You guys. K. M. Weiland is with us this week!!! K. M. is someone who I really admire, as an author and a teacher, so I know it’s going to be a fabulous week of learning for all of us.
You probably already know about her fabulous website, HelpingWritersBecomeAuthors.com. Her podcast is great too, and she’s kept me company many times while I’ve ironed or washed dishes. Numerous times I’ve been listening to her talk about storytelling and realized, “That is what’s wrong with my book.” She just has such an interesting, intelligent way of thinking about stories, and she’s very generous with her knowledge.
I highly recommend Creating Character Arcs and Structuring Your Novel. I could keep fangirling, but I’ll save some of it for Wednesday and Friday so we can get on with learning!
Our panel question today is:
What’s a piece of writing advice that you completely ignore?
K. M.: What I’ve learned over the years is that the trick to getting the most out of any bit of writing advice is to realize its context and not take it too literally. There are lots of commonly derided bits of advice like “write what you know” that are actually totally pertinent in their place (i.e., “write what you know” doesn’t have to mean writing about your life, but rather making sure you’ve done your research).
Basically, you just have to make the advice work for you. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s either because you don’t yet understand it properly, or because it doesn’t apply to you.
In the latter category, I personally reject the idea that planning a story curbs your creativity. I’ve always been an avid outliner, and when I was first starting out, I kept running into pushback. The idea is that if you outline or structure a story, you lose all natural inspiration and end up with something totally formulaic.
What I felt instinctively then and have since learned to articulate is that there’s actually no such thing as a writer who is either a plotter or a pantser. We all plot; we all pants. It’s just that some of us do our plotting upfront in an outline and others do it afterwards in revisions.
Don’t let well-meaning advice put constraints on your creative process. Learn to harness both your creativity and your logic. You can’t write a book without both. When you learn to consciously harmonize the two, that’s where the magic really starts to happen.
Stephanie: Your response goes in tandem with my thought, which is about how the longer I write and the longer I teach about writing, how much less I use words like “never” and “always.” There are really very few times that a writing rule is always true.
I do think there’s a lot of value in knowing all the “rules” and working mostly within them (or at least understanding why they exist) before you try to bust out of them. Same as how when you’re learning to cook, it’s helpful to understand and use recipes, but the longer you cook, the more you can improvise based on your instincts and still churn out an edible dinner.
One adage that I choose to ignore is, “No tears in the writer means no tears in the reader,” or something like that. I never cry when I’m writing my books. I have gotten a bit misty with The Lost Girl of Astor Street and Within These Lines, but neither made me outright cry, even though I know they’ve caused tears in others.
Shannon: First off, I’m dying at Jill’s answer because ohmygosh! Yes! Some rules are just ridiculous. One of my earliest rejections revolved around the world “was” and I had to ask advice from other writers. Without exception, they all told me the agent was ridiculous. Some rules beg to be broken. For me it’s the whole “You have to write everyday” bit. Now, in all fairness, I’ve been at this awhile and I have a schedule pinned down. But some of us are not destined to be everyday writers in every season of our lives and that is okay. Breaking rules doesn’t disqualify you from publication.
Jill: Funny, Shan! Because mine is, Never use the word “was.” I once received notes back from a contest I’d entered before I was published in which the judge highlighted every “was” in my manuscript and told me to get rid of all of them. And that’s poor advice, as is.
Now, to be fair, overusing the word “was” (or its variants based on narrative perspective and tense), can be a sign of passive voice, and I have little doubt that my early writing had some of that. So if you find that you’re using “was” in every sentence, you might want to take a closer look for passive voice and to try and vary your sentence structure.
But “was” is a legitimate word and sometimes the right one to use. It’s a HUGE pet peeve of mine when I see people using incorrect grammar just to avoid using the word was, like with our example from the Go Teen Writers book. To say “When I entered, Jane stirred the soup” means something different than to say, “When I entered, Jane was stirring the soup.” Neither are wrong in this case. The latter shows the continuing action of Jane stirring while the former means Jane stirred the soup once and stopped. If you mean that Jane is standing at the stove, constantly stirring the soup, then to say, “When I entered, Jane stirred the soup” is incorrect. The word “was” has value when used properly.