Andrea’s post from Monday got me thinking (as Andrea’s posts will do) about bad advice. I get bad advice all the time and I probably give my fair share of bad advice, as well. But I’m not talking about advice of the “have-another-piece-of-pie” or “don’t-bother-to-take-a-hat” variety. No, I’m talking about bad writing advice. The problem with bad advice is that you don’t always recognize it as such right away, particularly if you are new to taking workshops or if the advice comes from an agent or an editor in the 212 area code.
Now, of course, most of the advice I’ve received in workshops is incredibly valuable and perceptive and does nothing but make my work better. Occasionally, however, there are misfires. It took me a long time to understand that I didn’t have to take every piece of advice from every workshopper in every session. I think this is particularly true when workshopping a longer piece – say a novel or a book-length memoir. When you only submit a small section of a larger work, it can be difficult for fellow workshoppers to see the bigger picture. During my first years of workshopping with Lighthouse, I remember turning myself in knots trying to incorporate all of the contradictory advice I received. Finally, while struggling with a particularly vexing piece of advice, my workshop instructor gave me some good advice. It went something like this: Stop it! Basically, he told me to stop worrying so much about individual feedback and start listening for the consensus. It seems simple, but like so many truths I needed to be smacked over the head with it. Subtlety is not my strong suit.
I’ve also received bad advice from people who are not writers, who have no concept of what it means to sit down in front of an empty page and painstakingly fill it with something you hope rings true. An acquaintance once asked me about my writing and as I (stupidly) answered in too much detail about a particular agent I was trying to woo, he interrupted me. “You shouldn’t write for other people,” he told me. “You should just write for yourself.” He then poured himself a glass of wine and sipped smugly as if that was everything that needed to be said on the subject. I was stunned. I remember being angry and losing my appetite and wishing that we’d never agreed to have dinner with this person. It took me a while to figure out why I was so offended, but it came down to this. I write stories and a story’s power exists in the sharing. If I wanted to “just write for myself,” I would keep a diary and call it a day. I’ve often wished I had the presence of mind to say all this at the time instead of seething mutely over my pasta, but not enough to have dinner with said person again. Oh, I can hold a grudge.
Then there are the family members. My father, my dear, adoring father, once gave me this gem: Why don’t you write one of those Harry Potter-type books? Why, indeed! I love my father, but this is a man who once believed with all his heart that I might grow up and be Miss America someday. We have different ideas of success is all I’m saying. And of reality.
Needless to say, bad advice from folks who don’t write can be amusing in retrospect, but bad advice from those folks who are supposed be “experts” really stings. In shopping around my first novel, I was fortunate enough to get manuscript requests from a number of good agents only to be rejected by all those agents because the story was “too quiet.” One agent in particular, however, took the time to write me a single-spaced, two-page letter about my novel. She extolled the voice, the writing, the characters, the setting, but felt, ultimately, that it might work better as a short story. Upon receiving that missive, I put the novel into a drawer and curled up in a metaphorical fetal position for a goodly number of months. The thing is, she was just saying what all the other agents said, but in a more cutting way. There was not, it seemed, enough meat on the bone. I can see that now and I don’t disagree, but I can’t help thinking that advising an author to cut 300 pages down to 25 isn’t great advice for all sorts of reasons.
The thing about writing and reading other people’s writing is that it’s all so subjective. We can agree on the rules (and then break them) or recognize a particularly florid bit of purple prose. We know when we like something and when we don’t, but it’s often difficult to explain why. And one person’s great read is another person’s torture. Even the so-called experts can’t agree on much. I once received the following feedback from two different agents in less than an hour on the exact same piece of writing.
Agent One: You know, I don’t represent literary fiction. You should work with an agent who represents literary fiction.
Agent Two: This is too commercial for my list. I’m really interested in literary fiction.
Now, believe me, I understand that they were both just rejecting me in the nicest way possible, but at some point it is just confusing.
And, back to Andrea’s post, I too have been given the advice to stop worrying about submissions to literary magazines. It just doesn’t matter anymore, one agent told me. The truth is, I spend most of my time working on novels so I don’t submit work to the lit mags all that often. Every now and then, however, I pen a shorter piece and I want to find a home for it. I want to share it because, well, that’s the point.
This type of advice also worries the reader in me. I read novels, but also lots of short stories, collected and not. I shudder to think what will become of the short story if we encourage those who write them to stop trying to get them published. Without those literary magazines, how will we gather our collections? How will the editors find the next author worthy of an entire book of stories? And what about the poets? How will we fall in love with an as-yet-unknown poet if there are no literary magazines? Work has to be published somewhere before an author has the clout to interest a publisher in a book. If not in literary magazines, then where?
So, in the interest of not contributing to the deluge of bad advice out there, I’ll say only this: Write, Revise, Submit. Repeat as necessary.
Good luck!
