Thoughts On General Writing Advice

When I was walking out of the first writing conference I ever attended, an SCBWI Canada East conference in Ottawa, two older women stopped me. I must have looked a little lost, wandering around alone. I was still in high school, and if I’m nervous about networking now, back then, I definitely had no idea how to introduce myself to adults as a potential colleague. Still, I was carrying the conference welcome folder.

“Did you get a one-on-one?” the woman with whiter hair asked me.

At this conference, as is common, writers had been able to sign up in advance for an individual critique with one of the invited agents, editors, or successful authors. I hadn’t. The fee seemed like a lot, for a high school student, and I wasn’t ready to face a professional right there in the same room talking about my sample pages.* I shook my head.

“That’s really the only part of these conferences worth going to,” the woman told me. Her friend nodded agreement. “Trust me, I’ve been to a few.”

I took their advice the next time I went to a SCBWI conference. I was about a decade older and closer in age to the other attendees, though still clearly one of the youngest in attendance. I was also the only observing Jew at an weekend getaway during Passover, so getting served the disgusting kosher-for-Passover meals I brought while everyone else got the resort’s gourmet cooking didn’t exactly help me make friends and influence people.

The one-on-one critique with a guest editor was way different from participating in group workshops, and the women from my last conference were right: it was the most helpful part of my weekend.

The thing about writing advice, the kind you get in talks and seminars, is that it has to be very general to be applicable to everyone. And even when general advice is great, applying it to a specific scenario is a different skill set that can be even tougher to learn when, as in writing, every scenario (or manuscript) is unique, and the desired outcome isn’t objective.

It’s easy to agree that, theoretically, the stakes must be high enough for the audience to care about your main character’s dilemma; it’s much harder to figure out whether the stakes in your particular manuscript are high enough, and, if not, how to fix them. Like a doctor’s patients, manuscripts present with symptoms — readers don’t like the protagonist, they don’t want to read after the first chapter, the ending disappoints them — and if you intend to change those symptoms, you need enough experience to make good guesses as to their root causes.

Talking to someone with more experience than you about your specific work-in-progress can be more helpful than listening to ten someones talk about works-in-progress in general because someone working on your particular manuscript can suggest how to apply fundamental concepts to your scenario.

For me, I think general writing advice — seminars, articles, books — is like learning how to use a set of tools. Understanding things like plot structure and ideal pacing is like understanding how a hammer works or how to use a screwdriver. You need to master those things in order to undertake any woodworking project, but the idiosyncrasies of what you’re trying to build will require you to apply those skills in a unique way that can’t be taught through theory.

When I started reading writing advice books as a pre-teen, they gave me two things: first, they reassured me that writing was as difficult and full of nuance for everyone, even my favourite authors, and that “real” writers wrestled with structure and theory too. They helped me see the skipping-rope rhythm of a writer’s professional life and gave me confidence that I could jump in.

But equally important, they gave me a conceptual vocabulary I could use to talk about the problems I encountered in my manuscripts, both my own and those of critique partners. Just as it would be difficult to explain how to fix your crooked shelves if you’ve never encountered a level or a square**, it’s difficult to articulate what’s wrong with your plot if you don’t have words or concepts like “stakes,” “build-up,” and “climax.”

Bringing both together, I suppose these two outcomes helped cement the idea that evaluating one’s manuscript in terms of these concepts and then rewriting and rewriting was an expected and normal part of the writing process.

These days, I admit, I find myself somewhat disinterested in the type of general writing advice that sucked me in as a young adult. I read articles that look like they might offer a useful new way of thinking of a concept ( a new tool for my kit!) or that seem like they might offer insight into a particular author’s work style (always interesting!), but I’ve started to feel like the reason I want to read about dialogue tags for the umpteenth time is because it feels relevant to writing yet is not whatever difficult scene I need to attempt or, worse, revise. In other words… procrastination.

Not always — sometimes reading a theoretical piece can help me find the missing part of the puzzle that helps me finish the scene. For instance, reading a few writers’ critiques of the added rape scenes on Game of Thrones gave me a concept I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with a section that just made me cringe in my work-in-progress.

But most of the time, what I really need is for someone to read this manuscript, this story, and tell me their impressions. It’s all very well to read about narrator’s voice until the cows come home, but I’ll never figure out the problems with mine until a reader tells me how and where her reactions were different from the ones I wanted.

Another problem is that writing has no 100% hard-and-fast rules: true, there are things that aren’t a good idea to do unless you have a reason for it, but there are always exceptions. Each Harry Potter series novel starts with viewpoints outside our main protagonist. The Twilight books take forever to get their main plot rolling. Ancillary Justice and The Quantum Thief challenge their readers by plunging straight into mind-bending concepts. Yet each of those works was exactly right for the audience that loves it.

At many talks, I’ve seen headliner authors wind up fielding questions get some like, “Is it okay if my main character is a thief?” or “Do you think I can use an epilogue?” To me, these are like asking, “Do you think it’s okay to use a screwdriver?” or “Can I use stain instead of paint?” They make sense only if you know the exact project the asker is working on.

In a one-on-one critique, when you can show your mentor exactly what you’re building, it’s much easier for her or him to give you helpful advice. A lecture can tell you, “Use a hammer to drive in nails.” A one-on-one can say, “Here’s where your framework is shaky. Tear down this part and use these methods to put it back up.”

* I did, though, at one of the group critique sessions at the end of the day. One of the author speakers very kindly gave me information on her local critique group and suggested I join it. I was too chickensh*t at the time.
** My history and philosophy of technology training protests this assumption. But you get what I mean. Just pretend, okay?