From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:
This week, editor and former agent Nathan Bransford published a blogpost that I wanted to send to all the beginning writers I know. The title is: If You Think Writing is Easy you’re Probably Not Very Good At It.
It’s a little harsher than what we usually hear from good-natured Nathan. (I’ve met him IRL and he’s a sweetheart.) But I understand why he wrote it. He’s been reading unpublished manuscripts for over 20 years and he keeps seeing the same mistakes. He says he can always tell a manuscript is going to be awful if he sees one of two things in the query —
- The writer brags about his own abilities.
- The writer claims all the books being published today are awful.
I have an editor friend who’s dealing with two beginning writers who vastly overestimate their own writing skills. Because they’re both volatile and self-absorbed, she has had to tread lightly with them. She sometimes calls me to vent, and she loved Nathan’s piece, too.
After talking to her, I realized there are some misconceptions an awful lot of beginning writers have stuck in their heads. Those misconceptions keep them from understanding what it takes to learn professional-level writing skills.
I believed a lot of this stuff myself when I was starting out, and I hate to think of all the cringey things I said and did before I finally got it.
Writing a Book Makes You a Writing Expert
This is a biggie. Not every writer suffers from imposter syndrome. Some have the opposite problem. They think writing one whole book means they’ve learned all there is to know about writing. After all, it took them 5 years to finish the thing. And it’s 500K words! They don’t need no stinkin’ writing classes. Why doesn’t anybody recognize their genius? The whole system is rigged!!
But, as Nathan says, “No one sits down and simply paints the Mona Lisa. Whether you realize it or not, you’re going to start off writing the equivalent of crude stick figures.”
It takes a long, long time to learn the skills it takes to be a professional novelist. You can’t just say “I have a computer and I can write an English sentence, so I’m Stephen King.” But an amazing number of people do.
Current Bestsellers are a Trashy Waste of Time.
Reading what is currently selling — especially in your genre — is the only way to know what your audience is looking for. It also tells you what’s been done to death.
I was such an ignoramus when I started out, I didn’t even know my first novel was in a hot new genre they were calling “chick lit.” And I wasn’t reading it. I was reading classic mysteries, literary women’s fiction, and authors like Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen. Great writers, yes, but mostly not current and not my genre.
Reading classics is fine, but when we’re trying to enter a business, we need to know what products people are buying now — not what sold 100 or even 10 years ago.
When I finally got an agent, she sent me to the bookstore with a list of titles. I was embarrassed I didn’t even know most of them.
Confidence Sells: Fake it Till You Make it.
Unfortunately, too much confidence in beginning writers is simply evidence of the Dunning Kruger effect. I talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect in last week’s post on beta readers, and Nathan brings it up too. It’s the scientific study that shows people who are most ignorant about a subject are the most confident.
These are the people who are so good at faking it, they’re never going to make it.
Dunning-Kruger people are the ones who are sure their snoozerific memoir is going to sell better than the Bible and say so in their queries. They love to pontificate, and generally use 20 big words when 2 small ones will do.
They also give out tons of terrible advice to their fellow authors.
A couple of weeks ago, bestselling crime writer Sue Coletta made a comment on Ruth’s post that resonated with a lot of us. She talked about the unpublished writer who gave other writers cruel and clueless advice. Those types abound in critique groups, so beware.
Sue said: “Early on, I took the advice of an unpublished writer who thought he knew everything. This guy got off on tearing apart other writers. The deeper he cut, the better he felt about himself…Interestingly enough, twelve years later, he’s still unpublished.”
Yup. Sue’s former tormenter is a Dunning Kruger poster child. Unless he has a major epiphany, he’s never going to be published. That’s because these people are incapable of learning anything — because they’re sure they know it already.
These people generally can’t hear a word that’s said to them, because when they’re not talking, they’re thinking of what they’re going to say next. They’re stuck in a narcissistic bubble that no information can penetrate.
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris
PG doesn’t ever recall scorning anyone who lacks an understanding of the law. Those sorts of people used to comprise most of his client base. Did some of them make silly mistakes? Yes, they did, but they were still clients, no less welcome than those who hadn’t made silly mistakes. They were all God’s children, after all, who were asking for some help with a problem they couldn’t solve.
Absent human nature and human failings, most lawyers would have very little to do.
There is something about more than a few people in traditional publishing or published by traditional publishers that seems to compel them to trash anyone who may be interested in publishing or self-publishing as being irremediably ignorant and stupid.
PG’s psychiatric assessment is that the less real talent the trashmasters possess, the more they try to shore up their self-esteem by showering contempt on those who do not “know” as much as the trashmasters think they know.
End of rant.
If following the mechannical steps of story construction worked (outline, write, revise, garner critical comments, rewrite, polish, submit), they would work every time for every writer.
The longer you opt for the shortcut of constructing (not creating) stories block by block like ‘everybody else’ does it, the longer your work will sound like ‘everybody else’ wrote it.
The only path to that original, unique voice even all the big traditional publishers say they’re looking for is to trust in your creative subconscious and convey the story that your characters, not you, are living.
As is the case in every other endeavor on Earth, the only way to become a competent professional fiction writer is to PRACTICE (put new words on the page), not hovering over one work in an attempt to perfect it.
If you follow these rules, would will succeed. John Smith followed them and he succeeded. Pay no attention to that crowd over there that followed the rules and failed.
“PG doesn’t ever recall scorning anyone who lacks an understanding of the law.”
But these people are presenting themselves as professionals. How does PG feel about lawyers who lack an understanding of the law? Or, if we take them as prospective professionals, how would PG feel about a 1L on a summer internship who showed these traits?
PG is unhappy when lawyers screw up in dumb ways, such as those you pointed out. The only exception to that general sentiment is when opposing counsel screws up. PG loves it when that happens.
On a more serious note, there’s a difference between making a dumb statement/decision and committing malpractice. One of the easiest way to commit malpractice is to fail to file a document with the court during the time permitted by law or court rules. Such a failure can result in that attorney’s client losing big. On the few occasions where I observed this had happened, I called the attorney to point out the omission.
Some lawyers say that doing such a thing is not zealously representing one’s client.
Whenever I took such an action, my client was never harmed. Much of the time, the favor given to opposing counsel was a key reason why the case was settled without going to court.
My client benefitted by saving the cost of a trial on the merits which would have meant her/his award of damages would have been diminished by my attorneys fees given that preparing for and trying a court case is expensive. In the case I’m thinking of, my client received more money than he would likely have netted after paying the cost of a trial on the merits of the case.
Opposing counsel was spared the embarrassment of screwing up in a major way and paying a large deductible to her/his malpractice insurance carrier. Opposing counsel’s client was benefited by not having a large default judgement imposed upon her/him and likely being required to spend a lot of money, perhaps borrowed, to satisfy a judgment that would likely have been higher than the amount negotiated for as a settlement.
PG benefitted by not gaining opposing counsel as a bitter enemy and a diminution of PG’s reputation as being a quality lawyer who got things done in an efficient, ethical and legal manner. Such a reputation spreads among the local legal community, including local judges.
For PG and any other lawyers who learned about the matter and how it was resolved, each would have shared a feeling something like, there but for the grace of God go I.
There is also a heaping portion of he who lives by the sword dies by the sword involved in taking a default judgment at the expense of opposing counsel.