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6:06am September 25, 2014

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

I think my knee-jerk defiance to writing advice comes from my years in high school, because a lot of it was bullshit and actively undermining my intelligence, and when you’re new to something, it can be hard to tell if someone’s telling you something because they’re pushing an unfounded ideal on you or because it actually works.

Also, a lot of writing critique and writing advice is stupid, self-contradictory, and pretentious.

Yeah I remember getting a lot of really horrible writing advice in school.

One of the biggest ones was that the word “said” is boring, so we would have to go through and replace “said” with every possible long, pretentious substitute that would jar the reader out of the act of reading.  And then the teachers would read actual good literature to us and marvel out loud at the fact that this was supposed to be good literature but they kept using “said”, and that this meant we could be better writers than them if we went through and replaced every instance where they wrote “said”, with something else.  I wish I was kidding.

Also I see a lot of people online critiquing published writers on the basis of similar bullshit.  Like these are people who know that the “said” thing is bullshit.  But there’s a whole range of other things that are taught to people as “good writing” and “bad writing”, that are equally bullshit, or at least highly subjective.  So you’ll get people talking about what horrible writing Lord of the Rings contains, because it doesn’t read like a novel is “supposed to” read, or it has too many characters, or something along those lines.  And you can argue about a lot of things in Lord of the Rings (racism and sexism are my two biggest pet peeves there, and I’m a huge fan of the books, but holy crap the racism and sexism), but I don’t think it’s truly possible to say Tolkien is a “bad writer” just because he doesn’t write like a college writing workshop tells you to write.  Especially because the kind of novel that college writing workshops tend to want people to write, isn’t even the kind of novel he was setting out to write in the first place, so you can’t make these comparisons even if college writing workshops were a good measure of whether a novel is good or not.

But basically most of what I learned in junior high, high school, and college about how to tell good writing from bad writing was a bunch of stupid gimmicks that actually make your writing worse if you follow the advice.