. The only viable
secret to happiness, creativity, efficiency, motivation etc. etc is leaning
into innate rhythm.

There are as many kinds of writers as there
are people, and there’s nothing any writer necessarily does or doesn’t need to
do. If I don’t want to (though I don’t know why I wouldn’t), I don’t have to
learn a single new word in order to tell a story. I could get through a hundred
novels and never use a metaphor—likely I won’t, but if I thought that was the
best approach, who’s stopping me? If it was an innate feature of my voice,
would anyone even notice? (Did I use a metaphor in this post?)

Apparently, in Donald Bartheleme’s writing
class, students were forbidden from describing the weather, something which
seems so critical to mood and tone. Marilynne Robinson has never assigned a
how-to writing book to her class.

The fact is, if you’re learning a skill,
you’re not learning how this skill is to be performed, but how you perform it—in
this case, not how people write, but how you write. In order to discover that, you
follow your intuition– maybe the only advice worth taking.

I spent many of my first learning-to-write
years feeling bad that writing wasn’t making me feel bad, since most lauded
writers agonise and sigh over the much-sought-after career they’ve luckily
managed to achieve/ toiled away at, and those who say they’re getting paid to
do something they would do for free are often scorned for their lack of ability.
But I think whether or not you enjoy writing or write what you enjoy is a
matter of choice, and it’s to everyone’s benefit if you’re happy. I just don’t
get who would say ‘Wow, I hate this. I’m free to choose anything but I think I’ll
dedicate my life to this thing I hate.’

When it comes to most skills, cherrypicking
from methods and accentuating your skill subset is not only absolutely fine but
to be encouraged. As long as you’re practicing and actively seeking to improve,
it’s going to happen.

The biggest writing joys I’ve had, even
just this year, are the following epiphanies:

-         
I really like it when this
writer uses mythological layering to enhance the resonance of his story. I mostly
do my research after the story, and when I try to impose a structure on the
story afterwards, it always feels forced. Not only that, but if the story isn’t
interesting in spite of this layering, there’s a danger it relies on
interesting structure to mask poor storytelling. And if I didn’t need the
structure to write the story, what good is it doing anyway? Wait: I could write
high quality fiction without ever using some clever structure?

-         
It’s so cool how this writer
pastiches noir fiction/ fantasy tropes/ sci-fi. They obviously grew up
voraciously consuming novels in this particular genre, and recreate its
conventions with love. I don’t know that I’ve held interest in any one genre
long enough or with enough attention to effectively pastiche it. I hope no one
thinks less of my stories if I never do this. Wait: I never have to do this?

-         
This writer is concerned with
the future of fiction. I see they have gone to great lengths to find innovative
narrative structures. What a huge mental exertion that must have been! I wonder
if I would be capable of finding a story format that hasn’t been used before.
Wait: I never need to do this?

-         
This writer’s prose style is
really poetic. That’s cool, I guess, and loads of people like it. But my least
favourite thing is lack of clarity, and purple prose has a tendency to
obfuscate. When I do this, it’s a sign to me that I’m scared my story isn’t
saying anything. If it isn’t saying anything, I need to work on that, not on
alluding to depth that isn’t there. Why would I write in a way I don’t talk? Wait:
I never need to write purple prose?

In so narrowing what I don’t want to do, I
operate freely in the space that remains, and readers get a good sense of what
to expect when they read one of my stories, so this has been a beneficial
process. A story doesn’t need to be tough to read to express something difficult.
It’s the same with other things: you could be a jazz or classical pianist, a
100m or marathon runner, one type of sports guy on the pitch or some other type
of sports guy, like, maybe not even on a pitch. When you hone your scope,
everyone’s thankful, you specialise and get better at the things you like doing
and discard the rest.

And so on and so on:

-         
Writing longhand vs typing

-         
Plotting beforehand vs writing
into the void

-         
Loving your characters. To me
the idea is essentially meaningless unless it’s saying “Care what happens in
your story/ who it’s happening to/ where it’s happening”, which is a broader
almost useful statement, but then you realise it’s just common sense. I don’t
judge my characters and I try to see where everyone’s coming from, even if I
don’t agree with them. That works for me, but who knows…?

-         
Killing your darlings: the
WORST! It’s not killing darlings; it’s culling deadwood. You’re cutting out
what doesn’t work and that too is an enjoyable process, because what remains is
that much stronger having shed the bland, the directionless, the red herrings,
and so on. I don’t like it when writers say that their first drafts are “bad/ shit”
or what they’ve written “stinks”: it’s like, calm down. “Not there yet” is
kinder, and better indicative of what it feels like to read something
incomplete. If you write like me, ie, not knowing where you’re going, this
material is inevitable and has nothing to do with how good or bad a writer you
are, because the story creation process is iterative. Does the first half
predict the second half perfectly, for example? If it did, it probably means
you weren’t adventurous enough, didn’t hold off enough in order to let the
story tell itself (or appear to.) Some characters won’t have gone anywhere.
Some story strands never got resolved or stopped being relevant. Some info was
dispensed in a better way later in the story,
and some of it wasn’t as important to the reader’s understanding as you thought
it was. You’re not bad for having written something baggy on the first draft:
the power of what you end up with is all to do with iteration above first draft
writing ability. Write, draft, edit, re-write: no one ever seems to attach the
same meaning to each of these words. To me, they all fit into the overall act
of “converging.” Through these components, you converge on a good story, and
anything before “convergence” is “not there yet.”

Fiction gets you high or it doesn’t. All
depends on who you are, and hopefully fiction challenges that perception
depending on what gets you high. And really, all any writing technique does is
maximise the efficiency of your writing process, but anything can be smoothed
out later, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t matter how you write at all.

I could just do this all the time: a
non-researched, simple-worded, no-prior-structured rambleathon, and it would be
just fine. Not to say I’m not doing anything. In terms of fiction, plot,
dialogue, logical flow, characterisation, setting, insight… all these concepts
need to be addressed, but I can choose how I go about addressing them. Reading
a lot and writing a lot are super important, so it’s not like I’m not putting
the hours in, and fiction/non-fiction, news articles, overheard conversations,
personal experience and (my favourite) scientific papers  inspire stories, so it’s not like I’m not
absorbing and learning; I just get to choose what to absorb and what to learn. You
feed the machine what you want and guide what it later spits out.

Not only that, but your stories should stay
true to the things you enjoy reading and learning about, should ideally stay
close to your life/ things you can relate to, in order to create good prose.
But writing need not be painful or head into forced directions or use
unfamiliar and uncomfortable techniques—generally speaking, the less it does
this, the better! This blog post, for example, is coming out of me quite
naturally, but it summarises things that have taken me years to learn and to
develop the confidence to express: the actual typing-it-out is not the official
gauge of how long this post took to make: it’s been distilling in my head for a
while.

Who knows? It’s best to stay open, naturally,
and I kinda knew this before; I’ve just become more willing to stop trying to
be all things to all women, and I can tell my work is improving as a result.
And yet, for example, I doubt there’s a single word in this blog you didn’t
already know. I have a massive list of 1500+ words now that I’ve collected from
books I’ve read, and I do try and use them when relevant, but I inevitably take
them all back out again. I guess this is just how I write, then. But the more
YOU you are, the less competition you have (said Bill Hicks), in any field.

In the spirit of giving advice, I’m
probably just trying to tell this to myself. But what writer would write if not
in part for the act of self-discovery?

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