So the other day I made the incredible mistake of uploading some writing to a Discord server or two. I know, not exactly the most prudent course of action, but when you’re around absolutely nobody who can be bothered to so much as give your cursory ideas a thumbs up, then you take what you can get. This had the results I expected, of course, practically nobody looked at what I uploaded anyway, but I did get a few little kernels of commentary here and there. Some of it good, most of it terrible, I safely disregarded most of what they said because their advice was crap.
You see, long ago I came to the conclusion that, yeah, I’ve got some issues with my writing. It’s not great. Hell, it’s crap! But then again, it could always be better, couldn’t it?
There’s an old saying I really like, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Now, I know it might sound like something of an excuse. Yeah, you don’t need to keep striving towards greatness because it’s always going to be shit, but that’s not really what my point is. What I’m awkwardly trying to circle around to is that nobody knows what the fuck they’re talking about when they give writing advice. At least, not the dregs on the internet. If you’re anything above an absolute beginner, pretty much everything anybody tells you can be taken with a grain of salt, because, while you might not know what you’re doing – they definitely don’t know what they’re doing. And if you’re sitting there at your computer going “Fuck you, dude, I know everything!” Well, to put it simply…
You’re wrong. Dead wrong. Mega fucking wrong. Like so wrong your mother should have aborted you so that the rest of us didn’t have to put up with your bullshit levels of wrong.
Retard.
You see, despite what every faggot under the sun will tell you, writing isn’t a science. Well, it is and it isn’t. Confused? Good. Because writing is confusing, and what works for you isn’t always going to be what the conventional pseudointellectual thinks will work. Hell, it might not even be Academically correct. I had the ol’ ‘double-space after every period’ rule hammered into my brain with a golf club in Middle School, and it wasn’t until I seriously started looking into how you were supposed to format manuscripts for editorial submission that I learned the horrid truth. That ‘rule’ I’d been taught was one of the single most despised things a potential applicant could do.
Thanks public education! You failed me again!
Look, I’ll run you through some of the advice I got last time, just for kicks.
Why are you telling instead of showing?
Ah, this old phrase. You’ll notice this a lot with people who make their entire persona out of being ‘critics’ of someone else’s writing. They bang on and on about how your expositional delivery should be shown rather than told, but funnily enough they’ll never tell you how to show rather than tell. Isn’t all writing telling anyways? Well, I’ll dumb it down for you. What this means is that your direct relaying of information from the text to the reader isn’t interesting enough. The simple solution they’ll suggest will be to simply add a scene where you showcase what you’re saying rather than delivering it to the reader in a conventional fashion.
Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Well, no, because that adds this troublesome little thing called length to your text, something publishers dread. More pages = more money spent, after all, and nobody likes spending money. So unless you’re Brandon Sanderson or some other fat mormon who can crap out 1,000+ page doorstoppers of nothing but fluff and still have people eat it up, then you’d better cut those fucking scenes down if you want an agent or an editor to make it more than ten words in.
Here’s the line in question that earned me that scathing critique.
Port Belfry was a dangerous place.
What would I have to do to show that instead? Let’s say, instead of writing that one line… I decide to have somebody knifed on the side of the street. That certainly conveys danger, hell, it might even sound like a more interesting idea. I’d concur, but you know what that entails? I now have to write a scene around somebody getting knifed, I have to describe the body, have to describe how it looks, have to give my protagonist a passing opinion on it and justify why they’re looking that way. All this, in an ideal scenario, would be great, but do you know how much more writing that is? A lot. Sometimes you just need to fucking tell the audience something. Full stop.
You mention this thing but don’t explain what it is. How am I supposed to know? You should explain it before moving on.
So, now I’m being told that I’m not expositing enough. No conflicting messages there, right? Admittedly, this came from someone else, who didn’t like that my magical substance didn’t get more than a passing mention. This is the Sanderson generation at work, people who want ten page essays about how your magic works up front, rather than being willing to work with you in the hopes that they’ll glean some info later on without needing to be fucking spoonfed like a drooling baby.
Here’s my favorite. You ready?
You need a better font.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Mega! Were you writing your whole manuscript in Comic Sans again? No! I was using Times New Roman. Evidently, readability is not high on the agenda, you need something fantastical.
Gun, meet mouth.
But, seriously, what I’m getting at here is that you shouldn’t take anyone’s advice seriously when it comes to writing. Not even mine! You know what helps you become a better writer? Reading. See what other authors are doing, you might be surprised to find that certain authors break rules like this all the time. They want to convey a certain tone, a feeling, an emotion. I think what truly separates the wheat from the chaff isn’t whether or not you have the most perfectly formatted manuscript, or every piece of punctuation correct, or show everything rather than tell it, it’s whether or not you can put out a good story using the words.
So stay the fuck away from writing groups – at least online ones. Instead, do something more valuable with your time, go to your local library and pick out something that’s close to what you’re trying to write and rip it apart. Look at what that author does, figure out how they formatted, the rules they used and broke, and decide for yourself it that’s what you want to do. Because writing is a lonely job, and the only one who knows what’s best for your manuscript, is you.
