"Why Do You Choose To Be So Angry?": Unhelpful Helpers Harm · 5:54pm Dec 9th, 2017
Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
—Eugene Ionesco
So, for the past year, I’ve been an active member of FimFiction’s “Writing Help”. Today I leave in frustration and anger after an almost 12 month slow descent into madness. I used to be there because I genuinely enjoyed helping people, but over time it became more and more necessary to become a Gordon Ramsey figure, an angry bitter bastard, that I didn’t enjoy being but found it necessary to be. Now? Now I spend more of my time in there being abjectly furious than ever truly helping anyone, and any time I feel like I’ve accomplished anything is like a gasp of air to a drowning man.
Really, it was just time for me to get out of the pool.
This is largely about two things; Crafting a community and culture, and what it actually means to be a writer and to give advice.
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.
— Terry Pratchett
So first of all, why the descent into anger and mad madness for me? This one’s fairly easy to answer; Writing Help was largely populated by writers who didn’t or couldn’t write. There was a tendency among the people who gave advice to not know a single goddamn thing they were talking about. However, because they wrote a thing once, or are trying to write a thing now, they fashion themselves as writers.
This meant that the advice I was competing against was often catastrophically bad, or made from a place of total ignorance. Any attempts to emphasize this was met with backlash from the other people speaking from a place of utter ignorance as ‘elitism’, a cardinal sin.
You see, there is this mistaken notion in the heads of many people that being able to write makes you a Writer. It is far easier to give writing advice to those who know less than you than it is to actually write, though. Doing so can give you a false feeling of legitimacy as being a Writer with a big capital W.
Here is how I identify them at a glance; They ask where you get your ideas from, they ask what makes for good inspiration, they endlessly complain about not feeling inspired enough to write today. When they, in turn, ask for advice, what they are asking for is reassurance; any advice you do give is ignored, or taken as a personal insult.
Everyone, even the best, is guilty of at least some of this, some of the time. But it takes a special kind of person to be guilty of most of this, most of the time. In short, they're people who like the idea of writing more than accept the reality of it.
To someone who knows nothing, who is truly new to the craft, there is no way to tell who’s truly experienced from the advice they give. They have no frame of reference. So they are presented with two bits of advice; the sincerely ignorant, and the actually-useful.
I hesitate to call it the ‘truth’ or the ‘correct’ advice. Every author does work differently, writes differently, etc. Two very competent authors will completely disagree sometimes, to the point of mutual exclusivity. That is not what I’m talking about here.
The advice the sincerely ignorant give is often in the form of externalized reassurances; It is the same justifications they give themselves. By treating it as advice, it gives to them a legitimacy for their actions, and they truly believes it's helpful.
It doesn’t. And, to the new writer, those reassurances sound far more appealing than the actually-useful does. That’s the risk and trap for them.
Sometimes, out of frustration when I saw this happening, I’d link the offending user’s story page and point to it. This was seen as bullying, obviously. But, I’m sorry, but how else am I going to emphasize why I find a user’s writing advice extremely problematic if I can’t point to their writing? What does it say about that writer if showing people the things they've written is seen as a cruelty?
It seems anyone who writes is a writer. Except they’re not. It isn’t enough to want to write. If you want to be the kind of writer who gives advice, write. Study. Apply it in practice.
You are not the writer you hold yourself in your head to be, if only you could just get your ideas onto the page. You are only the words that are on the page. If you don’t like how those words represent you, if you don’t think they’re a fair representation of you, then the only one who has done you an injustice is yourself.
I don’t blame them, necessarily, for this. Which is to say, I absolutely do blame them, but I don’t think the problem would be so oppressive if it weren’t for bad moderation, and a bad environment which encourages this behaviour. This is also criticism I have laid at the feet of the WriteOff before, so it’s not new.
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Every room ends up cultivating an atmosphere. Every group of people is shaped not just by the people in it, but the behaviours it incentivizes and encourages. Just like you are not the same person when you talk to your mother as you are to your lover (or, at least, god I hope not), it is not just a factor of the people themselves in that room that influences behaviour.
Moderation, room policy and enforcement do a lot to shape a room, and in Writer’s Help there simply wasn’t any. No standards were set, no threshold, and no penalization. Truth be told, most of the times mods simply do not look at the Discord, except for some recent additions. And when they do, their actions are purely restricted to punishing only the most egregious offenses.
This creates a problem of incentives. The people most likely to stick around are the people most likely to enjoy giving advice, with no meaningful function of quality influencing that outcome. In short, they’re enforcing an upper limit of bad behaviour without trying to cultivate a minimum bounds of good.
Usually, this is done in the pursuit of creating an environment of inclusivity, a noble goal. Let’s, however, take antisocial behaviour as a clearer example. Antisocial behaviour rarely gets influenced by more subtle social policing. Not never, but rarely. If moderation doesn’t take the form of more active deterrents, you either get:
a) Users resorting to vigilante social policing, which creates more fights and conflict, which drives your better or more moderate members from the environment or
b) Users wishing to avoid conflict and the behaviour, and will be driven from the room.
This happens slowly at first, depending on your tolerance threshold and quantity of antisocial users. However, over time, you’ll see a higher proportion of users be those who either tolerate or encourage those antisocial tendencies, and a lower proportion of your more moderate or enjoyable members. And as the latter leaves for greener pastures, then the incentives to stay become less and less for all but the problem members.
I’m absolutely certain most of you reading this will have seen this in some form or another, if you don’t have a mod team willing to enforce Rule #0, which is to police social rules that aren’t explicitly written.
Going back to an advice channel, antisocial behaviour isn’t the only deterrent. When there is a critical mass of unpoliced amateurs, you’ll find that the more qualified advice-givers are driven from the room for a very simple reason; They spend more time explaining why the competing advice is bad, harmful, or detrimental as opposed to being able to just help people.
That’s not worth the effort, to many. Especially when you’re outgunned by advice that sounds nicer -- “Just write what you want, and don’t listen to what anyone else says!” being the ur example[1] -- and thus is more appealing to listen to than advice tailored to guide improvement, which usually sucks. Admitting you can be better means admitting you’re probably worse now, which sucks the big one, after all.
So the people who are more qualified to give advice stop coming back. Their incentive - to want to give advice - is undercut heavily by the uphill battle. The people giving bad advice are not undercut in any way because the less competition they get, the more they are validating themselves as writers. It’s easier than having to publish anything, and they can feel like they’re a Good Writer when they can’t hit the feature box; It’s not their fault, look at how appreciated their expertise is, here, to someone who knows less than they do?
So I had to get angrier, and more forceful, as time went on about the sheer depth of the problem. The only reason I stayed doing that was, largely, because the idea rather pained me of leaving new writers to that environment without a dissenting voice, but I don't like having to be that person or how being that person makes me feel and act.
It’s a bottom-up problem of ideology, and a top-down problem of cultivation, and that’s why I’m leaving.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
—Harlan Ellison
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
—John Irving
Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
—Neil Gaiman
[1] This is not to say that this can’t be good advice, situationally. A lot of authors do just need permission to write what they want, especially those plagued by anxiety issues. However, if you are coming for advice on how to write well, or better, then knowing how and why to use concepts is important, and being told why not to use a concept can be extremely important. Red and black alicorn self-inserts as a first fic, f’r instance.
See the Hazardous Materials blog.
You know what? You're... right. I've just been in #writing-help being a bit of a meme-y jerk this morning because when I try to give actual advice, people don't listen. And when I'm a twerp, people don't listen, either. It's an actual echo chamber where people legitimately interrupt conversations to be upset that their question was ignored (even when it was actually addressed, but it wasn't the answer they wanted), talk over one another, and more often than not give bad or thoughtless advice. It is actually exhausting to care, and a waste of time to not.
I'll do myself a favor and follow in your precious footsteps.
4744877
I'm going to miss shitposting there with you, but I respect your decision.
I've had some good times in that server, so I'll stick it out for a bit longer. There's still good people there, and sometimes we can have good conversations, even if those times are farther apart these days.
I mean, I'm glad for you, I guess? It's been fun getting to know you a little better there, but I really did not enjoy your rage, for either your sake or the hopefuls it was directed at.
I do have to disagree with this premise. It was not necessary at all.
There, there let it all out. Got to speak up or else you bottle it all up and then people get wrong idea that you are an angry person and not just someone tired of repeating cycle of stupidity. You are a rock and stupidity is river and slowly but steadily you are affected a lot by it. Good thing you got away, sounds like you were trying to push a boulder uphill except there were people pushing boulder down on you.
But I am curious about a different thing. Since well you do actually like helping others do you then plan to do it in some other way? There are lot of writers are out there trying to be Writers. And some of us are more like writers really.
4744886
Sometimes people need to be told they have bad ideas. More often, people giving bad advice need to be told to stop, quickly, before they do more harm. If a doctor curses at a nurse and yells at her because she's giving the wrong medicine, it isn't the doctor who is at fault.
Well, I got told that I'm way below the level of the people on writing-help.
Sounded like as good a reason as any to leave. 👍
4744886
It was the only thing that worked for the longest time. And then it stopped working, and escalating further didn't help. And alternative, more helpful people -- see Crystal and Undome above, Aragon elsewhere -- have the same problems, and have stopped trying a lot of the time as a result, or simply can't be in the server for prolonged periods of time.
So you're right. By the time you got there, it was unnecessary and didn't help at all, even though I was still doing it. Which is a big factor in why I'm leaving.
4744889
There is the School for New Writers discord. That actually has a pretty great place for writing help. Hell, if it could teach Bloons3 to write better, I think it has merit.
4744889
I got my own server for that, and ideally I will be trying to write more blogs like Hazardous Materials, Sadness isn't Sad, and the one I did on how to balance rewards and victories in horror writing.
Right now I've got stuff on why Batman is an edgy Mary Sue, but why he's still compelling, my own take on Alien Brain Worm Shipping in an echo of Chuck Finley, memes and referential humour, how a story can last as long as it can reasonably escalate, pants-writing vs plan-writing and stuff on the different kinds of horror and why they work.
The FIMfiction Discord is rather laid back, for better or worse. The primary goal of the server, not just the writing help channel, is to give FIMficers somewhere to socialize. It's nowhere near as strict as the site. It's rather loose on rules unless they're blatantly violated, moderation is kept to minimum and only really applied when there are specific mentions to mods. Which more times than not, discourages mods from doing anything, because so frequently we get mod pings, jostling everyone to the cry for help only to find out the person blinked for too long, and got scared of the dark. Mod activity is fairly low, yeah.
Then again, quality of advice is not something we police. However, from when I was more active in the chat, probably five plus months ago, I can say yeah, advice, in general, was not very good. You could easily identify who knew what they were talking about, and who was asking for reassurance versus advice. To me, I don't really understand why people go to Writing-Help, because it's just not for me. If I were seeking advice, I'd go to someone who I know is very talented, and apt in their advice and ask them directly. Ask a couple people that meet those standards. Writing help isn't really a writing help channel. If I need psychiatric help I go to a licensed psychiatrist. If I want to play basketball, I go play with a team, not with a bunch of people bricking up shots at a local park. Similarly, if I need writing help, I go talk to a writer who I respect, admire or at the very minimum can appreciate their ability. Writing help is just sort of a channel for "writers" to have their pow-wow, talk about certain ideas and "help" people, like the writer who goes down to Starbucks, stares at a blank word document for ten minutes, flips to facebooks then turns to socializing with other patrons in the coffee shop. They're "writing." It's kind of like going through the motions with not really doing anything. As you said, taking whatever sounds best, talking about "writing," joking it up, going through the whole process without moving an inch forward.
Anyways, I need to get back to studying for my history exam, but found this interesting enough to comment.
I'm 100% for encouraging someone who's product is bad that just loves doing what they're doing. I think the most important thing to everything you do is loving it. However. If someone asks for help, I try to evaluate how they respond to others before I jump in; it gives some perspective on what they're really looking for.
Ciao, mon cher amigo
4744893
I hope you have a much-needed quality of life improvement. Save some money on tea, eh?
I joined your server to hopefully keep in touch a bit, and get a good #writing-help experience.
4744895
Oh they are alive on Discord. Thought it was a relic of bygone era since there haven't been new lessons in quite some time.
4744896
Those all sound like fun blogs. Will ready my popcorn. For some reason I'm very interested in what you have to say about referential humor and memes, even though I think most will agree that Batman and Brain Worms are much cooler topics.
I almost never give advice simply because time and time again when I've put actual work into reading a story and fashioning real advice for it, the reaction I get proves that they didn't want advice, they wanted to already be right. I've never even been able to tolerate being in one of those "for new writers" help groups in the first place.
So I feel your pain, in a slightly different way.
Also,
I am a writer because I literally can't stop writing. I have had days where I genuinely wanted to cut the need to write out of my head and STOP. And I can't. The writing happens. It just... happens. It's happened since I was six years old. Writing is a disease for which there may be no cure.
I'm not sure you remember this, Numbers, but for what it's worth, you gave me some awesome criticism and feedback for a longform story idea I had at some point either earlier this year or late last year, and it's helped my writing process of other stories significantly. Thanks for what you said then, and I'm sorry with what you've been dealing with now.
At the risk of sounding narcissistic, I'd just like to say your advice did, in fact, help me.
Reading The Sense of Style has me thinking more clearly in the construction in prose, something I'm still wobbly in, but I can see the progression of it being written from someone in the fifth grade to that of someone in the eighth. Terry Pratchett has also broken what my expectations of what prose is supposed to be—as well as causing me to howl in laughter despite being in a library.
I can't claim to be good—it's only something I can aspire to. I'm a blue-collar worker when it comes to art, man, so all I can do is keep writing and keep reading. Hope you can exculpate the sense that your work wasn't in vain, or, who knows, maybe I've failed to learn anything.
Oh well. Warm greetings from Canada!
4744905
I'm sincerely glad it helped.
EDIT: 4744907 as well, you posted while I was typing so I missed it, but it was sincerely appreciated.
I use a different approach. I read, and comment. If I see a writer that has potential, but falls short on some point, I'll offer critique. If that goes well, then I do one on one to work with the writer to not change their style, but to improve the style they have. I can well understand the frustration of group help, when each helper has their own view, which may or may not share in the writer's view.
I find no fimfiction group called "Writing Help." I see mentions of Discord, but also mentions of "posting", which I thought you couldn't do on Discord, as it's all chat. ?
Hah! Yes.
But I think there are two contributing factors here:
1. Text chat is hell. It attracts people with short attention spans and a love of instant gratification, and discourages people who like to think things through. I can't give writing advice interactively; I need time to think about it, like a day. The bad advice that gets repeated the most, OTOH, is brief, sounds witty, and is perfectly suited to chat. Chat is the wrong medium for writing advice unless everybody in the room already read the story in question before the chat.
2. You, MrNumbers, sometimes write angry posts about people who are doing things wrong. No big deal; I do the same thing. But you might have more difficulty giving advice to beginners than someone like bookplayer or Skywriter, who don't seem to ever get angry.
4744904
That's the usual result, but you can use brutal filtering strategies to reduce the chance of that happening. If somebody I don't know who hasn't made any comments I've seen and hasn't written more than 0 to 2 stories sends me a PM, asking for "advice", and it's phrased in the form "This other person says I should do X, but I want to do Y; what do you think?", don't go there. Strangers seeking you out for advice are likely to act as you described.
But I did a thing back in, maybe, 2014, where for Christmas I offered to do a brief critique of up to the first 2000 words or so of one story by any of my watchers who asked. I wrote a lot of mini-critiques; it took months.
A) I will never do that again, and
B) I don't remember anybody responding badly.
4744944
#writing-help is a text chat channel on FIMFic's Discord server.
4744944
Discord has voice chat, but it also allows you to post text, and IIRC works basically like IRC.
Numbers is specifically talking about the official fimfiction Discord server, which has a text-chat channel called writing-help within it.
So you were becoming MacGuffin, the Alec Baldwin character in that scene from Glengarry, Glen Ross. You know: "PUT. THE COFFEE. DOWN."
All the more so since I think Mamet wrote that scene for the movie (It wasn't in the play) to say all the things he couldn't say in all those writing workshops he did in prestigious small liberal-arts colleges all over the country.
Because think about it: here are a bunch of kids with no life-experience other than growing up rich and privileged enough to be sent to a prestigious small liberal-arts college. And they're the kinds of kids who were dutiful and obedient and did all their homework and pleased their elders. That's how you get into a writing workshop taught by the famous David Mamet.
And these kids think their dutifulness and their obedience and their servility make what they write worthy of serious attention from a writer who is none of those things. And that writer has to be patient and polite and review these endless dull derivative works and dispense technical advice about pacing and blocking and script format.
It's not hard to imagine him thinking all the while, "A" student? I don't give a shit. Teacher's pet? Fuck you, stay after class and clap erasers. Because only ONE THING COUNTS IN THIS LIFE: Get them to SIT in the SEATS in the THEATER. They're sitting out there, WAITING to give you their attention.
Are you gonna take it?
But MacGuffin is a sadist, and you're not. MacGuffin may be doing his job, he may be telling certain hard truths about work and life, but he does these things in a way that inflicts inordinate pain and he enjoys it. You don't. No matter how angry you may get you won't be a sadist.
You quit that scene so you wouldn't have to play that character. That's worth some applause.
Make your own writing advice group with blackjack and hookers?
I am compelled to link this presentation by Mr Paul Harrell. Although it is not about writing, I find that the advice contained therein is nonetheless useful when applied to different areas of life. I think it reflects many of the same things that you experienced in Writing Help.
Presenting Mr Paul Harrell in "How to spot a fake expert:"
It suddenly occured to me how odd it is that the art channel is just called "art". It isn't "art-help". I can't imagine that truncating writing-help's title down to "writing" would solve anything, but I'd be interested in the experiment.
4745028
Absolutely fantastic watch, yeah, I can immediately think of parallels to this that apply.
4745038
I will admit I haven't ever spent any length of time in Writing Help, but this blog has actually gotten me interested in what people who do use it think it's about. About half of all reality is perception, after all (note: this may not be true).
I only dropped in a half-dozen times into the channel and thought it had some good advice, but that was from people I knew were good writers. I think I caught one instance of you being angry and at another time one instance of you giving good advice. I'm sorry to hear that I wasn't able to see the place when it was more suited to actually giving advice.
I never actually noticed. I hope I never did anything like that.