Questions to ask yourself about new writing advice

Or any advice really

Look, I’m a librarian. And a Capricorn. I love knowledge and research and organization and finding the most efficient way to do something. I have tried all the productivity systems, all the planners, all the charts. (It is possible that I’m constantly looking for more control over an increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable world but you know. Whatever.)

Specifically, in my writing life, I have read ALL the craft books.

Like.

All of them.

I’ve subscribed to so many newsletters, read blog posts about so many writing processes.

I got an entire MFA because I wanted to hear as many people as possible tell me how they do it. How they do this thing called writing.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

It’s not that I feel like I’m doing anything wrong in my own process, one that has now produced several fully formed books, even if they don’t live on shelves yet. But there’s a part of my brain that always feels like there must be an easier way, a better way.

Even if you’re not as Capricorny as I am, I know a lot of writers feel this way. A lot of writers always feel like they should at least try every piece of writing advice that comes along, because what if that is the magic bullet that changes everything?

But the thing is, all writing advice (all advice, in general) is based on certain unexamined assumptions that the advice giver is making based in their own experience with their own particular brain.

And so the first thing to do, when encountering new writing advice, is to ask yourself some questions to determine if this advice will be useful, or even applicable to you.

Question 1. What problem is this advice trying to solve?

Seems pretty obvious, right? A doctor would never give you crutches to deal with a headache. But I find that a lot of time we don’t even consider the actual problem a piece of advice is trying to address.

Some examples …

Fast Drafting is trying to solve the problem of quitting in the middle of a novel.

Morning Pages are trying to solve the problem of getting paralyzed by starting something creative and getting distracted by regular life thoughts while trying to create.

“Write Every Day” is trying to solve the problem of an object at rest tending to stay at rest, and how it is often so much harder to restart something the longer you’re away from it.

And sure, these problems can all be huge obstacles to making creative progress.

But then we ask ourselves the most important question of them all…

Question 2. Do I have this problem?

Seriously. Take a minute and consider this. Have you ever, in the past, thought to yourself, I have this problem, before encountering this advice? Really?

In this age of the internet, we’re all so used to constantly being told that we have problems we didn’t know about until this ad informed us that our hair isn’t shiny enough and we need this $200 conditioner.

The people giving us advice are doing so because this particular thing worked for them. It solved a problem they were struggling with. But it doesn’t inevitably follow that you or I had that same issue.

So.

Do I tend to quit novels in the middle? — No, I don’t.

Do I get distracted by regular life thoughts while trying to create? Do I find the blank page a little/lot terrifying? — I mean, yes.

Do I find it harder to write after not writing for a while? —Yes. Absolutely.

So, okay. I’ve got varying answers here. But we’re not done.

Question 3. What assumptions is this advice making about my life and my brain?

This is a big one, because all advice is based on assumptions, usually unconscious, almost always unspoken.

Fast drafting is based on the assumption that the benefits of outrunning fear and boredom by drafting as fast as possible, outweigh the inevitable messiness of the first draft produced in this way. And also that you already have all the pieces needed to build this book and already basically know the way they’re going to fit together. ¹

Morning Pages is based on the assumption that every human alive wakes up with noise in their brain and that the act of writing it down by hand first thing in the morning will drain it from their head, leaving room for creativity.

Write Every Day is based on the assumption that every human is susceptible to this specific kind of inertia, and also that every human has the time in every day to write if they just try hard enough.

Looking at these assumptions might evoke a strong reaction, and that’s good because that gives you information. All assumptions are going to be true for some people and not for others. That’s why we’re drilling down.

For me, while I do think it would be nice to be like I wrote a whole draft in two weeks or whatever, I know from experience that I end up more frustrated and stressed with a largely useless pile of words than if I allow myself to take my time. And that’s okay.

For me, the assumption that Morning Pages is based on is utterly false. It took me a long, long time to figure out exactly what it was about this advice that bugged me² before finally figuring out that it’s this particular assumption. Julie Cameron assumes that we all wake up with noise in our brain and that writing whatever comes to mind immediately upon waking is the best way to drain it out of us.

But that is NOT how my brain works. The vast majority of the time, my mind is most quiet in the morning. And the concept of ‘journaling’ is so strongly associated with my outside life that if I sit down to write ‘whatever comes to me’ it will not be creative insights into my project. It will be that infuriating patron yesterday who told me I should be fired because she thought I didn’t print out her thing but then it turned out I had and she’d just left it somewhere and people are the biggest jerks and now I’m mad about this thing all over again and I’m going to stew about it all day and not feel like creating at all.

Morning Pages don’t help me drain the world out. For me, Morning Pages let the world in. I don’t just pour it onto the page and then it’s done and I move on. That’s not how my brain works. If I engage with thoughts through writing, my mind will continue to chew on them all day long.

So even though the intention of Morning Pages is solid, and even though the problem it’s trying to address is one that I do sometimes have, the advice itself does not work for me as proposed.

And lastly, I do struggle to pick things up after I’ve put them down for a long time, and I can make some time in each day to write if I try hard enough. So the Write Every Day advice does help me.

Great, right? But one last thing.

Question 4. Is there something I can take from this advice that will address problems I do have, and also work with my life and my brain?

Now that we have all this information, we can look at each piece of advice for what it is and what it isn’t and look for gems we can use in other ways.

Fast DraftingTM doesn’t work for me because my brain needs time, it needs to see the whole picture, and I hate the idea of writing words I’m 100% sure I’m going to toss.

However. It is good for me to remember that all writing is good writing and nothing is ever wasted and sometimes we have to write our way through something in order to throw it out and do something else.

And it is also helpful for me to embrace more of a willingness to put [hardware and shit] as placeholders, to make notes to myself of what to go back and change later, and to keep moving forward as much as possible.

So, I don’t take the Fast Drafting advice wholesale, but there are elements that I try to remember and incorporate into my Building Block process.

As for Morning Pages, while I will scream until the end of my days that no matter what Julie Cameron says, they do not work for everyone and you’re not broken if they don’t work for you, I do keep a writing journal, separate from my life journal, for thoughts and reflections about my writing. And I’m trying to establish a practice of doing a writing warm up before diving into a writing session the same way I warm up when I’m playing my cello.

Finally, I do try to write every day when I’m drafting, but I also keep the definition of ‘writing’ here loose. Research counts as writing. Finding stock images of my characters counts as writing. Plotting counts as writing. Free writing about my novel, trying to work though a problem counts as writing. I try to touch my project every day. And if I can’t, I try to not let more than one day at a time go by that I don’t.

We’re all different. Our brains are different, our lives are different, our needs are different from day to day and year to year. Nothing will necessarily work all the time forever, and for sure nothing will absolutely work the same for every person.

Any words are more than zero words. Slow progress is still progress.

What writing advice have you found just doesn’t work for you? I’d love to hear about it.

Hang in there, everyone. We can do this.

1. I have this theory that some books are like paintings where you basically know what you’re making the whole time, you’re just adding in more detail as you go, and some books are like clocks where you absolutely need to have all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you before you even start trying to put them together. More on this another day.

2. I have STRONG FEELINGS about The Artists Way. The tldr: is that Julie Cameron did not invent journaling or free writing, she just put rules around it, and the idea that any one ‘method’ will work for every human on the planet is pretty intensely arrogant.