Advice from writers to writers is cheap. I try not to give advice beyond “there’s no right or wrong way to write,” but still I’m influenced by others who say how to write. After all, you have to please others, no?
I’ve been told you have to write short to write long. The idea being that if your short pieces get noticed then you’ll be in a position to say more. (I.e., write short stories before trying a novel.) Then I asked a New York Times bestselling author. He said, “If I had done that, I’d have never gotten published.”
Another chestnut we’re freely given is that we shouldn’t make our readers work to understand us. Pander to the reader. This past week I started to read a novel, again a New York Times bestseller, and some thirty pages in I still have no idea what’s going on. Now, I do hold a doctorate in the humanities so I think I know how to read. Somebody’s bucking the advice and making plenty of bucks at it.
A book editor, on a publishing website, says never to use semicolons in fiction; semicolons just don’t fit into fictional writing. Then I found a website that analyzed fiction by removing the words and leaving the punctuation. You can’t read Hemingway, I found out, without running into plenty of semicolons.
The examples could go on and on. Don’t write descriptive, because nobody likes that any more. Don’t write with a traditional plot since po-mo writing that only pretenders say makes sense is what publishers want.
I admit to being a mature writer. By my best guess I’ve been working on fiction for about 40 years now. I only entered the publishing game less than a decade ago and I’ve been finding it tough going. Some writing has changed in the past few decades, obviously. The good stuff, however, stays the same.
There’s a reason the classics are called classics. Those writers, I expect, didn’t fuss over what other writers said you should or shouldn’t do. Some things should never change.
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