Writing Advice is Hazardous to Your Health

/dusts off her small box and climbs on top

Ahem. This rant, writers of non-repute, is for you and your incessant received writing advice.

There is a thing called too much advice. If you're on your first draft, if you haven't taken the weed whacker to the selection, or had a chance to finish the arc to see where it goes... how can you get advice that's truly valuable? Good advice about a story is precious, and requiring someone to validate your writing every chapter won't help you accomplish anything except angst, and we writers have enough of that.

I know how you feel when you have a WiP. The excitement and madness of writing down your heart's thoughts and your head's emotions. The thrill of racing along with your protagonist as you're swept into their story is beyond compare. And who can blame you? For you, the story is crystal clear.

You've written your first chapter, or perhaps the entire novel, and that little voice, the who's so proud of your work and yet desires some advice speaks up. It tells you to get out there and get people engaged in your piece. Perhaps a Hooked contest over at Authoress's blog, or a writing forum; maybe even the coveted writing group.

To see if you're you're headed in the right direction, of course.

I mean, it was written for you and others to enjoy, right? A little advice and some compliments in one go - how bad could it be?

Let me give you an example from a fellow writer I know. She's a good writer, is free with her writing advice and time for others, and has a wonderful WiP that's shaping up nicely. My friend recently relayed an incident to me where she asked for people in this writing blog group she's in to give her critiques on her WiP. She got 18 people giving feedback on the entire thing.

18 - gosh, she must feel incredible, right? So many people came and gave advice on her piece! And as it turned out, she had several people remark on the same thing, and did find something useful.

The problem, however, was that verbal flood overwhelmed her. While some of the advice was good, just as much of it wasn't. There were people who didn't know how to act like professionals, and there were so many specifics that by the end she felt like she had to please everyone. It became frustrating and depressing to read - knowing when to not listen to unprofessional people still doesn't stop you from feeling down about it.

I know many people say the advice helps them to improve their writing, and I'm not saying advice should never be sought - it should only be sought after you've put it through the wringer and your writing is ready to be viewed by the public for final tweaking. Stephen King calls those people Ideal Readers; an apt phrase.

The thing is, until you've had a chance to sit and sweat over your writing a few times, any adivce you get will be moot, as you'll end up changing the whole darn thing anyways.

Another example: a second friend of mine recently had the first part of her chapter 1 put up for critiques on a board. The dozen or so comments that followed were about as useful as an umbrella with a hole in it. Vague comments about how they didn't like or liked it, with only one person pointing out any specifics was a total wash from her. She knew her first chapter needed some work, but all she found out was that it didn't work for most people. Oh, and the place two people wanted her to start at was trite and overdone for her genre.

If you take the time to sit with your story and look it over, you can figure out yourself the extensive rewrites you'll need to get the much-valued second chapter. All the advice in the world may or may not give you ideas and help, but it'll be their ideas, not yours. Your piece is your creation for so long before people start putting their mark on it - go through it at least twice on your own before delving to the outside realms.

You yourself, and the fact that you stuck your butt in the seat every day to finish the 60k-200k monstrosity is validation. Every day you go back and chip away at the boulder of a bad scene, or use your plot hole shovel, or wield those slice and dice knives - that is validation.

If you need permission to brag, you have it. Less than half of the people who say they'll write a novel end up starting it, let alone finishing a first draft.

When that voice starts speaking up, smack it with a stick. I'm serious. Advice is always a two-edged sword, and putting a piece out somewhere that's not ready to go will give you bad jujus.

Patience, young padawan. You'll know when the time is right to pass out those copies for others to read. Find those ideal readers, the ones whose advice you can trust won't steer you off into stereotypes or change your writing style.

Your writing and you - the best duo in the world. Keep it that way.

How I Work It

Chapter two of Devil's Tongue, my magic crimes novel, is officially a working draft.

I'm sure I'll make more revisions, but I enjoy the overall feel of it. Now to see if my writing group feels the same. *chuckles* They always find stuff that needs a rewrite, but hey, that's what revision three is for.

A quick breakdown of how I organize my work. In order to keep my sanity, here's how I handle my drafts. First draft is pure story and characters. I follow my characters around, and eventually I realize what's going on with the story. Yes, even in a detective novel, I don't plot things. I discuss with my protag and then my evil guys how they would handle the situation, and toss them together into a mixture of mayhem.

Rough draft two is to work all of the big errors out - continuity, unintentional oopsies, reusing the same phrases, etc. Then I toss it over to my writing group. They help push it to the next level.

When I finish with the second draft, it's like having a mostly formed vase out of clay. This is important because I see the bumps and the flat pieces, the parts where either myself or others help me realize there's an irregularity. The third phase is smoothing it out to its final shape, so it's as ready as a whole piece in its form.

After that point, I consider it a fairly whole piece, subject only to decoration, glaze and a bake in the kiln.

Keep on Truckin'

We're back into almost normal mode around the house again, and I reached my daily wordgoal for the first time in two weeks. I am back on track now, and I'm going to work through the bumps in my path until I hit smooth rolling again.

It's easy to write when things are going great. The fresh idea you had straight from the box, inserted and tweaked into the fabric of your world until it fits, and you spin it until it's time for the next step to keep the ball going. But it's when you can't find that clever turn to keep the ball going that the true writers come out. They employ every bit of willpower, ingenuity, and often plain cussedness to make the story go, whether it wants to or not, until it's smooth sailing once again.

Also, how many metaphors, smilies, and cliches can you use in a paragraph? Go for it and find out.

September has rolled around, and the writing wolves are howling at my writing group doors and demanding that I start pumping out something to show them. I belong to two writing groups - one is a well-mixed group that always manages to help me improve my writing so I can find the gold nuggets amongst the shit, but the second is a specialization group for genre writing. It's only a select few friends, and the rules are simple - you must produce 1k a week, and the projects have to come through so we can rip them apart.

None of us are professionals in there. Inside "Ground Zero" we're cold-hearted lawyers searching for every loophole and problem with a piece that comes up. It's very good for me because I tend to be a big picture person who manages to tie most of the facts together, but they really help me clinch any holes, no matter how gaping they may be. Or how much I don't want to see them.

When you can find a good writing group, they're worth three times their weight in gold. Finding a good group is exceedingly difficult, and I'm grateful to have two.

Current Reads: Finally plowing through the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. Not hard on the eyes. Terrific light reading. Snow Queen by Mercedes Lackey finally came out, and I finished it the second night I got it. The only thing holding back my writing now is my pile of books.

Current WordCount: 62,500/90,000

Musings

After spending some time stewing over my innate dislike of my faery story, I finally realized what about it I disliked so much. It's not that my writing or the story is bad, but rather half of what I've written is really backstory. So, I've got about 35,000 down in Carwyn's world, and half of that will be axed. I am perfectly fine with this, though. You'd think I'd be upset, but I really want to write an extremely engaging, action-oriented novel. And I've realized saying that a medieval society is incapable of moving quickly is a big, fat, stinky excuse. Even I have started to say it once or twice.

After reading Poison Study and the follow-up to it, I've realized just how possible it is to write a compact novel. It shouldn't feel strung out, as the beginning of mine currently does.

So, I'm going to fix it.