One of my roles at work for a long time has been to write a type of report we do that's typified by extremely bureaucratic, tortured diction and strange structure laid down by tradition. Last week, I attended a course on how to edit others in writing these reports. That class was a sign that I'm slowly becoming an expert on writing these terrible things, which is to say I'm now good at bad writing. I feel sort of like Chandler Bing when he was forced to care about the WENUS, yelling at everyone who screwed up the report that he also screwed up when he started his job.
During the class, I tried to memorize material and then forget it. I'm always worried that bad work writing will leach into my writing, which I want to be nothing like work writing. There was one moment from the class, though, that I thought might actually transfer outside the walls of work. When reviewing strategies for mentoring new report writers, the instructors warned us that the better the writer, the more that writer might resist corrections.
I can't argue the truth of this in the real world. The more we meet with success, the more we tend to ignore advice. There's probably a lot of sense to this. Lebron James probably ignored a lot of advice from coaches when he was young, because that advice was meant for normal people, not for Lebron James. Good writers probably cruised through their earliest writing assignments without much work and without really paying attention to what teachers told them.
I learned to write, initially, from reading, internalizing, copying, and then, finally, synthesizing what I'd read into my own style. That was good enough to get me a long, long way. But just like any pro athlete, I--and nearly all writers--hit a point somewhere along the line where I needed someone to tell me something to get me to the next level. Failure to adapt would mean being good and never great.
Obviously, whether I've made this switch from instinctual writing to writing refined by an expert eye is an open question, since I'm still struggling to break out in a more definitive sense. There are two mutually opposed truths I'm confronted with whenever I think of using advice to improve:
1) If my writing were really that good, it wouldn't keep getting rejected so often, so I probably need some advice, but
2) Most of the advice I'm likely to get is probably bad.
Advice: damned if you listen and damned if you ignore it
One of the only useful things I learned from the many writing workshops I attended in grad school is that if you put ten people in a room to talk about a story, you'll get ten different opinions on what works and what doesn't. The exact same thing that some people say needs fixed is what others will say is the strength of the story. Even when there is an opinion shared by the majority, this can often be the result of groupthink, rather than an opinion independently arrived at by several different people. Statistically speaking, most advice must be bad, because it's all over the place and it can't all be right.
What I'm getting at is that ignoring most of the advice you will hear isn't being truculent or haughty; it's a necessary trait a good writer needs to develop. But ignoring all that bad advice will get you in such a habit of ignoring everything you hear, you run the risk of missing the one critical piece of advice you needed to get you over the top.
How does one know which five percent of advice to listen to? I mean, if I knew that what the person was saying was good advice, then I probably didn't even need the advice in the first place, did I? I feel like knowing what to listen to and what to ignore is itself just another innate ability of a great writer, one that I either have or I don't. As I get near the end of my fourth year of my mid-life writing revival with only a handful of small publications and one novel I can't seem to get an agent to bite on, I wonder if I have this talent. I'm down here just getting by in triple-A ball, and I need a coach to tell me how to make it to the majors.
I don't want to be in a workshop. Ideally, I'd like to have one good writer who gets what I'm about, knows my writing personally, and can give advice that will make me the best writer I can be according to my own style and ability. He won't try to coach Steph Curry to be Shaq, or Shaq to be Steph Curry. He'll know what works in my writing and what doesn't, and give advice that suits me. This has been a characteristic of many of the great writing friendships in history. It's hard to find something like that, though.
The funny thing is, I thought I was paying all that money 15 years ago to get something like this.
I simply cannot imagine Dante or Chaucer or Melville sitting around thinking someone could give him good advice if only he 'got him.' This reads to me like a modern construct that primarily benefits the market place and its gatekeepers. It doesn't mean that great authors were islands unto themselves. Cicero sent drafts to his friend, Atticus, who, in turn, made recommendations. But it just doesn't seem like quite the same psychological stance as what's being explored here.
ReplyDeleteThe literary friendship I have in mind will probably always be Melville and Hawthorne. Lewis and Tolkien might be second. Melville, it's clear from his correspondence with Hawthorne, was hungry for Hawthorne's approval. He fed on his relationship with Hawthorne while writing Moby Dick, at least for a while. Prior to Moby Dick, he'd written two mildly amusing adventures. Hawthorne unlocked something in him. The friendship didn't last, unfortunately, but Melville was never the same writer again.
DeleteBut that's a friendship, like Cicero and Atticus, perhaps. What you were describing above read somewhat differently to me.
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