The Mythcreant Podcast 479 – Spotting Bad Writing Advice
We try our best to give actionable writing advice that makes stories better, but, unfortunately, not everyone else follows the same code. There’s a lot of terrible writing advice out there, much of it dressed up specifically to tell writers what they want to hear. This week, we’re talking about how you can spot it before throwing away perfectly good money. Whether or not you think our own advice is good, you’ll be forewarned about anything that sounds too good to be true.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: Chris
Oren: and
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: Good news, everyone! If we just follow this five step writing advice book, $19.99 with shipping, we’re all gonna be best sellers in no time!
Chris and Bunny: Woo. Wow. Wow.
Oren: Yeah, it’s that easy. The first piece of advice is to stop plotting your story.
Bunny: Second piece of advice, write.
Oren: It might be. You have to write, writers write. This is definitely deep wisdom, and we are- instead of plotting your story, we’re going to scheme our story.
Bunny:Ooh.
Chris: Oh, I see. Plotting is bad, but scheming, story scheming is good.
Oren: Yeah. We’ve defined plotting as plots that are bad, and so plots that are good will now be referred to as schemes.
Bunny: I can drum my fingers together and stroke a long hair cat while I scheme.
Oren: That’s my favorite part about British English is that the word scheme doesn’t seem to have the negative context that it does in American English. So you just hear people casually refer to the scheme for a new bike path.
[laughter]Oren: Sounds so evil.
Bunny: [as an evil villain] Ooh, transportation! Ahhahaha.
Oren: So today we are talking about signs of bad writing advice ’cause man, have I seen a lot of that recently. I’m not gonna mention most of them by name because if people haven’t already heard of them I don’t want to just be doing free advertising. So instead I’m hopefully gonna give you the tools to spot them on your own. And then if you find them in the wild, you will at least be forewarned.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely an invasive species.
Oren: Yeah. [chuckles]
Chris: I do think it’s worth when thinking about advice first, thinking about what your ultimate goal is from getting advice. What are you actually trying to achieve so that you can make sure that your advice achieves that? And at Mythcreants we’re really focused on helping our readers make their story more engaging so it lands better with readers. We have some pieces on improving writer’s happiness as well, and various things like that.
But most of our content is you want to make your story more engaging for readers, and that’s the result that we’re aiming for. Other places might be narrowly focused on trying to increase your output. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s a different goal than what we’re aiming for. There are many places that are more focused on creating content that appeals to writers in some way without getting results.
Oren: You can tell a lot of bad advice is basically just telling writers what they want to hear.
Bunny:It’s a good hustle. You gotta admit.
Oren: It is a good way to sell stuff. It’s just not what most writers actually want, at least not in my experience. What most writers are doing is they’re trying to do the same thing we are, which is they’re trying to make books that their readers will like. Otherwise, you don’t really need advice. You just write whatever you feel like.
If you don’t care about the reader experience, none of this matters, but, and most places pitch themselves as also wanting that but are just dishonest about it. The exception to this are the word count fanatic people who just say ‘it doesn’t matter if your book is good, just write, write, write more, and then maybe you’ll make money.’ At least they are sometimes honest that they don’t care if the book is good or not.
Chris: They’re not always honest, though. Sometimes they’ll be like, ‘just write, write, write, and then like magically, your books will get better.’ Without you paying any attention to making your books better.
Bunny: Any advice that says your first draft is best we should all know that’s wrong. Anyone who’s written anything…
Oren: That one’s not hard to spot.
Chris: If you really- all you want to do is write first drafts, and you’re willing to be like, ‘okay, well this final stories I create aren’t gonna be that good. This is what I care about.’ I’m not gonna tell somebody that’s the wrong way to do it, and it’s not impossible to get- make better first drafts as you go. But like usually these places are very much, don’t pay any attention to quality. Don’t try to think about what’s good or bad or what will make your story better and the problem will just magically solve itself.
Bunny: Look, stories are made up of words. The more words, the better.
[laughter]Bunny: The more story it is.
Chris: At the very least, if you’re gonna practice, you have to know what the difference is between the result you want and the result you don’t want as a result of practicing. If you were practicing the piano and you couldn’t recognize the difference between when you got a note right and you got a note wrong, there would be problems. You wouldn’t necessarily get that much better by practicing. There’s a lot of advice that it may be fun or it may be motivational, or it may feel good in some other way.
But that’s just different than advice that meets the goal that you’re trying to meet by getting advice and that, I think that’s just an important thing to think about; what is it that you want? And if all you want is to feel better when you’re feeling down and the advice does that, okay, but that’s different from it actually getting some kind of result.
Oren: If I just want to get some self-esteem boost and I’m gonna go check this advice site that’ll tell me all these fun meditation techniques I can do before I write, great. That might help you. Maybe those will get your words flowing, who knows? But it won’t teach you story craft. And if it, if they promise that it will- they are lying to you.
Bunny: There’s a few things that I think are worth noting that they might pitch themselves as writing device, but they are by definition disqualified from being writing advice. One of those, and I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail, this writing is inborn type of thing. Anything that prefaces its advice with that is disqualified from being advice ’cause advice needs to be doing something. And if writing is inborn, you don’t gotta do anything! You’re just magically [a] writer.
Chris: It’s not impossible. And I’ve seen writing books, books that are supposed to be about writing and storytelling, where the person’s, ‘you have to be like a born writer.’ And they’ll try to make the excuse that like, ‘oh, but if you are a natural born writer, then advice could help you.’ [laughter] At the very least, anybody who’s doing that is creating excuses for themself if their advice isn’t effective. Because anytime their teaching doesn’t work, they could just be like, ‘that’s because that- blame the person, blame their student for their own failure. It’s a very bad sign.
Oren: Anyone who is creating a set of criteria in which it is impossible for them to fail because if they get a good result, then they succeeded, and if they got a bad result, it was someone else’s fault; go away from those people. They are not honest and there’s no reason to think they will be honest about anything else. Speaking of dishonest, I think the biggest flag that is really easy to spot and that you can immediately notice is when they promise you that this book will make you some level of success. This advice will make you a bestseller, or this course will make your book great and will make readers love it. I’m sorry. No one can promise that.
Bunny: Unless this is like a publishing house, CEO, coming to be like, ‘write a book and I will publish it.’ Which is not advice, but that’s the closest thing you’re going to get to it.
Chris: There are some services that will claim that- what they’ll do is like, ‘oh, follow it. If you follow this perfectly, we’ll publish you.’ But there’s always some caveat where they’ll take the cream of the crop. It’s just another submissions, or they’ll make it extremely complicated so they always have some way of coming back and being like, ‘you didn’t follow this.’ But there are places that will try to lure you in with the idea that you could get published from them and just in every single case, they’re just working like any other publishing house that takes tons of submissions and publishes a very small portion of them. There’s nobody that’s guaranteeing that they’ll publish you if you do X, Y, Z. They’re always finding some way around that.
Oren: Even in the bizarre scenario where the, you know, person in charge of a publishing house came to you from off the street or whatever, I was like, ‘I’m publishing your book.’ Even they couldn’t guarantee it would be a best seller. If they could do that, then the publishing industry would be in a much better place financially than it is now.
[laughter]Bunny: That’s true. They can market the hell out of it, but that doesn’t mean people will enjoy it.
Chris: If you are already a very famous writer who’s… all writings are of yours are popular because you’re a big name. Sure. [chuckles]
Oren: Unless you’re that one guy from Hyperion whose book sold like, a trillion copies and then everyone magically knew not to buy his next book because the poetry was too good.
[laughter]Bunny: What?
Oren: That’s my favorite plot point in Hyperion. One of the characters is a writer and he wrote this book that sold a million bazillion copies and then he wrote another book and no one bought it. And the explanation is supposed to be that the masses are not smart enough to appreciate his amazingly deep poetry. But how did the masses know that the book was full of poetry they couldn’t get? They had all already bought his last book. Did they all just like go and read the critical reviews? And make carefully considered decisions like, ‘I don’t think I would enjoy this poetry after reading these reviews and cross-referencing it with how reliable I found those reviewers,’ my God!
Chris: Like his first book is as popular as the Bible or something. I feel like his next book would be a bestseller even if it was very bad, [chuckles] because at that point he’s a brand name, right?
Bunny: Are there examples of this magical poetry in the book?
Oren: Is- there is some of it. I, I think I, I honestly don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read Hyperion. That was clearly just the author expressing their angst about how people don’t read books anymore. Which was funny because during the time when that book was written, the reading level of the United States was going up. Again, it’s gone down more recently, but not like the sky is falling levels. People don’t read as much as they used to, but they still read a lot and there’s at least some data to show they are actually buying more books than they used to, even though they aren’t reading them which is weird but not bad for writers.
Bunny: Oh, I feel like that’s an attack on me actually.
[laughter]Oren: Look at what it promises to do. There is a reason Mythcreants does not promise that we can help you, that we can make your book sell good or that we can even make it good. All we promise is that we will do our best to help you.
Bunny: Here’s the promise I will turn you- You’ll wake up one morning and look down at yourself and realize you are Brandon Sanderson.
[laughter]Oren: That’s good. I like that. That’s a good promise. I’m into this now.
[laughter]Chris: All you have to do is follow these seven steps and the seventh step is becoming Brandon Sanderson. Admittedly, the directions for that stuff are a little vague, but you sure you, if you do become Brandon Sanderson as directed, you will be a bestselling author.
Bunny: Then the next step is profit. Easy.
Oren: You just put that Wired article about him under your pillow for like a week and then you’re good to go, I think. I think that’s how it happens.
[laughter]Chris: Another sign that I think is worth paying attention to because people kind of don’t think about it, this distinction until we bleed it out to them often is, basically when process advice is used in place of craft advice.
Bunny: Gosh, I can’t stand that.
Chris: And again, just to explain anybody who is not familiar with these terms ’cause process advice is a term that we coined. [chuckles] So process advice is anything about how you go about your work habits. As opposed to craft advice, which is about what should be on the page, like what your final result in the story is, not how you come up with that final result. For instance, dialogue craft advice would be like, ‘Hey, people don’t actually use each other’s names in dialogue that often. So that sounds unnatural.’ That’s something very specific. That’s about what you’re putting on the page.
Process advice would be like, ‘go listen to people. And take notes’ Because that’s about how you study. It’s not about the actual result that you get. And process advice definitely has its place. Like for instance, if you’re trying to raise your productivity, you’re gonna need process advice to do that. That’s a process result that you’re looking for. There’s other things that are just, again, hard to quantify without process advice in some way, shape, or form.
If people want advice on outlining, outlining is a process. Now, of course, a lot of people who want advice on outlining what they actually want is plotting advice. Parts of that can be difficult, but whatever process advice has its place. However, what tends to happen in lots of places is that people substitute process advice when craft advice is actually called for. So you try to get advice on characters and they tell you to write your characters backstory. As a way of getting to know the character without telling you, but what outcome do you want for this character on the page? We just talked about that when we were talking about what is character development actually for?
And when you see this, when you see lots of process advice in place of craft advice, it suggests the vice doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about. They don’t have the knowledge needed to give you that craft advice, or they are. So again, in that like romantic capital R mindset that they’re simply unwilling to express craft opinions that there’s like, oh, it’s all subjectivity and it comes from the muse and I couldn’t tell you what a good story is. Either way, they can’t really help you.
Bunny: It’s at best, it’s good for like giving you ideas for how you could like go about approaching something. Being like, you know, if you already have some idea about the craft part, you could be like, yeah, okay, maybe I can write the backstory of this character and see if that helps me, like get to know them better or whatever. But that’s not related to the actual craft of the thing. It’s just an idea for how you can get your juicy juices flowing.
Chris: Process advice isn’t banned, but like again, if it’s substituting when you actually need craft advice, is when it becomes a problem.
Oren: Because the same process can have very different results for different people. Like if you take that classic ‘listen to people talking and use that to prove your dialogue’ okay, but what am I listening for? I have definitely encountered some authors who that was a thought I had. It’s like ‘these people don’t talk like regular people. Maybe you should listen to the way regular people talk,’ but of course if that’s all you tell them, then they’re gonna end up copying all of the parts of how people talk that you don’t want in your dialogue. The stuff that we edit out as much as we can from the podcast. Otherwise, it would just be. Uh, right, you know-
Bunny: Awkward pauses.
Chris: And if you’re getting process advice from an editor or somebody who’s giving feedback on your work, the problem is that this is often a substitute for actually telling you what is wrong. If you write dialogue and it sounds unnatural, and they just tell you, ‘go listen to people’ they’re not telling you why your dialogue sounds natural or what about it is unnatural. And that can leave you completely unequipped to fix it, resolve the problem.
Bunny: Just create more problems at worst.
Oren: The next one that is a really big red flag that you need to be very careful of is vagueness. And this one’s harder to spot than some of the others. And this can be in both what a product you’re buying says it will do and the actual advice that it gives. Because a lot of courses and writing books and online classes kind of obscure what is actually in them. It can often mean you’re buying nothing of particular value. If you look at a writing course and it looks pretty cheap, it’s only $60, but then you see what does it include and it includes a bunch of blog posts.
Chris: Or resources! [dry chuckle] We have good advice. We have lessons. In this class, this class has class material. Lots of class material.
Oren: And if it’s not specific, it could just be that the class giver is going to send you 10 blog posts. That is not worth $60. If they tried to sell that as a book, they would get laughed out of town for $60. If they don’t tell you what’s actually in there, you can’t make that judgment for yourself. You just have to trust them. And I wouldn’t.
Chris: When it comes to the specifics, for instance, of a story. If we’re talking about craft advice that’s vague, this is also very commonly used for what I call pseudo structures where people are giving you what is supposed to be a story structure, but it doesn’t really work. And they’re trying to cover for that by making it vague. Like ‘your character should have a victory here, but by a victory we could also mean a defeat.’ [laughs] Or it’s so like, ‘oh, they will metaphorically come out of the bag.’ But, and that could be absolutely anything because it’s a metaphor. What they’re doing is making it so that you can’t actually pin their advice down or ever prove them wrong. It means that they don’t need to know what they’re talking about.
Bunny: The other thing with vague advice; it lacks nuance. Those story structures you’re talking about, just they have to be vague because they don’t account for everything. I’ve noticed this with the term like inciting incident in particular where a lot of the stories I’ve read, the thing that you might call that happened before the story started.
It starts in the middle of the story after it’s been kicked off. But then if you’re trying to warp around like inciting incident to fit that and you’re looking for like the next exciting thing, it’s either at like word zero is the inciting incident, or it’s like much further down the line after the first scene of the story has happened, which also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Oren: The inverse of this is hyper-specific advice, which is less common, but you still see it. And hyper-specific advice can be appealing to writers because it can make them feel like they just need to do whatever this book says. Because it’s, and it’s easy to follow. But the problem with hyper-specific advice is that it’s useless. If this actually worked, everyone would do that. And this is stuff like, I can actually say this one, because it’s famous, the Save the Cat, the original, the screenplay book has stuff like ‘at page 15, your hero must meet their arch enemy.’ Like why?
Bunny: Not all heroes in movies have arch enemies.
Oren: And those that do often the plot’s not gonna work for them to meet on page 15. Why would they? That’s a weird non-starter, and it just, for most novelists know better than that. Which is why in Save the Cat Writes A Novel, Brody takes those points and then vague-ifies them.
Chris: So they mean nothing instead of being hyper-specific.
Bunny: You swing back and forth. It’s a pendulum.
Oren: Because in Snyder’s version, ‘the midpoint is at exactly this page in the script your hero must have a false victory,’ which is silly. A lot of stories aren’t gonna have that, and so then Brody’s version is, ‘somewhere around the middle of your story, your hero must have a false victory or a false defeat, by which I mean a real victory or a real defeat, or a false victory or a false defeat.’ Anything in which your hero does or does not win something could qualify as long as it happens somewhere around the middle of the story.
Bunny: Your protagonist also has to do something. Or maybe they don’t.
Oren: Who knows? Authors of novels tend to not like super specific advice, so that I’m not as worried about that one, but it still is out there. People need to know about it.
Bunny: Usually it’s a tell when they can’t justify it. I’m sure the Save the Cat guy tried to justify the page 15 thing, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just like, ‘this is what successful screenplays do’ and then left it at that.
Oren: He waffles back and forth on that. Sometimes he gives weird justifications and sometimes he’s just like ‘a movie I like that made money did this so you should do it.’
Bunny: I mean, that is a justification, but it’s not a good one.
Oren: And like people get mad at us for this because they say that’s what we are doing with our stuff about things like turning points and character karma. But we’re not telling you that your story has to be a very specific thing. We are telling you things that it should have in it if you want to have certain effects. We’re not giving you like, ‘this is the instructions. This is what must happen in your story.’ That’s the difference to the extent that you can tell it.
Bunny: A story is not an IKEA shelf, guys.
Chris: I think well related, we’ve talked about this before, is trying to put all stories into a fixed number of categories. Which, and this is usually a very absolutist thing, where it’s like every single story is one of six types or one of… Save The Cat has like 15 genres or something? That he made up [laughs] from movies and they never work. Every time we look at them, they do not work. And I think theoretically, one of the reasons they can’t work (it’s impossible for them to work), for one thing they never take into account the fact that some stories are bad and poorly formed.
There’s some mix up between what’s descriptive or if we’re talking about prescriptive in a constructive way as opposed to prescriptive, meaning overly pedantic. Where when we give advice, and this is the thing is that lots of other people, other than Mythcreants, try to avoid criticizing stories. The idea is that every bestseller is a success story and that’s what we’re trying to get and so we never wanna criticize them, but it doesn’t fit the reality of the fact that stories have flaws and lots of them aren’t doing a lot of things right.
And every time you try to say, ‘Hey, this is the ideal formula,’ if you try to fit all stories into it, including the really janky ones that have no plot and only worked because they were just like really novel when they first came out but everybody would find them boring now, that doesn’t work. There has to be some division between best practices and not as good practices.
Bunny: I think people make the mistake of assuming that what’s in a popular work, it’s like in its best and most ideal form which is not necessarily the case. And then that any changes you suggest or criticisms you make would therefore be tacked on or like distract from the essence of it. I ran into this in a class where I brought up that it’s kind of weird that Parable of the Sower doesn’t even mention queer people, especially since Butler’s other stuff has dealt with themes like that. And I had gotten into a huge argument with classmates about… They were like, ‘oh no, it would be shoehorned in if she included it.’ I was like, ‘why do we assume that it would be shoehorned in? Don’t we trust Butler to like, include things gracefully?’
Oren: When something’s a classic people cannot imagine it any other way. So if you talk about, say for example, how Lord of the Rings could have been different, all they imagine is that you’re taking away Lord of the Rings. They cannot imagine that there could have been a better version of that story that we never got to see. And that’s just a problem with classics. That’s why it’s hard to talk about best practices in terms of classics, just because they have calcified in people’s minds and they just must always be that way.
Bunny: Which is really annoying.
Oren: It’s a problem. It’s one reason why we don’t only talk about classics. People are more willing to accept that newer stuff maybe could have been different.
Bunny: It’s also worth noting, back to your point, Chris, it’s a big thing in philosophy of art that if you have a theory of what is art that doesn’t include bad art, then you have a bad theory of art. [laughter] Because there is bad art out there. If your, if your criteria is like, ‘all art is beautiful,’ there’s some ugly ass art out there, I gotta say!
Chris: But again, when we’re talking about what is our goal with writing advice, if our goal is to improve our writing in some way, then by definition when we’re trying to create useful categories we are not trying to include the bad stuff. And so the lack of recognition that we have to make a distinction between good and bad quality on some level, even if it’s a fine line and lots of shades on the spectrum, is always gonna leave people astray.
Besides the fact that, of course, stories are highly variable, and the idea of trying to put them into categories that are useful is almost impossible just because of… the natural variety that they have is so great. And we have categories sometimes, but it’s very much, ‘Hey, here are some easy starter categories that you can use, but we’re not trying to claim that everything fits into them. These are just some easier, simple ways to get started.’ Like our blog posts on six turning points for climaxes, there’s six types of turning points that are very common that we see a lot. We don’t try to pretend that everything fits into one of them.
And then I have another blog post that explains more of the mechanics of how turning points work without sorting them into categories. So it’s a little more broad and flexible. We see lots of places that are desperately trying to give writers that ‘here, just follow these easy steps. Here’s how you do storytelling without having to think too hard.’ I don’t think that works. You’re gonna have to think about it storytelling’s-
Bunny: It’s not easy!
Chris: It’s not that simple.
Oren: And we’re almost outta time. So one thing that I wanna mention before we go is the last thing to really look out for is; anything that is presenting itself as a quick fix. A simple solution to a complex problem, and you have things like ‘if you just follow the hero’s journey, you won’t have to plot a story.’ ‘If you just use the Virgin’s promise, you won’t have to do character arcs because these will just tell you how to do them.’ ‘If you just use Kishotenketsu, you won’t have to have conflict or tension.’
The thing that- keep in mind for these quick fixes is that you have to remember that most other people are about as smart as you are, and if these things actually worked, everyone would use them. The fact that other people aren’t doing that, or at least are not doing it in a way that is noticeably successful, can show you that this is obviously not a thing that actually works. Because if you could figure it out, other people could too.
Bunny: I’m guessing actually this isn’t much of a guess that, because I’m sure that Save the Cat and Save the Cat Writes A Novel, have sold like a quadrillion copies each, and that doesn’t mean we now have a quadrillion bestsellers.
Oren: That was the thing I pointed out in my critique of Save the Cat Writes A Novel is like, ‘well, this book promised miracles and I haven’t seen any yet.’ All of the really glowing reviews of it from authors who were successful before it came out. Feels like if it could do the things it said it could do, we would already have a bunch of authors who were super successful saying that it was all thanks to Save the Cat. So with that, I think we’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank two of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel.
And second is Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]
This has been the Mythcreant Podcast opening, closing theme. The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.