Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice

I think &quot;don&#x27;t take other&#x27;s advice&quot; is just good advice in general, or at the very least &quot;be skeptical of other&#x27;s advice&quot;. I work in academic science where a lot of people of varying career stages are squished together in close proximity, and I encounter many situations where inexperienced and not that successful people are way too willing to shower even less experienced people with advice on how to live&#x2F;do things. This seems to be the most common with graduate students talking to slightly newer graduate students. It&#x27;s self-affirming for most people to give instructions and feel like they are being listened to, and I too often see this impulse outweighing the idea of the advice actually being useful.<p>For me personally, two things that determine if somebody is in a position to give me advice are:<p>1)Are they enjoying a level of success that I would like to achieve? 2)Is the environment in which they achieved success comparable to my own?

But there is a reason people seek advice: writing is hard.<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted to write, and I sought the help of some pretty good writers. They gave me great advice. But no amount of advice can be applied to a blank page.<p>So I wrote, pretty badly at first, you can see it on my blog.<p>Writing is hard. Imagine, you have an idea in your head, and you like it. You grab a keyboard and write it down, somehow you write something else, not the idea in your head. You have to force your brain to say what it means to say.<p>There is no problem with reading other&#x27;s advice, as long as you have some writing to apply it to. However, in my case I benefit more from reading what those people write, rather then read their advice.

I’d add to this that most “How to write” or “style guide” books aren’t useful. They can help you to turn really bad prose into serviceable prose, but they can’t make you a good writer. For that you need to spend thousands of hours reading the work of expert writers.<p>If you read a style guide like Strunk and White, you’ll come across a lot of nonsense. A particular bugbear of mine is the prohibition against passives, which is utter rubbish[0]. Don’t waste your time hunting down passives and split infinitives under the illusion that it will make your writing better. It won’t.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;suAASPc_s0A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;suAASPc_s0A</a>

This seems overly reactionary. Writing is hard, and specific, and the devil is always in the details as it relates to a person, so it&#x27;s almost nonsensical to give generally applicable writing advice. But, I don&#x27;t think that makes it impossible to give advice as it pertains to a particular style.<p>I&#x27;ve found that if you want to be a good writer, you need interesting material to draw from. That can come from your imagination, your lived experiences, other material you&#x27;ve read, or most likely all of the above, but you&#x27;re engaging in world building first and foremost. I particularly like this Faulkner quote:<p>“I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the ingestion and then the gestation. You’ve got to know the character. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a certain amount of picking and choosing among the possibilities of his action, so that his actions fit the character which you believe in. After that, the business of putting him down on paper is mechanical. Most of the the writing has got to take place up here before you ever put the pencil to the paper. But the character’s got to be true by your conception and by your experience, and that would include, as we’ve just said, what you’ve read, what you’ve imagined, what you’ve heard, all that going to giving you the gauge to measure this imaginary character by, and once he comes alive and true to you, and he’s important and moving, then it’s not too much trouble to put him down.”

The article is entirely about work patterns; when and where to write, and how to find motivation to do so. For that kind of thing, the advice &quot;find what works for you&quot; is better advice than &quot;do what works for me&quot;. (Although the latter advice still often helps.)<p>But <i>writing</i> advice is another thing entirely. Learning to think about your audience while writing is every bit as amenable to advice as learning to think about the processor&#x27;s branch prediction while coding. Advice like &quot;form a chain from stress position to topic position&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanscientist.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-long-view&#x2F;the-science-of-scientific-writing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanscientist.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-long-view&#x2F;the-sci...</a>), or the &quot;arcs of coherence&quot; from Steven Pinker&#x27;s <i>The Sense of Style</i>. Human perception processes language in understood ways. Conforming to those expectations requires learning from advice.

The best advice I ever heard: Every text you read is both an advice how to write and an advice how not to.

I think the only advice you need is:<p>- if you are creating figures: research and be empathic to the real reasons why people act like they do. Observe life<p>- be aware of the functions certain words, phrases, sentences or sections fulfill in the system of your text<p>- become a good reader: if you’re sensitive to language, this can be your failsafe, it will protect you from writing things you didn’t intend<p>- Just write and don’t be afraid to throw things out.<p>- don’t overly rely on dramatic systems, because you will end up telling low impact predictable stories like everybody else

I think that is self contradictory.