let's all stop asking for writing advice

Ursula le Guin’s frankly aspirational schedule will probably not work for you.

This isn’t a personal request. Let’s call it a general suggestion. The fact is, I think you can do better on your own.

In my experience, people have two approaches to writing: either they mythologise it, or they treat it as a universal science. Neither one is helpful, and I am sure I will come back to the first one at a later date, but for the time being, let’s talk option two.

If you’ve ever read an interview — or attended a talk, or listened to a podcast, or whatever — with a writer, you will have some sense of what I mean. It’s a recurring question: What advice do you have for writers who are looking to get ahead? And the question is never about the industry, which frankly I think we could stand to talk about more. It is always and inevitably about the Craft.

If it were ever about the industry, it would make more sense to me. You would not believe the number of people I’ve known who have decided, unilaterally and without having a goddamn clue how it works, that they are going to become professional writers. Not to advocate for the systemic murder of childhood dreams, but people should at least go into writing as a career with some sense of what, say, querying agents or pitching publications entails. (Even the process of chasing up unpaid invoices!) Just my IMO.

But it’s not; it’s about how to write. It assumes a definitive formula. At the very least, it assumes that what works for one person will work for other people, guaranteed.

Sure, read On Writing if you like — I am not your dad, and I am not going to stop you, even if I find much of what King advocates for to be aesthetically and creatively joyless. But the best thing you can do for your craft is to pick this stuff up by yourself. Read books, find what you like, and pay attention to how your faves are actually doing what works.

Not only will this give you a close-up on the techniques you — specifically you, not the imagined general audience of an author Q&A — want to learn; it will make you a better reader, and reading is a skill the world could use more of at present. Paying attention to what’s there, as opposed to what you are being told is there, is a trick you can apply to everything from your favourite fandom to the literal news.

I’ve focused on craft stuff, thus far, because the non-craft element of popular writing advice is largely down to personal habit. The picture I’ve used for this post is Ursula le Guin’s daily routine, which (as I have said in the caption) is completely baller and which I totally respect — but I’ve used it here specifically because if I tried to wake up at 5.10am every day, even if only to lie around and think, I would die.

You might, of course, make the case that the discipline involved in committing to this schedule would ultimately be good for me. It very well may! But I would probably still not write as much as I wanted to, and I would probably find the process of trying extremely frustrating. Besides, wouldn’t it take just as much discipline — if not more! since we’re treating discipline as the highest possible good! — to figure out and commit to one’s own ideal schedule instead?

For me, at least, that’s what all this comes down to: figuring out what works best for you. Writing is not a perfectly inscrutable creative process accessible only to a few chosen souls (because literally nothing is). It takes work and commitment and, yes, an element of self-discipline. But it’s also not an exact science, and no two writers approach it in exactly the same way. Buying too heavily into other people’s advice is a quick and easy route to frustration and disillusionment — that is, I’m afraid, the only shortcut you are likely to get through this field.

I’ve been replaying Disco Elysium (a very good video game) recently.

I mention this primarily because the fucked-up centrist government of the game is premised on the existence of Innocences — Pope-like figures who can see into the future and accelerate the forward progress of human history. The last Innocence in the universe of the game was assassinated some 300 years ago. Her assassin, at the shooting, screamed we were supposed to come up with this ourselves.

This isn’t the part of Disco Elysium that is trying to make a point about the creative process. (There’s a whole defunct video game studio you can explore, and it is scathing.) It’s about self-determination, though, and self-determination is what I am trying to argue for. Our work flourishes and grows thanks to its influences, sure; and thanks to critique, and to input from friends who we trust. Unilateral writing advice is not any of these things.

DE is a game played out largely in long-form text format. It’s genuinely fantastically done. As I’ve been playing it, I have been watching carefully how its writers build out its themes in every choice it asks you to make; I’ve been hoarding sentences that make me want to pause for breath, rotating them and their construction in my mind. I’m never going to write like ZA/UM Studios, in significant part because I write books, not games (usually). But I am still looking out for whatever I can learn and use.

It’s not a perfect process, but the process is not meant to be perfect. As I get older (they said, causing all their friends over 35 to roll their eyes very heavily) I am learning that writing is better informed by imperfection than by perfection. Hateful but true: you really do learn from your mistakes.

Plus it’s way less stressful than worrying about whether I’m using the right amount of adverbs in relation to adjectives, or whatever the fuck. Honestly, strong recommend.