On Writing Advice
An Essay
Thanks for reading The Questing Beast
Everyone tells me how to write. Write a thousand words a day. Set a specific time for writing. Write all the time. Write slowly. Write quickly. Write differently. Get the words down. Get to the point. Write bad drafts. Revise and revise. Use an outline. Don’t use an outline. Write a novel in a month. Write a novel in a year. Submit here first. Submit one-hundred times a year. Ask people for advice. Don’t ask anyone for advice. Get an agent. Don’t bother with an agent. Publish independently. Publish with a hybrid publisher. And only ever, ever publish with a traditional publisher.
Everywhere I look, people have writing advice. I consider most of it and try some of it. Some of it works, and sometimes not. And not all of this advice works for every kind of writing.
Maybe twelve years ago, I decided I needed to make a change. I needed to be more disciplined in my writing. I needed a space in which I could write. My kids were grown up by then, and I had already spent many years working on various projects. The only time that ever worked as a time to write was early morning. This became the time I dedicated to writing, and I knew I needed to protect it.
Having the time was one thing; trying to do something with it was something else. Words come easily some days; some days they don’t. It can be rewarding, frustrating, aggravating, and often discouraging. But that’s often simply the process.
***
Once I finish a piece, I begin looking for places to submit. And here comes the barrage once again.
If it’s a shorter piece, like an essay or a story, I’m looking at journals. Every journal I consider tells me to read one or two back issues before I submit. And sometimes these journals are behind paywalls. Sometimes not. So I read something. I tend to do the math in my head. If I need to read something from every journal where I want to submit, and if I want to submit a story perhaps ten places, then it’s going to take me a while. I put in the hours—I never manage ten submissions, but I’m able to look at maybe four journals. It still takes me two weeks. Then I only submit to three, anyway. Then I wait for months to see if anyone is interested in publishing something I wrote. Eventually the rejections will come back. By that time, I care less, and usually, I’ve moved on to another project. Very occasionally I’ve had something published. And, of course, all of this time and effort is completely unpaid.
***
I carry on, and I continue to read writing advice, and sometimes I think, maybe I need to do something differently—maybe I do need to take some of this writing advice seriously. I sign up for talks that are free, and occasionally I’ll pay to join a workshop—something on writing memoir, or maybe something on the novel. It’s always helpful, and I always learn something.
What I have noticed more and more, particularly with major social media platforms, is the way writing has become corporatized. It’s all about success—being a successful writer, a productive writer, and having a practice that is measurable and sustainable.
This kind of corporate language finds its way into everything from writing to journaling to daily planning. Set your SMART goals—those are your goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And of course they need to be actionable.
Some of this advice is helpful, but it can become a burden pretty quickly. I’ll sit there for an hour trying to sort out my goals for the week. Is finishing that essay a goal or a task? And what’s the difference? I realize I don’t know. I try to finish the essay, then I get sidetracked, and it goes back to my folder where I keep everything I’m working on. And maybe two months later, I’ll come across it again and wonder what to do with it.
***
With so many people offering writing advice everywhere I look, I wonder sometimes how somebody gains the privilege of telling other people how to write. Is it a certain number of years? A certain number of published books. I’ve written dozens of short stories and published some of them. I published two collections of stories independently through Amazon, but I don’t think any of those count. I spent three years putting together a long-form memoir. But as yet, it’s unpublished, so that doesn’t qualify me either.
In the working, paid part of my life, I teach at a university. Universities are a whole different bag of snakes. I got my first teaching job at a community college in 1998. I had a Masters in English, which in the world of academia, qualified me to teach courses in writing and literature, which of course is baffling. An MA in English is neither a teaching degree nor a degree in writing. But there I was, thirty-something and teaching people about writing and literature. It was a little weird.
I went on to do a PhD in English, which nearly killed me, and somehow writing what amounts to a two-hundred-and-fifty-page essay, mostly on a single author, made me even more qualified to teach than I was before. Even more baffling.
If anything has qualified me to teach writing in my academic life, it’s more likely the twenty-five years I’ve spent writing stories and essays and submitting to journals and publishers. The fact that my portfolio of published work remains fairly slim compared to many doesn’t matter—at least I don’t think so.
As for teaching, I’ve done it long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps what has helped to qualify me most as a teacher is being a parent. And effective teaching isn’t entirely about the material and how you present it. Somehow you have to cajole students into caring about learning. Your enthusiasm matters. How willing you are to be flexible matters. In reading over student feedback forms, one of the things that matters to students most is flexible deadlines. I don’t have to be a teacher to understand that people have lives and can’t always meet deadlines.
***
A big part of my job as a professor is providing feedback on student writing. Write this way. Map out your essay. Narrow your thesis. Use a comma this way—don’t use it that way. And there I am, dealing out writing advice like a deck of cards. Most of the time, they ignore the feedback.
A few years ago, I created a list of banished words for my students. I thought it would be helpful. Students are constantly annoyed at what they consider subjective feedback from their professors. I thought, here’s a list of words and phrases—don’t use them. It was very simple.
So, I posted a list of over fifty words and phrases to avoid in their writing. Here are some examples:
thus
deem
classic
ultimately
cringeworthy
and resilient
Thus, if my students deem a work of literature to be classic and not cringeworthy, they are ultimately able to have something to say about the resilience of the characters.
I don’t think most of my students read the list.
***
At one time, I mostly had to deal with students writing sentences that were grammatically bent out of shape, or using such phrases as since the dawn of time, since the beginning of time, since the dawn of literature. With the advent of AI, and more specifically Grammarly, students write more cleanly, but much more generically than they ever have before. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell writes,
“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you have the habit--to say in my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say, I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.”
Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Weirdly enough, this is exactly what large language models do when asked to produce content. I wonder sometimes what Orwell would think of AI and the kind of writing it can produce.
And speaking of AI, this is something else that will tell me how to write. If I copy and paste a passage into ChatGPT, for example, it will help make my writing grammatically correct, and it will catch errors that get past me.
As a blind writer, I use a speech program called JAWS (Job Access with Speech) for all of my writing. And yes, it’s a call back to that shark from the Spielberg film. If I write, get passed me, JAWS doesn’t know that I’ve made an error—past and passed are homophones, and JAWS doesn’t know the difference.
ChatGPT can be a great help to me in this way. At the proofing stage, as long as I’m specific in my instructions, ChatGPT will find all of those pesky errors I make in my writing. I tell it to look for errors, as well as grammatical and formatting inconsistencies. Which it does. It will then provide me with a list of errors which I then use to correct the mistakes in my piece. Then it will still offer me advice.
“Would you like me to help you get this piece ready for submitting to a literary journal?” it asks.
“Oh, fuck,” I think.
Once, I said yes, just to see what would happen. It changed my piece completely.
***
My writing practice has certainly evolved over the years. I was a chaotic and sporadic writer for a long time. And it took me years and years to begin to learn how to write.
I was twelve years old when I first decided I wanted to be a writer. By that time, I had already lost my sight, so all of my early efforts were in braille.
One of the skills I learned after I lost my sight was typing. I remember sitting in the low-vision class I attended for six months before going back to regular school and learning to type: I learned the keyboard, how to format, and how to type correspondence of various kinds. I found out very quickly I was a terrible speller.
Typing was an important skill. I needed to be able to produce words that other people could read. Braille is fine, but I couldn’t be handing in my school assignments in braille. But learning to type didn’t help my spelling.
Close your eyes and type a sentence. I’m sure you can do it. Now, keep your eyes closed and ask yourself how you are supposed to go back and check what you’ve written? You can imagine how happy I was with the advent of the personal computer, the word processor, and a speech synthesizer to make it all work for me.
***
I certainly can’t take all the writing advice that comes my way, but part of my writing practice is to learn. Whether I’m researching something for a piece I’m writing, or reading a book on writing, or providing feedback to my students, I always try to learn something. And that’s one of the greatest benefits I’ve gained from establishing a writing practice: learning to learn. I had a similar experience as a parent. I had to learn how to be a parent. And only after recognizing all the mistakes I had made as a parent did I learn to get better at it.
And learning is as much an individual process as anything else. I can read a hundred books on how to write, or on how to be a more effective teacher or parent or householder or gardener. But if I’m not ready to learn, it’s not going to be effective.
In the words of Merlin from T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone,
“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.”
