A young woman asks for writing advice. It’s an understandable request. She wants to be a writer and has found something in my stuff she enjoys. That’s gratifying, as praise usually is except when it’s smarmy and sounds fishy.
I’ve never
asked for writing advice and I try to avoid handing it out. Advice of any sort
is risky. If someone takes it and the results aren’t what he or she expected,
resentment festers. Advice not taken can rile the advice giver. Share your
experience, if you must, not your diktats.
The closest
I’ll get to offering writing advice is rather self-evident: read and write all
you can. We learn from gifted practitioners, the people who know what they’re
doing, not the incompetent gasbags. Otherwise, practice, practice. The most
usefully pragmatic writing tips I’ve encountered can be found in “Writing on the Brain,” a book review by Joseph Epstein in the April 2004 issue of Commentary:
“I was
recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: First,
one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This
must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that
one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the
nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions
and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt,
lunacy – once you have these in place, you are set to go.”
2 comments:
With the advent of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, writing advice has become redundant. Somewhere out there, a computer sits waiting, pregnant with all the words we might ever need. If we beckon, then magic and comedy pour out.
I remember reading Epstein's book review. I'm always looking for ways to be a better reader. So far, I have found that reading a lot, reading slowly, and picking the right books is helpful.
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