Bad Writing Advice

Why would I tell you how to write badly? Or give you bad writing advice? Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, writer, and writing consultant. Among her books are Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity and Psychology Today saw some merit in having Perry produce 11 Types of Bad Writing Advice.My first reaction was to jump on it and see how I could turn it all about to provide a quick fix of "good writing advice". I'm not alone in an effort to improve life by thinking positive, casting fresh French baguettes across the ocean, as it were. If what goes around comes around, it might as well be nourishing and gourmet! So, let's see what we can do with Ms. Perry's list of bad advice to avoid: anything that limits, cramps, narrows, demeans, distracts, diverts, straitjackets, inhibits, stymies, cripples or dictates.

"Well, duh!" I thought. No, wait. There must be value here or the magazine would not have posted this blog entry, right? Let's apply critical thinking to the kinds of suggestions I give people who want to be writers or to develop their writing skills. The first that comes to mind is the one Jane Friedman uses as the title of her blog: There are no rules! And I realized Perry's piece provides examples of the types of "rules" tossed at newbies like live grenades.

The idea is to not adopt any attitude or practice that shackles you to just one way of thinking, behaving, writing, form, or style. You may think, "That's no help, Lady!", which brings me to my second iota of writing wisdom: It's all guidance, suggested methods to try out and discard if it doesn't work for you. Some of them mean, "Don't do this in excess in one piece of writing." Let me illustrate with Perry's last piece of exaggeration:

Avoid adverbs; never use the passive voice; don't start a sentence with "there are." Every one of these "rules" has been broken repeatedly to terrific effect by top writers. And while there are established formats for query letters, nonfiction book proposals, and novel synopses, for every successful sale based on those formats, there's a major exception.

Aye, here's the rub: the people we are dumping all this advice upon are not "top writers". They are the "bottom writers" (especially if they're pantsers, if you will!) I don't encourage a vertical hierarchy about much in life, so I prefer to refer to those at the center and those on the periphery, hoping to work their way into the swirl that is the writing galaxy. Those at the center did not get far if they began and persisted in "exception" mode.

The idea is first to learn to write well. When you are just starting out, don't lean on the crutches of adverbs, adjectives, do-nothing verbs, colorless nouns and "there are" constructions. You need to strengthen your writing with strong action verbs and descriptive nouns.

Just because John Updike wrote in first person and sometimes used mundane openers like "It wasn't so much that ...", peppered his works with long adjectival passages and didn't hesitate to pop in an adverb to modify an already carefully chosen verb, doesn't mean that your writing will shine if you this do, too, if that's all you can do. Updike was/is one of the brilliant suns we revolve around because of all the other writing woven through these "broken rules", brilliance that can support the lesser structures.

Yeah, yeah. Fly away! Be free! But first begin with some grounding in the basics. It's sort of like sending children to any Sunday School, so that they will have something to rebel against when it comes time to choose for themselves what to believe. Writers, like children, need a context and structure to get them off to a good start.

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