When Good Advice Goes Bad: a rant against universalization

Please note: this is a rant. You’ve been warned.

I promise I will be getting back to my particular WGAGB topics shortly. However, today I wanted to talk about a general trend that drives me completely batshit crazy:

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

UNIVERSALIZING ADVICE

At the risk of pissing off a whole lot of acolytes that call themselves after a particular fruit, I’m going to come out as a fan of prologues. And epilogues. And heck, flashbacks. They work for me. I’ve got two out of three of them in my book. Fortunately, the queen of this fruit (which is often used to flavor pies and chapstick) is totally cool with me not agreeing with her and selling books anyway. You take what you need and toss the rest out. Maybe someone else wants that stuff.
Unfortunately one of the fruitlings told me that I shouldn’t disagree with the advice, and that’s why the Queen Fruit was a NYT bestselling author and I was unpublished. Talk about taking good advice down a bad path! Saying that I don’t think I’m going to do things like another person but heck it works for her and God bless is not saying “Your advice sucks, bitch, now curl up and die.” It’s saying, “I don’t think I’m going to do things like that, but it works for you and God bless.”

And I can still like her books and the books of the people that follow her way of doing things, and I can still take other bits of her advice and say it’s brilliant, brilliant, and isn’t she wonderful and supportive and a bang-up conference speaker? Sure I can. I think a particular science fiction writer, for instance, has amazing stuff to say about characterization and voice. Religious perspective, not so much. But ah, the glory of having one’s own opinions about things. I think that a particular editor who regularly posts on her publishing house’s message boards has vital information to share about what she wants in her submissions, and if you want to write for her, then you’d be a fool not to read it. But if you don’t want to write for her, party on. Take some of it with a grain of salt. Believe that rock star heroes rock.

You see a lot of this crap in this industry, especially on internet boards, blog posts and email loops. People give out advice, and other people slavishly follow it, or universalize it, or seek to have it utterly stamped out if it doesn’t conform to their worldview. Wiser minds than mine have sought to excavate the root of this problem and drawn blanks. Me, I say it has to do with writerly insecurity. The thing I find most aggravating about this industry is that people insist that there is a magic code. Type it in, cross every T, dot every i, make sure you use the right buttons and press “execute” and you’re golden. If not, the island explodes and everyone dies.

(Ahem. Sorry. But I know I’m not the only one who wants to type in different numbers in to that ancient Apple). But this is crap. There’s no magic code. What works for one writer may not work for you. What works for one ediotr or agent or publishing house may not work for you. So for God’s sake, stop acting like there is ONE WAY. NOBODY IS RIGHT ABOUT THIS. NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT ANSWERS. NOBODY.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen all these conversations about what you need to do based on a comment that one anonymous agent or other has made on their anonymous agent blogs. Miss Snark doesn’t like first person present. Agent 007 thinks cover photos shouldn’t make authors look like trolls. Posters go back and forth between these two blogs (and my own agent’s non-anonymous blog), desperately looking for validation or refutation: “Is it true? This other agent says this and this and this. Oh God, is it truuuuuuue?” The conversations have spilled over to my various email loops: I read this, I heard that, some editor at some conference said this and this and this, and all of a sudden any professional who dares show her face is bombarded with: accept or reject! Confirm or deny! This is what XYZ said, do you agree?

This is the answer. NO. YES.

Some agents agree. Some agents don’t. Some agents haven’t the first flippin’ clue what you are talking about.

Q: “I heard a writer say that you should just send in your proposal, even if the instructions say query only. Is this okay?”

A1: “No, you twit. I say query because that’s what I want!”
A2: “Whatever. I might read it if I have spare time.”
A3: “Yeah, I’d read it.”

Q: “Do you care what the author looks like?”

A1: “Huh?”
A2: “It doesn’t hurt if they aren’t trolls.”
A3: “Mmmm, hot authors. Helps if they’re single, too.”

Three answers. Three agents. Different industry people have different submissions requirements because, guess what? They are different! Some businesses are cash only. Some take don’t take American Express. Some have minimums for check orders. Do you go into your local hardware store and insist that they take your Discover Card just because another store will? I bet you don’t. You either suck it up and pay cash, or you go to another store that will accept the way you want to do business. Do you go back to the Discover-friendly store and ask them to validate your belief that the other store is a horrible horrible place because they won’t take your card and that they are doomed to perish and raise their children on the streets because they won’t? Bet you don’t do that, either. At most, you go to the Discover-friendly store and say, “I love that you take my credit card.”

But these people are not in for it. They want validation, dammit! They want to be told that the first agent was wrong, wrong, wrong. They want PROOF that the editor who told them that there wasn’t a market for that kind of material is shown up in the most humiliating way possible. They act as if it’s a personal affront when an industry professional — one out of a thousand — professes a view that they don’t agree with. They are PITTING these industry blogs against each other in a desperate bid to find the one and only Truth of the matter, the magic code, the Way, the whatever it takes to publish.

I believe this grows out of the long-held assumption on the part of many in the writing community that any advice passed down by an editor or agent is a holy edict to be held in awe and reverence at all cost and in any circumstance. It follows then, that if everything said by one of these folks is Right and True, then it’s IMPOSSIBLE for them to contradict one another, right?

It’s Publishing Fundamentalism. It sucks.

And it should be stopped.

Writers and agents and editors and others should not have to preface every opinion piece with “feel free to disagree with me” or “you may not agree with everything I say and that’s okay” or “that other agent blog is a nice chick even though I don’t agree with everything she says” or whatever other disclaimer the nice advice-givers feel obligated to provide to stem this tide of panic-driven malice. It’s understood that you don’t have to agree with someone else’s way of doing things. You 1) work out a compromise, or 2) find someone who agrees with you and you work with them.

Accept that not everyone is going to see things the same way you do, and that’s okay. Accept that there are no absolutes, there is no secret code, and that no one has all the answers. If they did, there’d be no point.

_________________________

Rant’s not over yet, we’re just switching tracks.

It has come to my attention that some people have taken issue with an opinion I expressed recently that it is wrong to represent yourself as a bestselling or award winning author if you are not. That I think it’s wrong is an opinion. That a person is or is not an award winning author or a bestseller is not an opinion; it’s a fact. A person who has won an award can point to the trophy or certificate or list of winners or whatever; a person who is on a bestseller list can name the list and the period on which their work occupied a place on said list. A person who is not an award winner or bestseller can do neither of these things.

Now, whether or not the viewer chooses to recognize that award or list? That’s more in the realm of opinion. There are a million awards and lists out there, and some of them are more valid than others. And the people who say that they are award winning writers when their awards have been won for something other than their writing? I think it’s the equivalent of having a PhD in English Literature and telling everyone you’re a doctor. Woo hoo for your awesome accomplishments, but they have nothing to do with what you’re touting.