The best writing advice isn't about writing
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23 December 2020

> This is an old thought I wrote down exactly three years ago, but for lack of a suitable blog at the time it remained unpublished... then forgotten. Might as well bring it back now. To my surprise, most of what I wrote below never made its way into other, newer articles. It's all for the best then, I suppose.

The Internet is full of writing advice. At first sight, prospective authors have a wealth of accumulated wisdom to draw upon, right at their fingertips. Normally, that would be great. Except...

Except all that advice always focuses on the nitty-gritty of the actual craft of putting words to paper. And it's ridiculously specific. Write this many words a day. Edit twice. No, thrice! Don't edit, rewrite. Don't rewrite, cut. Avoid these words. Exposition is bad. Blah blah blah.

Worse, it's all bunk. Words were invented to be used, and there is no one right way to use them. Like in the game of Go, no matter how well you write you could always have done it better. Your best bet is to read a lot, talk to other people a lot (preferably people not like you) and practice, practice, practice. Pick up tricks, try them out for size and create your own blend.

But you'll never get anywhere as a writer if you don't understand the world you live in. How are you going to write about a city if you never lost your way among the maze of little streets in its oldest parts? I can literally walk you through the history of my neighborhood; can you say the same about anything at all? A place, a community, a culture? You need something to draw upon when writing about distant or imaginary locales, and what you get from books simply isn't enough. It's the same with anything: if you practice a craft, for example, you can make an educated guess about any other. The sweat, the scraped fingers, the mess on the floor, those are probably universal. So are the disappointment, despair and yes, the enthusiasm. But if you never tried to do anything -- anything at all -- with your own hands?

Look, you can't always write what you know. You need to broaden your own horizons before you can do the same for your readers. But whenever you find yourself at a loss for words, it may be a sign that you just don't have the life experiences to even imagine whatever it is you're writing about. At such times, you don't need to learn fancier words; you need to go out and *live* more. Your prose can probably wait for a year or two.

Last but not least, whenever your story seems to be going nowhere, ask yourself how much you really care about the subject matter. Why are you bothering to write this particular story? Because if it doesn't mean anything to *you*, good luck mustering the willpower to finish, never mind making your readers give a damn.

The writing is a red herring, you see. This is about life.