I dislike a lot of writing advice posts that start with “DON’T DO THIS IF YOU WANT TO BE A SUCCESS” because
I’m pretty certain at some point someone told Tolkien no one wants to
read about the origin of a language he just invented and also “wtf is a
hobbit? Can’t the elves at least have some resemblance to their original
mythos?* Ugh fine…”
I’m not sure which blogs you are following, but I can guess at some of their “helpful tips and advice” based purely on what I have seen at a glance. Funnily enough most of them are my pet peeves, both as a writer and an editor, so if you’ll indulge me, lets go on a little ramble, anon.
“Editors hate Prologues and will dismiss you if you have one!”—
only the shitty ones do this. The ones doing their job will tell you
whether or not the prologue is in fitting with your genre style (yes
there are styles withing genres *inception foghorn*) or whether you’re
giving away too much foreshadowing and character back story which might
be better explored throughout the rest of the narrative as a means of
garnering depth and substance. Sometimes the prologue isn’t necessary at
all, sometimes it can easily be made into chapter one, and sometimes it
can be edited out entirely. Figuring this out is part of the editor’s
job. You are not writing to appeal to the personal likes of the Editor,
you are writing to tell a story which the editor will then hack apart to
find the backbone of and say “here, here is what we need more of”.
“Editors hate Epilogues!” — see the above.
“Be original, no one wants the same story over and over!” —
other than creating a flamethrower guitar, humanity has remained pretty
much constant in it’s use of fire. Heat things, cook things, destroy
things. We’re a simple bunch, us homo sapiens. We like our fire and we
like it hot, and occasionally there might be a flamethrower guitar
thrown into the mix which sets out little brains to buzzing. But mostly
we’ll be happy in the morning if we can use it to cook bacon with and
possibly set fire to the neighboring campsite. That’s why religion is so
successful. It tells the same story over and over, validating our
existence, our tragedies and our hope. Which is not to say be bland and
never try to be experimental or creative. Instead lets agree to use the
word “interesting” rather than “original”. By this point fire has been
invented and it’s not going anywhere, the original concept idea of fire
is very much rooted in human psyche ever since cave people
figured it out and quite possibly thought they’d captured something
wild. (And it’s that little bit of imagination that makes humans so very
special, it’s the same part of us that names stuffed animals and
worries about hurting their feelings. We’re great at inflicting the
human condition onto perfectly undeserving inanimate objects.)
Screw “original”—lets be the ones who make things interesting.
Throw some napalm into the mix, or find a way to make fire dance over
ice, take the fire and go to the moon if you want to. Just because
something has already been done, doesn’t mean you can’t do it over and
over again in interesting ways. If that was the case we’d have
neither faith nor human ingenuity and we’d still be banging rocks
together and peeling bananas with our toes.
“Editors make a decision based on the first three sentences!” They
might do this, but chances are it’s the editor’s assistant who has just
read the exact same opening sequence written by ten different people
and hopes to spare the sanity of the publisher who is going to sign off
on authorizing your book from subjecting them to one more “she was an
average looking girl with luxurious blonde hair and blue eyes the color
of deep water, but totally average…so average she’d never get a
boyfriend…” (You cannot write an original romance novel. Sex is older
than fire and romance probably just as much so from the first moment
Grog realized this plant smelled nice and gave it to Grognita and she
also thought it smelt nice and let Grog put his feet under the stone
table in the cave. You can however write an interesting one that does
more than follow “{girl with self confidence issues} + {young
interesting man with a dark history and a secret need to be coddled}
meet in unlikely but totally likely circumstances, confusion and
emotions ensue” equation. Flip the table, have a love triangle that
turns into a happy polyamorous fun time for all without one of them
being killed off and leaving the ‘true’ pairing to survive. (I once
edited a book that did that, the words “our true love can finally
flourish” made me vomit in my mouth).)
It’s true, you need to
be interesting and engaging from the start to get the attention of your
intended audience. But what’s more important is your cover letter
detailing the summary of your book, whether you intend it to be a
dark fantasy or a rip roaring comedy or something in between. It’s the
cover letter that gets read before your manuscript is ever even
downloaded. It’s also the promise of future revenue. You want this book
to be part of a trilogy? Tell them that, and tell them you have rough
drafts planned for those books. Even if they’re only rough drafts on the
back of napkins, it’s still technically true. Which is the sum and all
of being an author, you’re telling fiction to tell truths, and any
editor worth their salt knows this. Side-note to this section as well,
most editing companies will dismiss unsolicited manuscripts right off
the bat. It has nothing to do with your first three sentences, and
everything to do with needing a representative who has a good reputation
to stand up, wave a flag and say “hey, this isn’t garbage!” Get an
agent, find one who specializes in what you want to write, chances are
they already know which publishing houses to send your stuff to.
“Readers hate that!”— Oh
thank god, I’m so glad someone finally knows what every single human
being on the planet wants to read, I’m…oh you have no idea what a
relief this is, finally I can stop writing what I wanted to write and
write one specific trope for the rest of my life, thank you, thank you. /scathing sarcasm (Unless
you’re killing off the third character in your romance book to teach a
moral story about true love, in which case go fuck yourself, readers
really do hate that.)
“Don’t worry about spelling and grammar, that’s what editors are for :) it’s content not quality :)” —
if you listen really closely you an hear the sound of my sanity
shrieking through the void of editorial hell. If someone hands you a bag
full of shit, regardless of how great the bag itself is, it’s still a bag of shit. Editors don’t expect you to have gotten everything right by yourself, that
is why they are there, for when you’ve read your own book so many times
you no longer catch the subtle things like “thought” and “though” or
you’ve given up on using comas and resorted to the em dash out of
mad desperation. I once received a copy to line edit which was so riddled
with spelling mistakes I had literally no idea what was going on. The
response from the author was “isn’t that you’re job? to figure that
out?” (complete with spelling mistakes) to which I replied, “no, I am
here to take a walk through your garden of words and point out where the
roots are being strangled and the pond might need some cleaning out”.
Then added on to myself, “not run screaming madly through a jungle being
pursued by hornet-bears with a suicidal grasp of sentence structure.”
Editors
are not expecting perfection, but they do expect some form of
competency that implies sentience beyond a loaf of moldy bread. The
majority of good storytelling comes from the actual words, not the idea. To suggest otherwise is like expecting an operatic masterpiece to sound good whilst being
sung by a tone deaf goat. So try your hardest,
cross your t’s and dot your i’s. It helps more than you’d think.
“No one likes a Mary Sue”—
DC comics and Batman would like to disagree with you, but what is
really being said here is “no one likes a female hero” which is blatant
bullshit. You got yourself a bad ass Amazonian queen who also likes to
embroider? Cool, go for it. Male heroes have never had to explain their
brilliance. Neither should female. Anyone that tries to put your writing
down because the women seem “too over powered” aren’t the kind of
people you want to be dealing with.
“You should only ever write what you know.”—
Whenever I read advice like this I can’t help but feel like Mary
Shelley had some fucking weird anatomy classes I never got at school,
and that I’d like to try whatever Tolkien was having. Just long enough
to find the Shire and be among people of my own size.
Yes,
writing from what you know sounds like good advice, but only so far as
you take it metaphorically as well as literally (Like a sort of zen).
Otherwise dragons could never be slain and the stars would go untouched. I
understand why it gets said, I really do. No one wants to read more
“noble colonists meet noble savages and it was a grand old party and
nothing bad happened ever”(—every history book ever written). Similarly no
one wants to read more fiction appropriated by others in order to claim
diversity. It is not the place of a cis straight person to represent
the LGBTA community in order to claim progressive thinking on their part. It’s why having cis people portraying trans people goes beyond problematic and into the realms of “people are all different, an idiots guide to using your brain”. By all means we should be allies and make all
efforts to be diverse in our work, but we should not seek to take their
stories from them when there are so many creators from the LGBTA
community who go ignored in favor of mainstream medium, and who would give a far
more accurate account and portrayal of their stories. The same goes for
race. In that instance, write what you know is applicable. Otherwise,
feel free to frolic with imagination and try not to tread on any toes
too much. Common sense and decency will guide you better than any magic
star.
“You should always try to impart meaning”— this is
one of the staple quotes thrown about by literary snobs. “Impart
meaning” as though everything you do will somehow shake the foundations
of humanity, rather than slide off the side with nary a wobble on the
Richter scale. What they really mean in that instance is “beat people
over the head with morals and show how witty you are by making these
observations” when what a really talented writer ought to be able to do,
is slip them in under the radar and make the reader’s brain go “ping”
through the subtle art of story manipulation. Tolkien wasn’t writing
about the grandeur of war and kings, or even that good and evil is
inherent. He was writing about the horrors of war, and that even the
sweetest most lovable creatures (hobbits, fyi, who party and drink and
eat and fulfill the role of little children in all their innocence) can
be corrupted by the greed of others and that corruption can span across
the centuries to hurt the ones you love so you best do something about
it now or else.
It was about love, and wanting to heal
people. It was about understanding that if you have to fight, do it to
defend the people you love. Power and influence fade, but somewhere
where the hills are green and the sky is bright, someone is watching for
you, so come home. If you missed all that I suggest you go back
and read it all again. And again. And every time you do I bet you’ll
find new meaning. Because that’s what good writers do. By all means
impart meaning, but don’t imagine it has to be something great. It can
be about the sum of humanity if you want it, but it can also be little
things, like not treading on ants or that it’s okay to cry. You’re not
writing to make people think you’re a genius, or if you are, you’re
already writing for all the wrong reasons and I’m afraid there’s nothing
more I can help you with.
“If you’re not having fun it’s not worth it”— This
is the advice given by hobbyists who like to tell people they write but
what they really mean is “I like the thought of it but it’s too much
like hard work, but I do have clever ideas…” and I have just one thing to say to them. Buuuuuuuullshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
Writing
is hard. It is incredibly hard. It’s like trying to pin down the inside
of your brain to a storyboard and not lobotomize yourself at the same
time. Writing is hard and there are times when you will hate it.
There will also be times when the story carries you and it’s immensely
fun to ride those waves of heady creating. But behind that wave is
invariably a tsunami of self doubt, followed by a drought of ideas, and
you’ll lie dehydrated in the tundra of your own work, wondering what
ever possessed you to grab your raft and try to make it upstream without
a paddle. That doesn’t mean you should give up however. What it means
is you pick yourself up, dust yourself down, find a bloody great big
stick and you try again. If you do it for long enough you’ll
eventually find you can make your own waves. The act of writing is like a
habit. If you do it long enough, eventually it’ll become second nature,
and more than that, a craving. It’s my one true vice and like a
vice, some days it will tear me apart. On other days however, I get to
walk with angels. It’s entirely worth it.
So you want my definitive advice about writing and what you should do?
Don’t give up. Do the thing.
(*Fun fact, elves are ungodly vicious bastards, and it wasn’t until about the 19th century that they became less terrifying and more cute and benign. Funny that.)