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I keep hearing and reading articles from many people who claim to have advice on how to "write well." I've read that people prefer the active voice over the passive voice, the immediate past or present vs. the past or present perfect, etc. I've been told to keep sentences short and to-the-point among other things.
As of now, I am beginning to question the worth of pretty much every article, guide, or class that's ever claimed to teach people how to write fiction well. You only need to look at Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" to see what I mean. The story is descriptive, to be sure, but it's also full of passive voice and severely underdeveloped characters, which didn't stop it from becoming a much-discussed and extremely popular piece of fiction.
Shirley Jackson said that she wrote the story very quickly in a span of a couple of hours, and personally, I think it shows. I find the story's prose to be very sluggish, but I cannot say that it isn't a well-told tale that gets its point across in an efficient manner. Do the two go hand-in-hand? Must they go hand-in-hand?
You can teach people how to write grammatically (although Cormac McCarthy and others have promptly ignored mainstream grammatical rules and enjoyed great success regardless). You can teach people to write active sentences and deliberately craft a story to be "in the moment." You can teach them to avoid exposition, how to build suspense. You can teach them how to write salable stories and easily digestible fiction that's easy to read.
What's impossible to do, in my opinion, is teach people how to actually write a good tale. Case in point, Jackson's story does away with most, if not all of the above.
In your opinion, what is the best and worst piece of writing advice you've ever been given, and what made you think that the advice was good or bad? I'm interested to hear your opinions.
As of now, I am beginning to question the worth of pretty much every article, guide, or class that's ever claimed to teach people how to write fiction well. You only need to look at Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" to see what I mean. The story is descriptive, to be sure, but it's also full of passive voice and severely underdeveloped characters, which didn't stop it from becoming a much-discussed and extremely popular piece of fiction.
Shirley Jackson said that she wrote the story very quickly in a span of a couple of hours, and personally, I think it shows. I find the story's prose to be very sluggish, but I cannot say that it isn't a well-told tale that gets its point across in an efficient manner. Do the two go hand-in-hand? Must they go hand-in-hand?
You can teach people how to write grammatically (although Cormac McCarthy and others have promptly ignored mainstream grammatical rules and enjoyed great success regardless). You can teach people to write active sentences and deliberately craft a story to be "in the moment." You can teach them to avoid exposition, how to build suspense. You can teach them how to write salable stories and easily digestible fiction that's easy to read.
What's impossible to do, in my opinion, is teach people how to actually write a good tale. Case in point, Jackson's story does away with most, if not all of the above.
In your opinion, what is the best and worst piece of writing advice you've ever been given, and what made you think that the advice was good or bad? I'm interested to hear your opinions.