There is a lot of advice out there for writers, and almost all of it is good advice for someone. It’s not all or even mostly good advice specifically for you, because about half of it contradicts the other half. The real writing advice, always, is to find what works for you and then do that.
What works for me is meticulous outlining, character planning, and (when the story calls for it) detailed worldbuilding all worked out well in advance and saved in anywhere from two to four separate documents in a file for whatever novel I’m planning to work on. If you’re a writer who doesn’t engage much with the social media writing communities, or if you’re a very new writer, or if you’re not a writer but you read my blog, you may not know that what I am is usually called a plotter or a planner. That’s the method that works for me.
Some writers do not do any planning or outlining or anything like that at all. They have an idea and they start writing and they see where the story takes them. These people are magical wizards. I’m constantly impressed by the skill it must take to craft a cohesive narrative like that, much less a good cohesive narrative. These writers are sometimes called discovery writers, but more often they’re called pantsers (because they’re flying by the seat of their pants when they write).
There are people who are somewhere in the middle, too.
None of them are wrong.
You know who is wrong? This guy answering the question here.
There is no one right way to be a writer. But there are lots of right ways to be an asshole.
I saw this on twitter last month and the main reason I didn’t make my disagreement known there is because this guy has a blue check account and I don’t want to contribute to his engagement and funding when he’s posting such absolutely garbage takes.
But I do want to talk about that line of thinking. Because it is dead wrong. Just absolute drivel. That tweet is a super worthless collection of words. If the guy who wrote that tweet ever stumbles upon this post I want him to know that however wrong he thinks I’m saying he is, he’s way more wrong than that. And it’s important to say so because there are a lot of writers out there who haven’t yet found themselves in a healthy writing community, who might see some total garbage like that and think it’s correct. If anybody who reads my blog is a beginning writer or knows a beginning writer and you see anyone saying anything like that, please don’t internalize it. Please don’t let absolute trash-tier takes like that stifle your words.
If you’re looking for advice on what it takes to be a writer, I’d lean much more in favor of what Chuck Tingle posted a couple days later on his own twitter account.
I mean, I do think you should probably write sometimes, if you want to be a writer (but then I think that writing is the best part of being a writer). But I also spent two entire years languishing in writer’s block hell and didn’t write a single word during those two years. I’m a writer now, I was a writer before those two years, and I was a writer having a rough time during those two wordless years.
There is no one way to write. There’s no one amount of writing that makes you “real.”
There’s lots of writing advice out there. Much of it contradicts itself. But the advice that’s always good is to write the way that works for you and to look for more advice from people who say the kinds of things Chuck Tingle was saying, not from people who say the kinds of things that Bad Take Guy was saying.
This blog post has been an excerpt from the March 2024 issue of my newsletter, C.J. Dotson’s Dreadful Dispatch. You can see other issues and, if you dig them, subscribe to my newsletter here.