The Sceptical Sceptic’s Scepticious Guide to Writing Advice

Mandatory, recommended, suggested… or bum steer?

There’s one thing you can say about writing advice: there’s no shortage. Quantity: not a problem… or perhaps it is. Perhaps you can have too much of a good thing?

Well, there’s the rub, because with so much floating around, in print as well as online, it’s only to be expected that the quality is highly variable. So how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Or, to put it another way, and one I think is more helpful, how does each of us decide which advice to follow, which to take with a pinch of salt, and which to ignore altogether?

It’s one of the refreshing differences between Substack and certain places I used to (virtually) frequent: I see rather fewer of the sort of posts that pronounce You MUST do it this way. I wonder if Substack isn’t one of the last Internet refuges of that endangered species, nuance.

Well, here’s my take. I’ve been writing a long time. In fact, I’ve been writing almost all my life, so much so that I can’t clearly remember a time when I wasn’t creating little stories. I do have clear memories of writing in the kitchen of a house we left when I was seven or eight. I know memories, especially from so far back, can be unreliable, but there’s one circumstantial detail that gives it credibility: it was the last kitchen we had that contained a separate table at which I could write. Which makes it every bit of sixty years ago.

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." — W. Somerset Maugham

More to the point, perhaps, I’ve been writing professionally for… gulp… forty years now. Well, slight qualification, the first piece I ever got paid for was in 1984. That, however, was never published. The first paid piece that ever did see the light of day appeared in early 1987. (You can read more about both here.) I didn’t give up the (part-time) day-job until 1994 and at that stage I was earning more from photography than from writing. The first two books to carry my name used my photos, not my words (except captions). But by that time I’d been writing fairly regularly for magazines for several years and the first book to include my words also appeared in 2002.

But you don’t need a full autobiography. You get the picture. Just one more nod to my credentials: most of my colleagues in the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild seem even now to think of me primarily as a photographer. Ironically, however, I’ve never won the Guild’s Award for Photography¹ but I have twice picked up the award for Feature writing, the more recent being in 2022.

Image for no reason except I’m talking about photography here. (Petra, Jordan.)

So, whatever else I bring to the discussion, I do bring a fair amount of practical, professional, experience, including more than 60 books, and at least 250 published articles. And though I’m overwhelmingly focused on writing fiction now, my approach² is inevitably informed by my non-fiction experience. And it’s certainly part of the background to my reaction to many of the 'gems' of writing advice I’ve come across.

I’m going to skip right over 'You MUST have an outline', because I’ve already covered this at some length (and returned to the theme later). TL:DR: it’s bollocks—and I say that as someone who’s outlined more books than I’ve pantsed. Similarly, I’ve aired a few thoughts on 'Write what you know,’ and 'Show, don't tell³.'

So let’s look at a few other choice pronouncements:

"The first draft of everything is shit." — Ernest Hemingway. Well, give me Terry Pratchett before Hemingway any day of the week: "The first draft is just you telling yourself the story." That’s different, and it’s a lot closer to how I feel. And, while I’ve never been a proper journalist as Pratchett was (for fourteen years), I do have plenty of experience of writing to deadlines and where I simply couldn’t afford the time for multiple rewrites. My usual routine for features, especially for regular gigs where I knew how things went, was: 1: Write first draft. For an 1800-word feature this usually took an hour or two. 2: Leave for a while, possibly overnight, sometimes (luxury!) a few days. 3: Take another look, tweak a bit, send it off; very rarely did I have to do more than gentle tweaking. And I’ve had more than one editor say to me that my work never needed more than a very light edit, if that⁴.

In fiction, there may be significant changes after the first draft, but it won’t be unreadable. It’s not shit.

"Avoid adverbs." Or, as Stephen King put it, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." Sorry, Stephen, but I’m not buying. The third word in Three Kinds of North is an adverb (quickly), and I make no apology for it. But I also don’t make a habit of throwing in adverbs quite so early. In Book 2, The Sundering Wall, you’ll have to wait over a hundred words for the first (simply).

Of course, it’s amply possible to gratuitously, if not egregiously, overuse adverbs, unfortunately but inexorably rendering your prose indigestibly stodgy.
It’s possible to overuse anything, but that doesn’t justify a blanket prohibition.

Similarly, Don’t use semi-colons. I’ve rarely been more uncomfortable reading a writer I normally love than when I picked up a copy of Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. Mostly (of course) it was great, but every few pages I’d be brought up short by the unmistakable feeling that someone (an inexperienced editor? A gremlin?) had been through the manuscript and simply⁵ replaced every semi-colon with a comma. Even if you did want to avoid semi-colons, that’s not the way to do it… but why should we? It’s like saying there’s a nice pair of pliers in your toolkit but you’re not allowed to use it.

Ditto, by the way, for em-dashes. The latest daft notion (which I’ve even seen here on Substack) is that em-dashes are a tell that a piece has been 'written' by AI. That’s another one for which I can only say 'bollocks'. And if people start believing it, we’re just handing another bit of our domain over to the evil Skynet.

Every story needs conflict. Here all I need to do is to yield the floor to the GOAT⁶:

"One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process. "― Ursula K. Le Guin

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However… not to sound too Scepticious⁷, what about a few nuggets of advice that I do relate to. I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying, 'works for me so it must be a universal law', but these definitely work for me.

"If you write to impress, it will always be bad, but if you write to express, it will be good." — Thornton Wilder

"Writers do not choose their stories. Stories choose their writers." — Elif Shafak

"Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about.)" — C S Lewis

“If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” — Toni Morrison

“Novels have to be plausible,” Peter said. “Life doesn’t. Life often isn’t." — Peter Wimsey in The Late Scholar, Jill Paton Walsh after Dorothy L Sayers.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." — Albert Einstein (but my emphasis).

And last, but definitely not least…

"Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences." — Anne McCaffrey.

1. Although I can’t resist noting that I’ve been Highly Commended five times. So near, and yet so far…

2. And often enough the content too: here’s a discussion of one such aspect.

3. To which I would add an observation I saw on here from Noha Beshir: don’t assume everyone shares your cultural background.

4. The only thing that really surprised me in this was the implication that other people (professionals) were sending in pieces which did need more editing.

5. Adverb. Not sorry.

6. She is for me. And the whole theme of this post, really, is 'whatever works for you is what’s right '.

7. Of course I know it’s not a word. Well, it is now.