When Good Advice Goes Bad (intro)

Hey, devoted blog-readers!

Sorry to be MIA recently. I had to do a lot of catch up after being sick, and I’ve also been hard at work with my revisions (eleven pages, will talk about them more in detail later).

I think that all my rants should come with warning signs. What do you think? Beware… here there be snarkiness… Because, here’s the thing. I’m introducing a new feature here on the blog called…

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

The longer you’ve been in this business, the more advice you hear and the more you realize that supposed “rules” might not be so gosh darn helpful after all. In fact, if handled incorrectly, they might damage your writing, your career, and even your well-being. I’ve read a ton of articles, gone to a bunch of conferences, jotted down notes at more seminars than I attended in an average semester at Yale. I’ve seen good advice, well-meant but misleading advice, and some pretty bad advice. (And yes, I do realize that what is one person’s bad advice might be another person’s nugget of gold, so I’m not even touching that here. I’m talking about really bad advice.) One thing that has always amazed me is what I perceive as an seemingly endless number of ways to misinterpret (sometimes willfully so) good advice.

I’ve always been a fan of Socrates’ statement that true wisdom is realizing how much you don’t know. In general, i think it can save you from a world of trouble. On its most obvious level, it keeps you searching for answers. There are a whole lot of people out there who rush off blindly into things without really examining them beforehand, because they have no idea how much they don’t know about it. However, there’s a deeper subtext here about knowing what it is you do know, as well, which is very important. If you don’t know what it is you know, then how do you know you don’t know it wrong? (And again, this goes back to looking for answers. Always a good idea to stop periodically and take stock of what it is you know and make sure you aren’t mistaken anywhere. Ask Descartes.)

For instance, now that people actually want to ask me for advice, for critiques, for anything, I feel paralyzed by doubts. Before I sold, I thought I knew a bunch of shit. Actually, I still do, but I realize that this bunch is only one on a whole tree in a whole acre of shit that I don’t know. There is so much about this business that I don’t understand. The book I sold started out as a project purposefully designed to bomb in contests, fo Pete’s sake! Looking at things from the perspective of the newly-contracted, I see that so much stuff I worried about before, so many things that I obsessed over as a new writer don’t matter a hill of beans. I see a lot of mistakes I made, and I see a lot of times when I thought I was doing things right by following certain bits of advice, but now realize that, on occasion, I had everything cocked up in my head. The bunch of knowledge I amassed pertained only to me — what do I have to do and know to be able to do what it is that I want to in the way I want it done? (Follow that?) It doesn’t necessarily apply to anyone else. Every time I would try to give advice, I peppered it with so many qualifiers and exceptions that I think I sounded like the old English grammar nursery rhyme:

I before E except after C
Or when sounding like A as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh.’

Do it this way. Except for this market. Or, if you write like that. Heck, it’s “all in the execution.” Just don’t let that be your excuse for doing it wrong. You can only do it wrong if you know you’re doing it wrong and you’re doing that on purpose because it works doing it wrong. How do you know if it works? Dunno, you just do.

Yeah, like that kind of talk could help anyone?

But how could I think the things I thought were right, if I’d heard of situations where it worked the other way, or if I didn’t end up following my own advice at all? I vivdly remember cringing the first time I read a post about another new writer hoping to dash off three chapters to send to an agent so it could be up at auction next week. You know, because it worked for Diana Peterfreund. I felt incredibly guilty, like I’d somehow passed off bad advice or a bad example. (Not even Catholic, yet still capable of such ginormous guilt.) I still believe that first time authors should market finished books. I don’t think the publishing industry moves fast. I don’t think first time authors should count on making any kind of significant money.

In addition to the rather likely possibility of looking like a big fat hypocrite, there was an added bonus of giving out advice that people would misinterpret. I saw signs of this everywhere. I hang out on enough writing loops and websites that I’d commonly see the same answers repeated and forwarded on loop after loop until they began to resemble a game of “Telephone” and were perverted to encompass meanings and connotations that the giver never intended. I’d see folks asking an industry professional (IP) the same question over and over again until they got the answer they were looking for, which wouldn’t do them any good. I’d see a casual comment by an IP or experienced pub turned into the Word from On High, advice followed slavishly to the letter while the writer ignores the point, advice given for a specific situation that is then universalized inappropriately, and suggestions that come with the caveat of “if you know what you’re doing” be leapt upon by folks looking for “the magical short cut.”

So I got really nervous about saying anything. I don’t want the responsibility of telling soemone something that may be wrong, may be wrong for them, may reflect poorly on what others have done well, or may be misinterpreted in any number of ways so as to ruin this person’s entire career. Dude, I’m 26! How should I know?

But anyone who has been around me for more than a few weeks knows that I’m pathologically incapable of keeping my opinions to myself. So give out advice I did and do and will continue doing, because as frustrating and difficult as it is, I can’t bear to see people in a bad situation, or plowing blindly into a bad situation without at least giving them a heads up about what they might find as bad about it as I do.

My friends say I’ll grow out of this.

But then I think about where I’d be if wiser folks than me didn’t give me a heads up about bad stuff that I was doing, if I hadn’t stumbled on this article or that website that served as a giant lightbulb moment, and I hope that I don’t grow out of it. I hope that people wiser than me don’t stop giving me good advice. I hope I don’t stop trying to learn what is the best way for me to do things. Because, like I said, the thing I know best is that there’s a lot I don’t know.

So, caveats and qualifiers aside, let’s talk about the purported subject of this post:

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

(Oh, right, says the reader, who has totally gotten lost in my syntax.)

Over the next few days, I will be reporting on various bits of great writerly advice that has been trampled, maimed, perverted and otherwise turned to dastardly means. Everything from the simple “try not to use passive voice,” a banner that has been waved in every wholesale genocide of the word “had”; to the more complicated career questions, such as “start with category because it’s easier.” I have a running list I’m eager to dive into, but would love it if people felt like sharing their own in the comments section. And here, of course, we’re looking for advice that is well meant but leads to errors, or even good advice that we can explore and see how we might be, even now, interpreting it in a damaging manner. I hope to learn a lot.