We’ve got enough bad writing advice for now
Back in 1990 or 91, I attended the Chicago Comicon. Back when you still could see some of the mega greats of the day and Image burst on the scene. I was just laid low as an aspiring writer who desperately wanted to get into comic books by a painful fact check that really wasn’t fact.
This was done to me right in front of the late Peter David’s table and he watched me get crushed by the advice from a hot and rising star and got all sorts of pissed off on my behalf. This event spawned a conversation that lasted maybe a half hour. In that time, he cheered me up and gave me a bit of advice that had helped me immensely, though it took 30 years to truly germinate and bloom.
He asked me what the most important thing a writer should do, and I mumbled back the tired old saw “Write every day”.
Just saying those words depressed me. I hated daily word counts. Still do. That’s because that’s not my process. BUT, I now understand you gotta do the work to be a writer. The writer who doesn’t write isn’t a writer. BUT the writer doesn’t have to write every day. You gotta hit your deadlines. Key but distinct difference.
But Peter David surprised me.
“No,” he said with a wry gleam in his eye. “You need to READ every day.”
I loved to read at that time. (Now I find it hard to read because I struggle with youtube brain and getting easily distracted by gaming and videos.) That advice delighted me to hear. At the time I did it with ease, consuming 2-5 novels in a week because of the job I had. It was the era before the internet, after all.
Peter went on to explain, “You have to read a lot so you can recognize good writing and repeat it.” That made sense, and it was something I could do. That advice stuck with me and slowly helped me become as good a writer as I am now. I recognize good writing because I’ve read it before and can at least know what it looks like on the page, providing me with a pattern I can recognize and use as a rough template.
Unfortunately, that advice “Read every day” had a small but crucial flaw in it. It makes the assumption you are reading GOOD writing to begin with. It wasn’t until I started getting in the mix of writing communities, beta reader circles and social media groups that I realized that this wasn’t true for most people. I learned quickly that a majority of current indie writers (sorry guys) have a rather poor catalogue of books to draw upon and inform them in how they write.
I’m not talking technical craft like you’d get from your English 101/201 courses. I’m talking understanding the beauty and artistic craft of writing. Books most modern writers never read but really should. Let’s start out with this little gem of a hot take.
I’ll go a step further and say if the majority of your reading is manga/hentai, fanfic and all written after 1980 with maybe a couple exceptions, you’re lacking a huge part of your necessary foundational knowledge as a writer. A while a big stink was made in the pulp revival community about authors not even being aware of the classics yet wanting to write pulpy novels. The result? A lot of butthurt indies proving the point of the critic making that statement. Do I agree with said critic’s method of going about it? No. Was he right? Mostly. He was gatekeeping saying people can’t publish if they don’t read his curated list first. But he is right on this singular salient point: without knowledge of the origin of a genre or even fine literature, which isn’t just literati style, but classic genre and pulps as well, you can’t recognize what makes it great and replicate it. It’s technically the “Xerox Degradation” problem. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy translated into a new culture and then copied again, degrades the quality of the thing that inspired so many copies. Yes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but if you really want to know what makes something great, you should see what inspired it (with a few rare notable exceptions, the original is often the best).
So where the hell was I going with all this? Oh yes. Writers must read, but not only that, they must read the classics. They must read the genre they hope to write in, too. Not all classics are “Great” in the snooty university, professional critic sense. Just like Rotten Tomatoes (when we used to be able to trust it) you have the critic’s score and the audience score. You should read lots of both and give yourself an advantage.
I’m not saying I’m perfect in this either, but I have read lots of stuff in various genres from those authors who aren’t in what I write, either. But their work informs me. James Clavell, Tom Clancy, Andrew Vachss, Steven King, Piers Anthony, Harry Harrison, Robert B. Parker, Janet Evanovich, David Drake, Alan Dean Foster, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Dickens, Jack London, James Fennimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Dumas, H.P. Lovecraft… That’s a lot of what I enjoy and touch on some of the greatest writers since the modern novel format came to be.
There are also hundreds, if not thousands of movies in my noggin too. You can glean a lot about storytelling from that, but you can’t learn about writing novels from it. The two are very distinct crafts, but have a large crossover. Why does this matter? Because cinema created it’s lexicon trying to find ways to imitate written narratives. The montage condenses information covering a large period of time, or several aspects quickly. This was something that books can do naturally when using an omniscient narrator. Voice-overs came from writing internal thoughts and ideas of first person writing. It gave us the cool/irritating trend of film noir to hear the internal monologue of the protagonist. But if you don’t read books that use those techniques from which cinema copied, you have the xerox degradation problem again.
What I personally recommend is that writers get back to reading classics. Find lists of “Best books”, either genre specific or in general fiction. Don’t read things written in the last 25-40 years, especially before TV was king. You need to get back to the roots of modern novel and learn the classic techniques so you can use them. You need to learn to use adjectives, adverbs and dialogue tags well, not to mention see them used badly. (Tom Swift, I’m looking your way!)
The point is, an author needs to be broadly read if they want to improve their craft. They need to read good and bad writing from the books that inspired all others. It’s why as a fantasy author you should be familiar with Tolkien since he practically invented the genre. But it would behoove you to read the classic “color” Fairy Books. Find yourself Moorcock, Saberhagen, L. Frank Baum, Zelazny and more. People who defined the genre in stand alone novels and series.
Stretch yourself into the pulps like Robert. E. Howard, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Anthologies from Analog, Amazing Stories and more. Authors who hammered out stories monthly if not weekly when reading and radio were all you got. I found a small press reprinting classic railroad adventures and BOY have I been surprised at how good those old pulp stories have been.
Maybe I’ll do a list of suggestions sometime. I dunno. That gets a bit pretentious and fighty. So all I’ll recommend is read stuff written before 1960 for a while. Find the big names of classic literature and see what ones grab you. Especially the late 19th and early 20th century authors.
I encourage you to read more, and deeper than you have before. There’s more than what’s been going on in the last 25 years and it’s far better than you think. The lessons learned will improve your craft from then on. Vaya con Dios.
