Writing Advice: The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent

by Barb, still in Maine where it has been the most glorious fall

Welcome to my fifth post about what I’ve learned in fourteen years of being a published author and a lifetime of writing. The first four posts are about Voice, Emotion, Narrative Distance, and Dialog Tags. In this post, I’m going to pass along the bits of advice I (and almost every other fiction writer) have received along the way along with my (current) judgement about how useful the advice was. As I side note, I did examine several pieces of advice related to dialog tags in my previous post, so I’m leaving that topic out here.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

When people ask me what books I recommend on writing, I always answer Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and Stephen King’s On Writing : A Memoir Of The Craft. The quote above is one of the central tenets of Bird by Bird, that you need to tackle overwhelming writing tasks by breaking them down into manageable chunks. It took a couple of runs at this and a good friend reinforcing it before I incorporated the discipline into my writing and my entire life. But once I learned not to think in terms of writing an entire book, but in terms of writing 1000 or 1200 words or a scene or a chapter at a sitting, I was a happier and more successful person and writer.

That being said, one of my personal eccentricities is that I have never, ever typed, “The end.” I know there will always be more drafts, and copy-edits, and page-proofs, and publicity, and reviews, comments, and e-mails. Your relationship to your book never ends.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

Two other central tenets of Lamott’s amazing work are the idea of “shitty first drafts” and the enemy to creativity that is perfectionism. Most of us who begin writing have been reading heavily for years, some of it the great works of literature. Thinking that what flows from our fingers has to be that good from the get-go is one of the great barriers to writing. Understanding that you can get it done and you can (and will) fix it later is a key to finishing and to success.

“I began to stalk around his living room, like a trial lawyer making her case to the jury, explaining various aspects of the book, some of which, in my desire not too appear to obvious, I had forgotten to put down at all.”

This is a much less often cited quote from Bird by Bird. In fact, it’s not Googlable, but it is terribly meaningful to me. I was, and remain, a sparse writer, especially in first drafts. But in the beginning I also suffered from the unconscious belief that what the character had to be thinking or feeling must be so obvious that I didn’t need to put it on the page. I was young, and now that I’m older, I have a better appreciation that what is glaringly obvious to me is not obvious to everyone. Not because they are not smart but because their lives and experiences are different from my own. As a friend of mine says, “When my mother says ‘No one would ever do such a thing,’ what she means is ‘No one who lives within eight square blocks of me would ever do such a thing.'” Our contexts are unique.

Also, as I said in my post on emotion, in fiction, particularly crime fiction, readers need to see how point of view characters are reacting to and processing information both intellectually and emotionally, in order to know those characters and to root for them. I come back to the quote above all the time to remind myself not to leave out the things that seem obvious to me.

“Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis came together, and I had an idea.”

Since I cited On Writing as my other north star, I wanted to include advice from it as well. It’s not so much an advice book. Like Bird by Bird, it’s part autobiography and it also contains advice about how to be in the world as a writer. Not that many (or any) of us can be in the world like Stephen King, but I found it helpful nonetheless. The quote above relates to Carrie, and how two unrelated ideas can come together to create a premise. I’ve since heard Tom Perrotta say this too–that it takes two concepts to make an interesting idea. This advice has been very helpful to me, especially when I’ve had an idea too thin to be a book, or, minimalist that I am, I’ve been tempted to reject that second idea as something that will muddy the book instead of make the book.

“Start with your character in motion.”

I’m not sure who said this to me. I think it might have been in a class I took with Hallie Ephron, whose excellent book is Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: The Complete Guide to Mystery, Suspense, and Crime. This advice has been very helpful too me. Sometimes my character starts in literal motion, going out a door, driving up a driveway. But the more important thing to remember is that stories are about change, things that happen outside the norm.

On the other hand I feel free to ignore advice like “Never start with the weather.” Or “Never start with a phone call.” The weather thing might be good advice for beginners, especially those who are tempted to “set the scene.” But in more adept hands starting with the weather is fine. The phone call thing I’ve never gotten. What can set events in motion more than a a phone call in the middle of the night?

“If you’re going to tell a lie, tell it fast, tell it straight, don’t justify, don’t explain.”

This advice comes from my friend and fellow writing group member for 20 years, Mark Ammons. What he means is that if you need the reader to buy something, dithering around and shoring it up with all sorts of explanations only calls attention to it, which makes the reader suspicious of your motives. If you say it quick the reader may move on without questioning it.

“You can put the Statue of Liberty in New Orleans if you can convince the reader.”

This piece of advice was given to me by fellow Wicked Sherry Harris, who was paraphrasing John Dufresne, whose amazing book is The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction. For me, what this means is, when a reader says, “I didn’t find it believable,” what they are actually saying is, “The writer didn’t sell it to me.” Convincing readers of improbable, unlikely, and unbelievable things is what writers do everyday. But the world-building and the character development have to be there to make it believable.

This piece of advice might seem to contradict the one above–don’t justify or explain. But to me the two go together. Justifying or explaining when an event happens or a character makes a decision in a book will undermine it. But if the foundation is already there, you don’t need to do that in the moment. Mark also says, “You get one gimme per story,” meaning that you can ask the reader to swallow one improbable thing, no more. But that’s meant to be one moment in a story and it had better not be something like, “He looked up from his porch in New Orleans and saw the Statue of Liberty,” unless you’ve laid the foundation, or you want to shock the reader into reading further.

“You know more about your story than you think you do.”

Speaking of Wickeds, this is not so much something Jessie Crockett says when running her Polka Dot Plotting coaching sessions or workshops, but something that she models. Using Jessie’s methodology, which she walks you through, you discover that you do, indeed, have all sorts of assumptions about your story embedded in your subconscious dying to come out. Some will be good, some bad. Some will make it to the final draft, some will not. But they are there and once you’ve had the courage to articulate them, they will be much easier to write.

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”

This piece of advice from E.L. Doctorow kept me going on many a day. It was especially helpful when I was a pure pantser, but even in the later stages of my career when I did some plotting (see Polka Dot Plotting above) I could never come up with all the scenes, and though my lists of scenes might have included the what and the why, they never included the how. So I treasure this advice.

“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

This piece of advice from Neil Gaiman always makes me laugh because it takes me back to my 20 happy years in my writing group. It is always more fun and so much easier to write someone else’s book. And while there are times and places for brainstorming, (exclusively when the writer asks for it) the fun other writers in a group have making suggestions of the “you know what you should do,” type is not anything you should pay attention to. Let them have their fun. Keep your own counsel.

“Show don’t tell.”

An old chestnut and good advice for the beginner but of limited value. As Julia Glass, the brilliant author of Three Junes said in a seminar I took with her, “Sometimes you just tell it.” I always think of showing and telling like a camera in a movie, zooming in and pulling out. Pulling out for the establishing shots, viewed from a distance, the details fuzzy or obscured. The B roll. It’s a pacing thing, mostly.

“Describe the fast things slow and the slow things fast.”

This bit of advice is attributed to Lee Child. I think it is a human-being thing as much as a writing thing but very good writing advice that relates to the above. Say you have an hour long commute. The first time you drove it, to the job interview, you were white-knuckled and noticed every sign, building, and vehicle along the way. By a month on the job, you often arrive in the parking lot wondering how you got there. That commute will be a single phrase for your character, “By the time Jack arrived at the office…” But my husband and I were in a car accident a year and a half ago. For insurance reasons, we asked for the read-out from the car’s computer. I was astonished to see the car had careened with my husband fighting for control for a total of nine seconds. I remember every beat as the passenger, not knowing what was happening, screaming, seeing the plastic picnic table explode as we plowed into it and being thankful even then there was no one sitting there. My husband, trying to control the car, making decisions, hearing me screaming and pleading, undoubtedly remembers it differently but in the same slow-motion, goes-on-forever mode.

“No head-hopping.”

This is common advice everyone will give you when you’re new. What it means is that when telling the story from one character’s point of view you shouldn’t suddenly jump into another’s point of view revealing things the original character couldn’t know or feel. The most common place to change point of view characters is at a scene break.

I’m not as doctrinaire about this as some. I’ve enjoyed many books by authors who change point of view mid-scene or who hide the point of view in a new scene for a couple of paragraphs to keep you guessing. As long as the reader is not unintentionally confused I think both of these techniques are okay.

What’s not okay is some of the tortured constructions that result from the over-interpretation of this guideline. We look at other people all the time and think, “Joe is sad.” As sentient beings we are constantly drawing conclusions about other people’s status. We don’t think “Joe appears to be sad.” That is stupid. Cut that out.

I am always amused by new writers who greet advice like this simple guideline about heading hopping with responses like, “But in the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner…” To which I always reply, “If you think your skills and talent are at the same level as Faulkner, go for it.” Some day I will meet someone brimming with self-confidence who will take me up and this and be right about their abilities. I look forward to having that happen.

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

This guideline, recorded in letters by Anton Checkov, is an old saw but deservedly so. To me it means that every detail must serve the story in some way. Nothing is random or has no purpose. It also helps me think about payoff for the reader and character. Often when writing you don’t know why something is there or someone is in a scene or the story keeps returning to the same setting. Then in a later draft, when you know what you are doing, you discover the reason. Your subconscious knew all along.

Readers and Writers: What bit of advice have I forgotten, one that means something to you? I am sure there are many. Are any of these new to you?