The Trouble With Writing Advice

If you’ve spent any time at all within a writers’ group or the hallowed halls of some kind of school setting, there is for sure one thing given freely: writing advice.

You are to show, not tell. You must write daily, discarding all else in favor of your craft. You should wield detail like a painter wields her brush—but not too much detail! Plot is everything, but so is character. Where is your narrative arc? No need to follow convention so closely. Did you tie up all loose ends? Did you leave room for the reader to draw their own conclusions? Be explicit, but for the sake of all that is holy do not be too on the nose!

We writers are an opinionated bunch and we hold our opinions like talismans that will protect us from bad writing. The truth is, these opinions will not protect us or anyone else. And, as you can see from the paragraph above, writing advice (this is just a small sampling) is contradictory and sometimes flat-out suspect. Good advice, valuable advice requires a lot of care.

Last week I listened to a podcast about this very thing. “Our Advice on Giving Advice” discusses the slipperiness of writing advice and how each of the writers on the podcast (there is also at least one agent and writing instructor) handle giving it. I found the episode thought-provoking and definitely worth a 30-minute listen.

I shared several of my key takeaways from the podcast in my recent newsletter, but, ultimately, what is most helpful for me is remembering that all advice stems from this: "The only mistake you can actually make in writing is that the work is not having the effect you intended it to have on your audience." 💥

So when you’re evaluating someone else’s work (or your own!), before going down the road of well-worn advice, consider whether the work achieves with the writer set out to do. If not, what needs to change?

And, by all means, when giving asked-for (that’s key) advice on someone else’s work, remember that you aren’t advising based on how you would write the piece but on what the writer is aiming to achieve. See, it’s much harder to give quality advice than to reach for a “show, don’t tell!” or “I wanted more from this scene.”

Think about the feedback you’ve received on your own writing and what was most useful to you, and proceed carefully, generously from there.