Writing Advice or Reading Advice? · 11:02pm Aug 26th, 2017
Poked my head in at The Writer's Group for the first time in awhile. Answered some questions. Enjoyed some of the complementary snacks from the coffee table (SweetAiBelle: the hay-oreos were getting a little stale).
But one thing that struck me after being away from the Q and A business for so long was how generic answering felt. There is a person whose story is still in the shop asking for ways to make that story read like they felt it should, and I have to words until they get a sense of what operations they need to perform on that story (which I have not read) to make it read how they want. An answer of "It depends" from the commentariot used to give me conniptions. What is anyone going to do with "it depends?"
But when I tried to answer more specifically, it boiled down to wording around until I came around to myself. Young grasshopper, let me tell you of the million things I have seen and how we got home from them before dinner got cold. I used to write paragraph upon paragraph responses to these questions late into the night. But if I really think about it, is that any better? Is it not "it depends" in long form with all the depends I can think of written out?
There is no tonic you can shove in your ear and suddenly have every secret of writing poured into your brain. There is no Gold blog post you can write that will instantaneously make a generic person even a passable author. I can even think of the odd editing session where made a direct comment on a story I had actually read through followed according to the author's understanding that ended up in a train wreck.
So why is writing advice a thing? We drivel out our rules until people follow them and complain that others are not following them. Then the popular authors quickly mumble something about "I can break all the rules because I'm awesome, but you need to follow them because you aren't me." We wave our hands about uttering abstractions "pacing," "hero's journey," "show", "tell" and then get in a spat when the minutia of your utterings aren't quite the same as the minutia of mine. Blibber blubber raz mataz and flames until the only sane response is a moderate "it depends and let me tell you all the things it depends on..." (or just leave it at "it depends" and swoop out with your writer cred.)
And yet, I have found times when writing advice is useful. It is definitely useful to be able to say "I thought the pacing was off", "The mood didn't fit the plot", or "that character was a Mary Sue" (well, maybe not the last one). It is admittedly good to have the concepts from writing advice. However, I do not know if they are the right tools to actually help writers directly, especially not when you have nebulous concepts like pacing strewn about.
As much as we like to think of the brain in terms of a computer, it is nothing of the sort. A computer is a thing that manipulates symbols in well defined ways and if you fail to follow those rules exactly when you are telling it what to do, then it ends up putting your trousers on your head and brushing your toes at midnight instead of morning (time zones are hard). It follows exact instructions in order perfectly.
People, not so much. Our brains are fuzzy connection engines, not instruction executors. We record a hundred points in no particular order, pick the lines that make most sense to us, and then draw our own sloppy constellation. When everyone around us has drawn their own constellation and the constellations that are most popular have bounced off each other enough to round the edges and kind of fit, then something becomes A Thing (like pacing). Learning A Thing is the same process: we need to experience writing and squish the words everyone uses to talk about writing around before we can write ourselves, much less throw all those abstraction words around like we know something.
But though writing advice can give us a sampling of what is A Thing right now in the writing community, and that's important, I think after sifting though so much forum advice that the best advice is less like "Do this one weird trick and it will fix your story" and more like "I read x, y, and z stories that did that really well, and this other story not so much. Why not have a look? And it looks like you don't quite know what you're talking about when you say "medium pace" because stories have a bunch of different paces and they all have a use if you need them. Look at this thriller story that goes fast then slow then fast and it's a wild roller coaster ride!"
In other words: pointing authors towards experiences and correcting how they are asking the question if they are off is going to do them far more in the long run than spouting abstractions. If they do not even have the words to talk about their story problem, then by all means give them some words and a link to a reputable person's explanation of the words, but if you find yourself starting to "it depends," maybe consider that showing is generally better than telling and regardless it is still on them to draw their own constellations however they may be.
The problem with most writing advice is this: it needs context in order to work.
Without context, writing advice falls apart to "it depends" because we don't exactly know the situation the advice is needed. We drivel our rules because they've worked for us, but complain when others don't use them because we don't realize the other author's situation might not be the same. Editors are fantastic for asking questions and giving advice like this precisely for this reason; by reading over the work they know the context, and with notes from the author they know where the author wants to go and how best to help them.
Some general writing advice is good, but general often doesn't help with questions like those that appear in "The Writer's Group". General advice helps with writing habits; writing a page and a half a day helps keep a consistent pace, doing research about a thing helps with writing about the thing, writing notes on longer projects can help maintain continuity and flow, etc. But most authors aren't looking for the general advice. They need the context-specific advice, the "how does this work in my specific project".
This can at least help one get their bearings, but in the long run, I don't know exactly how effective it is. Again, it boils down to context; one person's turn of phrase or narrative device might be what a person needs, but it may also not fit the given situation a writer may be stuck and needing advice on.
Stories almost need to be linked in "The Writer's Group" more often, as it would allow those asking for advice to point to a specific section and say "I'm not sure how this works. Can someone read this and give me feedback as to what it sounds like?" Alas, most times this is counted by the mods as self-promotion, but not everyone is clamoring for the favorites. Some people really do want the feedback, but alas, to me "The Writer's Group" does not help for obtaining the feedback as much as it used to when I first came on here.
I can replace 'em!
*munch munch munch*
I think part of the genericness of it, too, is that it tends to be the same questions asked over and over again, just by different authors. Really, new authors do run into the same issues continually.
4648950
Well, keep in mind the self promotion rule used to just say "no self promotion". These days, it says this:
I wanted to make sure it was understood that you can post links. Of course, mature links is a different matter. (I should probably update things to allow mature embeds...)
--Sweetie Belle
4648950
Maybe I shouldn't have brought up TWG. It was where I last saw what I wanted to talk about, but I don't think the problem has much of anything to do with the group itself. It was more the closest amateur writing forum where people ask questions, and my general frustration was with how I see writing questions answered, blogged about, and otherwise discussed in general.
I do agree with your point that part of the underlying problem is a lack of context, though. Any time someone blogs or asks/answers a writing question outside of a 1 on 1 editing situation, there is going to be a lack of context, and in the lack of context all we can really do is provide abstractions. But then if you go and pull out what you wrote in your editing session there's so much context that it might not be useful to many people other than the author-editor. Saying things about words is hard
4648982
I don't know if I've seen that many repeats lately. It seems like back in 2011ish the forums were all abuzz about people asking all kinds of things about what they need to avoid to the point it wore me out. Nowadays I can't really recall too much that gets repeated that often. Granted, traffic is down in general and we aren't a new fandom, so maybe all the newbies have found a different point of entrance and are bugging that fandom for all the things they shouldn't be doing.
On further reflection, I'm not sure if repeats are really a contributing factor to genericness. If we got the questions over and over, wouldn't we have a standard specific answer or be able to ask the right questions to sort people out in short order? Now newbies not knowing how to ask the right question might play a part, I could see that.
4649097
I'll admit I'm kinda likely to jump in if I see a discussion on TWG, too, as both an admin of the group and also the one who did the last rewrite of the rules.
I also end up in a silly spot of referring the self promotions over to the shameless self-promotion bureau, which I also run, then referring things that aren't promotions back.
And then there's the TWG Discord group, in which self promotion actually is allowed. It's not the most active, but I do see fanfics posted there for review. I do agree that sometimes the questions that are asked don't really give you enough information, and seeing an example helps. Sometimes just popping into their user page and looking through their story list helps, really.
Well, there is a third person vs. first person thread going, and there was one on Mary Sues not that long ago. I could be overestimating how often they happen, tho'.
Technically there actually is a stickied list of old discussions that often were questions that get asked often. I don't think it gets paid attention to much, tho'. I recreated it, because before it was by Cosmic Afro, and he's not exactly around to modify it.
--Sweetie Belle
The writing advice I've found most useful is less about how to write, and more about how to think about writing. For example, this blog doesn't say how to write horror, but instead describes tools for thinking about it. If, then, I decide to write it, I'll be better equipped to figure out the best way to evoke the emotions I'm targeting.
As for specific stories, yes, I think it very much does depend. Often, I feel like giving feedback (this bit made me feel X, and here's why...) is more useful to a writer than trying to give critique... but that may well be because I don't often trust myself to actually understand what the author's going for, at least not without them telling me.
4649179
Wait, how does one do the thing where the quoted person's name appears in the quote boxes? This is the greatest thing in recent memory.
Without somepony to keep the writing things in TWG and the AppleDash in the AppleDash group, how are specific groups supposed to exist at all? The shuffled posters should count themselves lucky you take the time to shuffle things to the right group instead of just deleting them outright.
4649841
You do it like this:
[quote=Name]The Quote[/quote]If you look through the new site BBCode guide, it has most of the new stuff you can do in BBCode since the site update in it. I particularly like how you can put fimfiction stories in embed tags and do this:
- MLP: FiM
- Anthology
A small collection of drabbles, flash fics, and short stories.What's especially neat there is that if the story is mature rated and somepony that doesn't have mature on looks at it, they'dd just see a message about mature content being hidden instead of the embed.
Yeah, group purposes would get all muddled, and I always figure that the group rules should be keeping things a nice place for whatever the purpose of the group is for members. Keeping things on topic means the original purpose of the group doesn't get lost.
I do tend more towards locking things then actually deleting them, though I will totally delete spoiler threads sometimes if the poster isn't fixing them in a timely manner when I ask them to. (Namely, I don't want spoilers in the title of the thread, or in the main body of the first post without spoiler tags...)
--Sweetie Belle