Really Bad Writing Advice: It's Everywhere!

Today I step back from my mission to provide so much bad writing advice that I'm the last writer standing.  This is because today, surfing the Net to avoid writing a chapter I'm having a hard time with, it hit me: There is already so much really bad writing advice out there, I can put my mission on hold for as long as I like and would-be writers will still be more than sufficiently mislead.

To clarify, I have nothing against writing advice.  If you're Anne Lamott or Steven King, your advice is brilliant and I hope and pray you'll keep dispensing it.  I think Martha Alderson is a great plot whisperer even though I'm constitutionally unable to use her workbook, and I know people who swear by, write by, and produce terrific books with Save The Cat.  Keep saving that cat!  If these folks advice works for you, but all means, follow!

I'm talking about my bad-advice competitors.  People who list 67 words you can use instead of "said."   "Ignore them!" she ejaculated/exclaimed/declared/bubbled over/whinnied/whined/cried/inveighed.  The same goes for the 99 words to use instead of "went."  Seriously?  

I'm talking about all those random and completely nonsensical rules.  Don't give a physical description of your characters.  Don't use adverbs.  Don't use adjectives.  If you must use adjectives, never use the word "nice."  Never use the passive voice.  Run on sentences are the kiss of death.  No, sentence fragments are the kiss of Death.  No, rhyming picture books are the kiss of Death.  No, alliteration is the kiss of Death.

Today,  I actually read something that, in an effort to mislead writers about how to create interesting characters, told me that my heroes should listen to women while my villains should interrupt them. 

All right, I admit my competitors in the Really Bad Writing Advice arena are highly skilled. 

But (never start a paragraph with "But" BTW) I just wanted you to be aware that in order to avoid direct competition with my really bad advice, my competitors have taken to disguising themselves as purveyors of good advice.  Helpful advice.  Warnings to save you from the dire consequences of adverb usage.  So if you're out there beating the bushes for terrible advice, feel free to embrace them despite the mislabeling.

I say, purveyors of terrible advice disguised as good advice, stand your ground!  Urging writers to produce truly bad prose by replacing the word "said" with as many awkward substitutes as possible on a single page is an honorable calling!  Stand your ground, hold your head high, and acknowledge the glorious badness of your truly rank suggestions.

Bravo!

Really Bad Writing Advice: 5 Top Reasons Revising Your Novel is Better Than Having a Life

Excuse me. I have just sent in what had damn well better be the final total overhaul of the novel I’ve been carrying on about for the last year and a half, and now I am faced with the alarming prospect of reclaiming my life.

Oh the trauma!

Never mind the fact that my dog, who tries to stay up with me when I write, is in a virtual coma and will barely even open his eyes when you wave a dog cookie in his face. Or that my entire closet has been turned into a hamper, and my washing machine barely remembers who I am. But I digress. (This tendency might be what was wrong with my novel, but I digress again. Damn.)

Anyway, here we have the 5 top reasons that revising a novel is far better than having a life.

1. When you finally do take a break, which you shouldn’t, but you do, and your family wants to watch an Oscar-winning and also educational documentary, you get to screech, “No! I want to watch The Carrie Diaries!” and your (entirely male and entirely horrified*) family will go along with you for fear your head will explode right there, in your family room, if they cross you. 
2. When you insist that your family not make any sounds whatsoever, including tv, music, closing the dishwasher, turning the pages of books, or hitting the keys on their laptops too vigorously, due to the fact that each sound deprives you of six seconds you vitally need in order to meet your deadline, no one will remind you that you watched 13 straight hours of House of Cards to distract you from the fact your book was falling apart. Ditto about your head exploding.
3. You will come to realize that wearing fresh clothing on a daily basis and personal grooming are not all they’re cracked up to be. Unlike when you’re living your life and don’t leave your house without the endless and repeated annoyance of combing your hair. Revision does not require combed hair. (Also make-up, jewelry, or matching socks.)
4. Friendship is challenging, messy, and complicated. The revision cave completely eliminates any hint of these issues, due to the fact that your erstwhile friends barely remember you after your complete disappearance.
5. In life, your fears about other people being annoyed with you are a paranoid remnant from your unfortunate youth, and we all know how distressing it is to question your perceptions of life in general, and your life in particular. In revision, on the other hand, you can feel completely confident in your conviction that people are annoyed with you because people are annoyed with your because your freaking book is so late.

*My fellow female has decamped for Manhattan.

Really Bad Writing Advice: Organization is Bad

All right, so the second half of my novel-in-progress is kind of a mess. All right, an actual mess. All right, so the arc kind of droops with a scoliosis kind of twist at a point when droopiness is not exactly what I was going for.

After some mean-spirited yet rational person advised it was a poor idea to demand that my Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, and Listserv friends send me over some writing software that would fix the problem for me upon installation, preferably while I slept, I resorted to the notecard.

There they were, a monument to hoarding, slightly yellowed, a lifetime supply from when my kid took Spanish and we spent almost an entire year laboring under the delusion that notecards help kids learn languages.

Then I bought a corkboard. (Two actually – thinking that this mess might require a vast panorama of color-coded notecards, spreading six feet across my dining room.) Then I found some flashy, multicolored thumbtacks. And some matching pastel post-its that I could use to make some really insipid pastel rainbows should I ever finish reorganizing the second half of my book.

And now, in the story arc that should culminate in the repair of my novel and the first aspiring truth ever involving Staples, we reach the premature and unanticipated horror of organization: My dog, my writer’s assistant, companion, and eater of paper (I like to think of this as editing choices from the Great Beyond) likes flashy multi-colored thumbtacks. A lot. Also notecards. I hesitate to describe the amount of chasing, cajoling, and offers of salami, brie, Puperoni, and leftover almond cookies from take-out Chinese were involved in getting my thumbtack back.

Suffice to say, not only did organization almost kill my dog, but the convincing of my dog to return the notecard with the thumbtack lodged in it was highly distracting and not conducive to unscrambling my novel.

Eschew organization. It could kill your dog.

Really Bad Writing Advice: When to Resist Criticism, Suggestions, and Meddlesome Sane People

We’re all friends here. We know the world is full of small minded, jealous people who want to trample our dreams and squelch our deeply creative natures. Also megalomaniacal people who wish to hijack our work and transform it into something it’s not. (Everyone who’s snickering and going, “Yeah, something good,” should leave this site immediately, never to return.)

Anyway, in the quest to extend my really bad writing advice into new frontiers where only the wise have gone before, here are some helpful tips on when to stick your fingers in your ears and go neeee-neeeee neeee-neeeee. (Or, for international readers, whatever cool, culturally-appropriate sound you make when sticking your fingers in your ears and acting petulant.)

So, in the interest of becoming the only writer left on earth when my bad advice is universally embraced, this is when to ignore suggestions:

1.) When that’s the way it really happened. Especially when writing picture books that pass down cumbersome yet preachy events from your youth. So it’s incomprehensible. That’s what people said about Finnegan’s Wake – which I’ve always thought would make such a piquant PB.

2.) When you’ve already done every single thing that every single person in your critique group suggested, and now your mean Aunt Martha says that an elephant is a greyhound designed by a committee. Elephants are nice. Ask Mo Willems. Where would Piggie be without Elephant? Think about it.

3.) When you’re sick of revising. This is your helpful inner-voice telling you that you’re finished. Buying handbags online is the surefire antidote to being sick of revision, and also to the creation of literature. Screw it. Which would you rather have, a lovely new knock-off Prada bag or a horrifying sense that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and you might have to redo every single syllable?

Go Prada. Go Prada. Go Prada.

4.) When you’re pretty sure that every word that passes through your fingers and onto the page comes directly from God. Like the Bible, only a trilogy, with zomboid elves and without the didacticism.

5.) When small-minded people point to submission guidelines and shake their heads. As if publishers know what they’re looking for. Come on. So the University of Chicago Press seems to be saying they’re not in the market for zomboid elves. How do they know, until they’ve had the chance to peruse your stunningly literary but still hot zomboid elf sex? Like they’re going to publish yet another masterful history of the Civil War once they’ve seen your zomboid elf sex? Please.

6.) When you’re right and everyone else is wrong. Who has the finely-honed literary sensibility, you or them? Duh. (Unless they wrote Bird by Bird, in which case, shut up and listen.)

I’d offer some even worse pointers, but I’m in dire need of a knock-off Prada bag in stunning trompe l’oeil leatherette.

Really Bad Writing Advice: The Writers Conference

I have been so busy with revision – in the practice makes a hot mess school of novel-writing – that I’ve neglected my mission to share dreadful writing advice. Apologies! And here is a lovely break from all that good writing advice with which we are constantly assailed.

Dear Clueless One,

My eleven-year-old niece, Lulu, has written an epic novel about magic pigs and vicious talking spiders in space, kind of an homage to Charlotte’s Web, only with time traveling maggots that feast on pig brains in an even more pointed homage to the vibrancy of cannibalistic slasher movies.

In my effort to get her work in front of Important People so she can get the adulation and seven figure contract she deserves, I have been taking her to writers conferences where, during the Q&A, she reads her (exceptionally long) first chapter to the panelists. The reaction is stunning. A hush falls over the room. The issue of appropriateness never even arises because, hey, who wants to make an eleven-year-old cry?

I also like to line up with her afterwards to meet the Important People, where she wows them by reciting, from memory, as much of Harry Potter in pig-Latin as possible before the conference staff turns out the lights. I figure that all the people behind us in line have had thirty or forty years to make their impression, and now it’s Lulu’s turn.

Do you have any advice for us, and also, how can I keep Lulu awake during these conferences?

Signed—Proud Aunt

To which I reply (with apologies to 11-year-olds everywhere who have written brilliant epic novels about space pigs)

Dear P.A.,

Having attended any number of conferences where people young and old have hijacked the proceedings, often receiving adulation, seven-figure contracts, and the occasional death threat in return, I honor your determination! It is well-known that the quality and commercial viability of the work is best represented by the willingness of the writer and her aunt to leap the bounds of propriety and carry on shamelessly. I say, carry on! And on and on. (Although your willingness to fold up your tent just because the conference staff has turned out the lights, does make me question your commitment…)

Love, Clueless

More Really Bad Writing Advice

Having succeeded beyond my wildest expectations with my initial foray into Really Bad Writing Advice (e.g. there were comments none of which employed the phrase “you mean-spirited bitch”) I have decided to sally forth into the realm of even worse advice.

Here goes.

Dear Clueless One,

I have just finished my stand-alone historical fantasy in which pirates and mermaids team up to change the course of the Russian Revolution using only their wits, rusty sabers and sex appeal.

Beyond its obvious appeal in raising deep, philosophical questions about Communism, this book is the manifestation of my personal crusade against boring, lazy writing, taking aim at that infinitely overused phrase, “he said.” I am proud to tell you that I never once use “he said” in my book, ferreting out compelling facsimiles such as: 

• he wholeheartedly yet heartrendingly exclaimed with a plaintive naivete that could draw tears from a mashed turnip, could they have obtained turnips, which they couldn’t because they were pirates who had been at sea for a really, really long time; 

• she bellowed with the steely yet ladylike determination of sinuous seaweed that now overflowed the banks of the Moskva River with rampant yet implausible abandon; 

• and the simple yet elegant *he ejaculated truculently.”

Noting that you used the phrase “she said” 2,914 times in your last – and might I point out only—novel, will you reform and join my Crusade? 

Signed, Crusader

To which I reply:

Dear Crusader,

Sure. Why not? The plot of what was supposed to be my next book just imploded and I’m not in a good mood. Indeed, the prospect of committing writing suicide sounds quite alluring. Let’s all hold hands and jump. Off the gangplank. Into the depths of the seaweed-riddled Moskva River. She agreed with crazed alacrity. 

Best, 

Clueless

Really Bad Writing Advice

Hi Gang,

Having noted that the internet is loaded with fabulous, and, all right, possibly a tiny bit of less fabulous, writing advice, I have decided that the moment is ripe for someone to start handing out really bad writing advice.

In the self-promotional vein, I am thinking that not only will I be able to corner the market on appalling directions for would-be novelists, but that this will go a long way toward winning awards as really bad branding too!!!

I’m so excited.

Anyway, here is wee sample of the misguided pap that I plan to send into cyberspace for all eternity:

Dear Clueless One, 

Because there are no good books out there for teen readers, I have taken it upon myself to write a uniquely superb (and also uniquely long) trilogy with magic elf robots who save the world, reinstitute the meaning of Christmas, and also promote dental hygiene. I am calling it “The Dental Floss Games.” Get it? 

Is 895 pages too long for the first book in the trilogy? Also, I’m not completely sure of how the first book ends, so I decided that that would be a good cliffhanger. My know-it-all critique group is being very negative, but this is all right, right? 

Signed, 

Whiny Genius

To which I reply:

Dear Whiny, 

No and yes. I think. Or maybe yes and no. Or possibly, oh my God, no! I guess what I’m saying here is that you should just follow your own inner voice, no matter how long-winded. Ignore the advice of others; you should only be around positive people who support your dream.

Also, after 895 pages of magic elves with pristine gums, your readers will be so damned glad to reach the ending that they won’t actually care about the ending. 

Love, 

Clueless

You too can send writing questions great and small to the Clueless One. Really stupid questions are particularly appreciated, but I guess that an intelligent question would be OK too, if you insist. I'm at ann@annstampler.com.