Now, a bit back I saw someone complaining about a site called the Mythcreants, which seems to largely be a writing advice column / blog-type-thing. Now, I try not to badmouth someone without at least giving them a fair shake, and I checked out their site. I think there's an attempt to do some good work here, but I also think what's presented is vastly incomplete and often odd. The problem with writing advice is that it's sort of like financial advice or really any sort of advice - it can easily do more harm than good if delivered incorrectly, and broad generalizations and "musts" and "shall nots" are often wildly unhelpful when making contact with reality. Mythcreants often runs afoul of this, and I kind of wanted to just dissect that for a bit.
The first thing that I feel like is noticeable is their rather extensive Q&A column. I think in terms of advice, Q&A columns are perhaps some of the best ways to dispense it because it's most often someone with a specific problem who comes to Q&A for a solution to that problem, making the diagnosis and subsequent advice usually highly specific and applicable for that specific person, and more broadly applicable once you start spiraling the ideas from that specific application out. Now, the selection of these questions is... sort of weird? Some of them, certainly, are great choices. For example, one person asked "How can I spot bad faith critiques?" That's a great question for a beginning writer or even someone more experienced who feels like they're being harangued a bit too much. No further notes. Others, however, feel... listen, I know I just said Q&A is great because it's specific, but these are too specific or so simplistic that it feels awkward. A lot of the questions are great big "cans" - can I do this, or can I do that, which to me feels like a sign that a lot of these questions are coming in from novice writers who feel like they still need to ask someone for permission to do something. And that's not an insult to them - I was there, once upon a time - but one of the truly wonderful things about writing is realizing that you're very free with it, that you "can" do anything so long as you feel it is a satisfying way to write that resonates with you and your audience.
Many are also "cans" about social impact around marginalized groups - certainly great questions for any author to ask. But I don't think "can" or "should" or "ought to" is really the right way to look at that sort of question. I myself am a trans woman, and I'm disabled mentally and in some respects physically, though many of those physical disabilities have become less noticeable with my adulthood. There are times when I really do see some depictions of trans and disabled people and feel uncomplicatedly offended. I think we can all safely gather round and laugh at Sia or The Good Doctor for being backwards and stupid when it comes to this sort of matter and so on, but it's rarely so clear cut, especially from the perspective of an author or artist. The important part is to be thoughtful, read closely on a topic if you're trying to represent it properly, and then not much else can be done besides consulting members of a marginalized group directly and doing your best to actually write it. I've lived about two decades now and if there's anything I've learned it's that being impolite or insensitive when making a best effort is maybe the least concerning thing that a person can be, at worst an annoyance; and so it is not tantamount to an author to make it their sole priority. The advice from Mythcreants seems well-intentioned in this respect, but with all I've said in mind it also feels insufficient in that area, if that makes any sense. It seems more focused on what one ought not to do rather than looking at the vastness of the possibility present when one really looks at the diversity of the human race and the ways in which we are different.
Additionally, I personally feel like - and this is rude, but I don't know how phrase it - the Mythcreants hate fun. Or at the very least, they hate things that might be interesting in the context of a fictional novel. For instance, they have an article entitled Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs. It starts off by being on the face of it inaccurate by saying that it is "historical almost by definition," largely ignoring the vast number of fantasy stories that take place in the present day or near future, but let's move right on past that. The list - spoilers for a several-year-old listicle, I guess - consists of modern medical knowledge, birth control more reliable than sheepskin condoms, acceptance of differences (ex. class, race, gender, sexuality, etc.), reasonable fashion trends (ex. no codpieces, restrictive corsets, lead-based cosmetics, etc.) and standardized time-keeping. The problem I have with all of this is that fundamentally speaking these are things that many people find deeply interesting topics and love reading more about them. People love reading about societies that have bizarre ideas about medicine, that have prejudices so exotic that they seem to turn the world on its head, they love a dramatic pregnancy scare, they love the biggest, stupidest codpieces and most carcinogenic makeup you could imagine and they love having no clue what year it is. Maybe not so much on the last one, but you're sort of picking up what I'm putting down, no? What people find fascinating about past societies is reflected in our fantasies because they are interesting things; the past is a foreign country that we love to explore and play in with fiction, and most audiences are here for that sort of thing. Don't take it from me! Brandon Sanderson apparently has written a hit series about an entire society of feudalistic magical hand fetishists and he's a best-seller. Haven't read it though; still getting around to that one.
Another example of this is their article on "Five Tips for Avoiding Disorientation in Your Opening Hook." I think this is sort of a silly endeavor in the first place. Confusion in an opening is an almost certainty, because nothing has been answered yet and nothing established. There's something to this that I like to call "the Star Wars rule," which basically says that if something's function is self-apparent by how it plays in the story going forward, then you can use that to your advantage and minimize further explanation. If you off-handedly mention that Blahian wine, then audiences will very quickly make the connections that it's probably really high-quality or has sought-after characteristics, because they're probably familiar with the fact that good French and Italian wines are also pricy and have sought-after qualities. You only really need to elaborate on that when, per say, the character from Blah reveals that he's secretly blighted the vineyards to drive the wine prices through the roof and make a monopoly or something, and you can elaborate on how he specifically did that, or what in Blah let him do that, and it'll all cohere. What this means, ultimately, is that you can throw uncertain or unknown terms into fiction and they will be able to come to understand those very quickly by context because humans are generally pretty good at that, and they'll respect you for letting them figure out that little mystery on their own. They focus, for instance, on the opening to Blindsight:
"It didn’t start out here. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they’d be wrong. It ended with all those things."
I think this is actually a really good opening, not knowing anything else about the novels. It's... pithy, you know? It gives the immediate feeling of some old guy on a porch telling you about something he lived through that other people didn't. Immediately, what we're being told is that the world is like our own - there's Big Ben and Theseus and Rorschach are familiar names - but something's happened with them that's quite enormous and led to a very big conclusion involving vampires and scramblers and a group named the Fireflies. After all, we don't usually talk about big national monuments with this sort of tone unless something very bad happened to them or in them. The audience immediately knows that the story is going to somehow cover all of these things and they're going to figure out what this all means as it goes along. It being a little confusing doesn't make it bad - it makes it intriguing. The article then goes on to urge authors not to use confusing labels, including not referring to characters by multiple names early in the opening (ex. replacing Paglino with Pag, Gardner with Gard) and minimizing metaphors. I can at least agree with keeping the narration consistent, but I feel like that's true of most writing, opening or not. All of this feels like the writers of Mythcreants expect authors to write books for people who are not curious and are not interested in learning about what they're reading about, or that they think that writing is tremendously weakened by being even slightly ambiguous or potentially confusing for an audience. And again, you don't have to take this one from me. One of the most popular game series of the last ten years was Dark Souls, which has story elements that are almost indefinitely obscured or simply unknowable even in the opening, and people love that, they love debating what version of events is true and what's really going on and they find great joy in that. Hell, last year we got Signalis, a game that opens with a cutscene where the main character picks up a semi-obscure late 19th century horror novel before listening to a German radio station repeating "ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG!" before repeating a series of numbers while the main character's face starts dissolving, and then quotes from H.P. Lovecraft start flashing on the screen along with several characters we don't know about, a highly technical fictional BSOD screen and then just the title.
You know what people said to that?
"We love it, give us more, we will speculate about this for months."
Now you may ask, Jay, where are you going with this? Surely you have some sort of grander point about how bad writing advice tends to stem from a prescriptive view of writing that fails to take into account the complex realities of the real world, fantasy worlds and the authorship thereof? And, well, yes. That's the point. This advice is overly specific and prescriptive, and it seems to cater to people who haven't strongly developed their own style and authorial interests that tend to create strong audiences in turn. That's really it. I just chose to tear into Mythcreants because they were around and I had a lazy afternoon to do so. I do hope that if they do see this, they don't take it too harshly. There's nothing unsalvageable about their site or their general milieu, and if someone got something out of their advice I'm glad. I just don't see them as being all that helpful personally.
