I’m going to say that my least favorite writing advice is anything that falls into the category of an absolute rule that is given without an explanation. The worst of this usually comes from people trying to give advice for business or academic writing, whether it’s the omnipresent “NEVER USE PASSIVE VOICE” or the comical, crackpot theories of the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime]E-Prime[/url] crowd. I will defend the value of rules in writing, but in writing rules are things to notice, ways a writer can train themselves to be more aware. They aren’t any good on their own without an intention behind them; writing can serve so many different functions no rule could apply to every single piece of prose. What is universally valuable to a writer is a well-honed intuition, to think deeply about writing and care about the even the smallest aspects of it; through that the writer gains more tools for whatever goal they choose. 

To illustrate a frequent rule and try to give it context, I’ll talk about using said to tag dialog. The use of said is an example of a deliberate choice which is not flashy but is respected even among the most highbrow literary circles today. If someone went to Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the closest thing American Literature has to a factory for acclaimed authors, and submitted a story that was otherwise conventional but avoided using said, I guarantee that the instructor and fellow writers would look at them like they had three heads. Said is a word that is so common even in literary fiction because its ubiquity makes it invisible, it lets readers focus on the words around it. The more you move away from said the more you break the flow, and while some avant-garde writers like Donald Barthelme make stories that are intentionally difficult to parse, the audience for that kind of fiction is limited, even in MFA programs. More importantly, it makes it difficult to focus on other aspects of the prose. Like everything, this used to be different; in earlier times avoiding said became something that writers took to comical lengths, with JI Rodale even publishing “The Said Book”, listing words that worked as alternative ways of tagging dialog. There’s a reason “The Said Book” is now only mentioned as a punchline. 

A second line of thought that I dislike is the idea that taking writing quality seriously is something only reserved for some ivory tower elite. It’s even worse when people hold up examples of great writers with simple styles as proof of this rule, reasoning that because George Orwell wrote sentences that were clear and readable he must’ve chosen a path far removed from dense writers like Tolstoy or experimenters like Samuel Beckett. Orwell was a man who took his craft seriously. [url=https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/]He wrote an essay about why he wrote[/url], the first sentence of which reads “From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. “ He talked at length about the conscious choices he made when writing, most famously in Politics and the English Language, but the concern he has over language and its impact on the reader’s minds in constant, you can see it in 1984 when that work talks about Newspeak and its role in enforcing tyranny. Orwell would write for three hours every night even when he held a full-time job, revised drafts to obsessive degree, and kept everything close to his chest until he had gone over it many, many times. Even when he was starting out and writing unremarkable poetry, he had the same seriousness to his process. I’m not advising everyone copy him (I wouldn’t want anyone else dying at the age of 46), but to suggest he wasn’t someone who looked at writing as a serious art form is absolutely false. Hemingway, the only writer of the 20th century more famous for a sparse style of prose than Orwell, had a famous quote about why he wrote the way he did, said in response to William Faulkner’s claim that he lacked courage because he had “never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway said


“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. “

Lastly, I’d like to talk about the role of editors and their influence on the writing process. Editors aren’t schoolteachers or parole officers, assigned to writers to correct bad habits and fashion them into a more respectable person. They are intermediaries, chosen for their discernment and to act as a gatekeeper before a wider release. Editors are chosen either by the writer or by the publisher, and in each case their employer has placed an immense amount of trust in them, often chosen them specifically because they know that editor can see exactly what the publisher or the writer is aiming to achieve. Most often serious, irreconcilable disagreements between the writer and the editor are a case of bad match; either between the editor and the writer or the writer and the rest of the publisher’s output. The solution to that isn’t to declare one party right or wrong, it’s to try and see if both can find better matches elsewhere. Rewrites and corrections can be a powerful thing when people actively seek them out; Gordon Lish, Raymond Carver’s editor, famously edited his stories so heavily that Carver’s signature style owes almost as much to him as it does to Carver. If a writer’s intentions aren’t aligned with an editor's, the whole process becomes awkward. If JD Salinger came back from the dead and rewrote something I'd written I would be impressed, and the end result would doubtlessly be better than my original, but ultimately I would be left feeling unsatisfied, because I don't want to write like JD Salinger (Borges is welcome any time though).

The subject of feedback has deep links with the practice of editing. Feedback is not the same thing as soliciting suggested changes. At its core, it is giving them more data, more context, and more insight from a source other than their own perspective. Think of it like a pilot in airplane high above the clouds on a dark night. They can’t get much from their eyes, but thanks to instruments like the altimeter, the airspeed gauge, and navigational aids, they can get where they are going safely. Just like the pilot, the writer decides what to adjust, checks in again, and through that process maintains their course. Modern planes have autopilot systems, that will not only gather feedback but actually complete some of the work for them, but engaging or disengaging them is a conscious decision of the pilot. When we offer feedback we must always respect the role of giving information, and be aware of when the writer wants to solve a problem themselves and when they want to see the specific solutions others have in mind. As Ursula LeGuin said:


“Even if you’re sure you see just how it ought to be changed, this story belongs to its author, not to you”


Some of the most important feedback an author can get is about the broad strokes of a work. We can obsess over individual sentences or paragraphs, but it’s always in pursuit of a greater goal, of triggering some emotion or conveying some theme. That is the kind of thing that benefits a lot from hearing other voices. Not to get into epistemology, but we’re all flawed human beings, one thing we're very good at it is providing subjective experiences and one thing we're pretty bad at providing an objective point of view. Even when we try, we'll get far more of the first than of the second.