Thoughts on advice

I am a gullible fish. I hope that you are not.

It’s been 8 months since I sent out an Amateur Hour. Whoopsies!

To be quite honest, it’s because I have been struggling on what to say/talk about, and I have been pondering if I truly have anything worth to say or talk about.

2023 has been a great year so far, and being able to emotionally regulate again means I have had a lot less angst. Seriously, reading back on some of my old Substack posts is cringe-worthy because they were 100% angsty Jen filled.

So, let’s pretend I have not disappeared for 10 months and get right into today’s post about my feels on advice.

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I have come to the conclusion that most writing advice doesn’t serve me.

It’s not because I am so full of myself that I think no one can teach me anything I don’t already know because being closed off to learning is probably the greatest detriment to any human no matter the field. It’s mostly because it feels contrived at this point. 

Do this. Don’t do that. If you do this you’re sure to have that. But if you do this you won’t have that. 

Go ahead and insert any writing topic ever in the above. Prologues. Sex scenes. Epilogues. POV. It all fits. 

And there is no other place that is brimming with “advice” than Twitter, or whatever Musk man is calling it now. 

I have been off Twitter for over a year now. HOORAY! And I cannot tell you how much it has actually changed my brain for the better. I am not giving advice to hop off the site. I know how important online spaces and community can be but if you have been thinking about that cleanse, I encourage you to try it.

I hope that most of you are not like me, prone to take any advice to heart. (seriously, I am a gullible little fish and realize that this really just might be a me thing). I would crumble every time someone said that prologues were unnecessary. Or that 1st person POV equaled a weaker book. Fantasy was dead. You have to write commercial. You can’t do this. You can’t do that. You should do this though, and you should do that. 

My head was spinning, and the problem was, I began to internalize it, even if I knew it wasn’t true. Every time I sat down to write I had a dozen experts in my head telling me all the ways my books were shit because I wasn’t following their tried and true advice.

It made me miserable. It made writing miserable. 

When I left virtually every online space: twitter, discord, text group chats, etc… It was with the intention to focus on myself but it also allowed me to be with my imagination without outside influences and it was healing. 

January of this year I began to write my fourth book. I started writing it by hand. I wrote 8,000 words by pen and paper that turned out to be all backstory. Okay, cool, that was fine. So then I began to type the draft from the true beginning and for five months I wrote 40k of this book. The entire time, my gut was telling me it was wrong but I was determined to ignore my gut because every advice has told me that I have to finish this book even if I already know its all wrong.

But guts are usually right. 

In June, I said fuck it and ripped the story into two different books because it was worth a try to see what would happen if I did, I could always back track. The truth is, I conceptualized this story two years ago with Character A and his story, and then at some point about a year ago I had this idea of Character B and was like I could put her into his story. After spending 5 months trying to make two completely different books work as one I just decided that I was going to rip them apart and put Character B’s story back into the pot to simmer and work on Character A’s book. 

Well, I outlined Character A’s book in July and began writing this month and I am nearly 20k in. In one month, I spewed out nearly half of what it took me to beat into submission in 5 months. 

I say all of this because I know that last year I would have asked a dozen or so people, probably tweeted into the void about my dilemma and would have been inundated with so much advice that would make my head spin and I would have been frozen in fear of what the right thing was to do. 

I have learned that I need to write in silence from the outside world. I need to make the decisions myself. I need my own creative freedom without rules and constraints from the buzzing of the online community. I need to be able to scrap when I decide, to try wild things if I want, or just abandon if I must.

I have struggled with crippling perfectionism for years and I still struggle but the way that voice has gone so much quieter since I have removed myself from spaces that were hurting my creativity is truly a blessing. 

On top of that, I have been reading a ton. A lot of backlist more than anything, and the way that I encounter any and every style and structure I could possibly imagine in books has made me so excited. Yes, you can totally have two different styles of POVs in one book. Make their POV 1st and the other in 3rd. Who says that you can’t have that much detailed backstory. Please spend 4 pages describing a building. 

Your imagination is the limit, especially in drafting. 

To round up this hypocritical post that could totally be seen as one big advice but truly are just my personal feelings about advice, and to leave on a hypocritical note — my favorite advice this year has come from Ashia Monet who upon waking up and finding me despairing over my first draft told me this: “You’ll be a better writer in a year than you are right now. Stop tinkering and write forward.” (P.S. You should totally subscribe to Lilith’s Muse — Ashia is wise.)

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thank you for reading today’s post and I’ll try not to be a stranger! Until next time.