Do you have an advice for an aspiring writer?
If youâre aspiring to be a published author, Iâm not the person to ask. Iâve been published very rarely, in extremely limited circulations of zines and low-budget university papers, and never for writing fiction.Â
If you mean just that youâd like general advice on things I learned the hard way through ten million drafts until I was actually satisfied with something I wrote, then, sure. Plenty.
To begin with, I think the best advice is to take writing advice with a grain of salt, actually. There are a lot of blogs and forums and stuff, but in my experience a lot of writing advice is produced specifically to mystify and obfuscate the writing process so that âwritersâ can maintain elitist status. Sometimes their advice is interesting, but a lot of it is also smug self-aggrandizing nonsense. With that said, some of what follows is certain to be smug self-aggrandizing nonsense and you should take it with a grain of salt.Â
Technical proficiency: You are communicating a story. Some forms of grammar and punctuation are, tragically, indispensable to that. Full sentences, full stops, commas and apostrophes do tend to contribute to othersâ understanding of your writing. This may seem obvious, but itâs worth thinking about how English exists in heaps of different dialects with conflicting conventions, so you do have to pay attention to the ways you use it when youâre trying to communicate a story. This all seems very obvious, no doubt, but hereâs the really cool bit: you can break these rules whenever it works best for you. Dialogue? Almost never has proper sentence structure or grammar. Informal first-person storytelling? Sentence fragments! Everywhere! You see what I mean? Technical proficiency and clarity of expression are important but they do not, necessarily, have to overshadow style and expression; they serve a purpose and as long as that purpose is fulfilled you can do whatever the hell you want.Â
The dubious likelihood and value of originality: Tropes and cliches are amazing fun to mess around with, play straight, mix up or subvert completely. Derivative is not necessarily bad. Some amazing stories are pretty damned derivative. In the west, people steal from Shakespeare and the Bible all the time, for example. And those two are themselves both derivative in their ways, although itâs somewhat harder to tell were certain ideas have come from because theyâve been cobbled together in a pre-modern-literacy society from a number of different superstitious and mythological sources and so forth. The point Iâm making is: there is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in writing something that is not perfectly original. Itâs never going to be, anyway: youâre formed by the same society that produced these stories and I have no idea what people are expecting when they ask for âoriginalityâ. Pull ideas from everything, hammer them together, and climb to the top of your patchwork mountain to survey the possibilities. (This is not, of course, an endorsement of actual direct plagiarism. Nah, son.)
Characters: Hurt them. Instinct is to cosset your favourite babies and make them awesome and give them awesome things and â shh. Stop. Make them struggle. Rewards are more satisfying when the character has to sweat and bleed and maybe lose a limb or two to get them. I donât think I can stress this enough, really. Make them hurt.
Writing from experience: Write what you know is a common maxim that I thinkâs vastly misapplied. People seem to think it means that you should write stories from direct and specific experiences. An example of that would be: âYouâre a university student? Write about university life!â And mostly thatâs pretty silly. Can you imagine how very many stories would exist about boring office jobs? Yeah. Yeah. I think thereâs a better, less literal, way to interpret that: Write with reference to your own experiences, rather than literally of your own experiences. For example, if youâre writing about somebody under attack, think about occasions upon which youâve experienced the same broad emotional spectrum of panic, danger and fear â been in an accident where you got hurt? Had one of those awful street-crossing moments when you were nearly hit by a car? Fallen off something high? That immediate sense of danger and panic is going to be really useful to you in explaining how your character under attack feels. Go back there. What was it like? Canât remember all of it? A bit blurry? Good â it was confusing. Started shaking? Good â adrenalin does that. Seemed fine until you had time to think about it and then flipped? Great â thatâs psychological shock. And so on. Tug on your own feelings and responses and extrapolate from them.
Feedback: people are going to give you conflicting feedback and they are going to give it to you while being enormous entitled dicks. You donât necessarily need very thick skin, but you might need to determine which feedback you accept and which you think is a pile of rotting testicles. Itâs possible that you could only accept feedback from readers whose writing you admire, those you know personally, or those with whom you share tastes and opinions more generally. Itâs very, very important to remember that people want very different things from stories and what you want may not be what a lot of your readers want. This is not your fault and it is not your problem. Your writing cannot be everything to everybody.
Donât let anybody tell you what, why, or how, to write:Â Ultimately, just remember that these are words you made, a story you wrote, a thing that came from you and filtered through to other people through you. This is your space. Itâs your thing. Accepting or seeking out advice is one thing, but I think that when critique comes in, you definitely have to stand tall or youâre gonna get walked all over. It feels, and often seems to outsiders, very arrogant â who are you to reject other peopleâs well-meant criticism of your work? (Especially if you end up writing fanfiction and canât be seen as the final arbiter of character decisions and whatâs canon âfactâ.) Well, youâre the writer. Itâs yours. You made it. Itâs your writing. Itâs your decision. Itâs hard work and it can be tremendously frustrating sometimes. But when you have written something, it is in your voice. Donât apologise. You have no need to. Donât retreat. Â Nail your goddamn colours to the mast.Â
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