Writing Advice: When to Give It, When to Take It
One of the regrettable side effects of a world in which anyone can publish anything straight to Amazon is the proliferation of “indie” authors. Indie authors are great… but when there are so many of them, we run in to kind of unique issue. The problem is that in a completely unregulated market, you’re going to find many people who walk and talk like master authors who’ve never actually published anything that more than a handful of people have seen, much less purchased.
The driving compulsion behind any author is the desire to be published. Sure, we’d like to make money at it. We all dream about making a comfortable living just sitting in a Starbucks, plunking away at yet another masterpiece. We daydream about the halcyon days of bookstores; we want lines of people waiting at midnight for the next release in our bazillion-selling series. Essentially, we all want to be Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. It’s not about the money for most independent authors; it’s about the prestige of being able to say, “I am a published author.”
Invariably, authors start writing about writing. I’m firmly convinced that all authors spend a little too much time talking about writing, writing about writing, and thinking about writing. The hashtag #amwriting is a great example — if you’re tweeting about what you “amwriting,” you aren’t actually getting work done. I know I’ve been productive when I look up at the clock and discover a couple of hours have gone by unnoticed while my phone has registered several missed phone calls and text messages. If I have time to post on social media, I’m not actually getting any work done.
George R.R. Martin drives me crazy for this reason. He’s a massively successful author, but he’s said in interviews that he only works when he’s home for an extended period of time and can focus on his ancient word processor. He doesn’t work when he’s traveling. He doesn’t work when he’s going to be interrupted. He’s lucky his series and the television show it spawned have made him so financially comfortable because a working writer couldn’t afford to turn out content at that glacial pace. He’d starve first.
A brutal fact of the writing world is that many beginning, amateurs, just-starting-out authors aren’t that good at writing. They haven’t had the time and the practice to get good yet. Yet many of them are writing blogs giving advice on how to write… and much of that advice isn’t helpful. If a big publishing house has never published you, giving other authors advice on how to get published isn’t helpful. If you’ve written one or two novels in your entire life, you probably shouldn’t be blogging about how to craft meaningful characters. Instead, you should be working on your own craft, seeking out the honest feedback of writing partners and beta readers who have considerably more experience than you (or who will be honest concerning how your writing affects them as readers).
Once in a while, an indie author makes it big and gives hope to the legions of others out there. That’s a good thing; that success means I want to hear from that person. I’m willing to bet there are things I can learn from that person. But if your only claim to fame is that you wrote a book that nobody else wanted and you gamed the Kindle promotions system to make that book a bestseller for a day, your advice on writing is speculative. It’s guessing, in other words, no matter how educated the guess.
Good writing isn’t just avoiding mistakes or knowing the rules of grammar. Good writing has to be better than trite. It has to stretch beyond derivative. It has to be more compelling than “good enough.” It’s better to spend time listening rather than offering advice to accomplish that. Above all, spend more time writing. Stop trying to be the teacher when you’ve yet to surpass the students. There’ll be time enough to offer advice when you’ve spent a lot of time putting in the work.