Almost All Writing Advice Is Aimed at Somebody Else

Nearly every piece of writing advice you have ever been given was built for somebody who is not you.

Write drunk, edit sober. Kill your darlings. Show, don’t tell. 1,000 words before breakfast. Morning pages. Butt in chair. Read everything in your genre twice.

All of it comes from fiction. Most of it comes from people teaching fiction to people who want to write literary novels. If you are a surgeon with a book about how surgical teams actually fail, following that advice will actively slow you down, and then you will conclude that you’re not a writer.

You are not failing at writing. You are following a training programme for a completely different sport.

A small digression, because it’s too good not to

“Kill your darlings” gets attributed to Faulkner, or Stephen King, or Wilde, depending on which LinkedIn carousel you saw it in.

It was actually Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a Cambridge lecture published in 1916, and what he said was “murder your darlings.” He was talking about ornamental Victorian prose. He was lecturing on style to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry.

That’s the pedigree of the advice you’ve been beating yourself with. A century-old note about purple adjectives, aimed at 19-year-olds reading Spenser, now deployed against a chartered accountant trying to explain what went wrong in 2011.

Where the rest of it comes from

The writing-advice industry was built by and for novelists, and it optimises for the novelist’s actual problem, which is generating something out of nothing.

A novelist faces an empty page and a world that does not exist. Everything in the canon is designed to get words flowing when there is no external source of material. Freewriting, daily quotas, permission to be terrible, the whole apparatus.

Your problem is the precise opposite. You are not short of material. You have 30 years of it and it is jammed in there sideways.

Your difficulty is selection, order, and working out which of the 11 possible books is the one you’re writing. There is almost no advice for that, because the people producing writing advice have never once had that problem.

The specific ones that hurt you

“A thousand words a day.” For a novelist this builds a novel. For you it builds a heap. Volume without a decided structure produces material you’ll spend 6 months sorting, and most people quit somewhere in the sorting, surrounded by 100,000 words they can’t use.

“Show, don’t tell.” Sound advice for fiction. Ruinous for expertise. Your reader came for your judgement, stated plainly. A nonfiction writer who refuses to just say the thing is exhausting to read. Show the story, then absolutely do tell them what it means, because that is precisely what they paid for.

“Kill your darlings.” Aimed at writers in love with their own prose. Your problem is the reverse. The bits you’re inclined to cut are usually the specific, slightly embarrassing, entirely unrepeatable ones, and those are the only parts nobody else could have written. Keep the darlings. Cut the framework diagram.

“Write what you know.” Meant as encouragement to novelists. Read by experts as an instruction to stay in the technical lane, which is how we end up with business books that read like an internal training manual with a nicer cover. Write what you know, and what it cost you, and the day you got it wrong.

“Find your voice.” You have one. You use it every day at work and it’s confident and funny and occasionally impatient. The trouble starts when you sit down to write and swap it for one you think sounds like an Author. Your voice does not need finding. It needs you to stop hiding it behind a thesaurus.

What actually works for a book like yours

Decide before you draft. Who it’s for, what changes for them, and the chapter list. One week of that saves 3 months. It is also the least enjoyable week and everyone tries to skip it.

Talk it before you type it. You are 10 times better out loud than on the page, because speaking keeps you in your own register and typing makes you formal. Record yourself explaining a chapter to a person. Transcribe. Edit the transcript. That’s how a very large proportion of good nonfiction actually gets made, and anyone calling it cheating has never tried to write a chapter cold at 6am.

Work in chapters, not in words. One chapter, start to finish, gives you something to react to. 1,000 loose words gives you nothing to judge.

Write to one person. Name them. A real human, ideally somebody you’ve actually advised. Your voice comes back automatically when you’re writing to somebody specific and deserts you the second you write to an audience.

Get read early, by the right person. Not your partner. Not your most encouraging friend. Somebody who is exactly your target reader and slightly too honest for comfort.

The one bit of the canon that survives

Every craft book says the first draft is meant to be bad, and every craft book is right.

That one crosses over completely, and it’s the advice professionals ignore hardest, because you have spent your career being competent and the experience of being bad at something at 48 is genuinely unpleasant.

Your first draft will be worse than your worst professional work. Everyone’s is. Mine still are, after 30 years and books that went to number one.

The difference between people who finish and people who don’t has never been talent. It’s the ability to keep going while producing something you don’t respect yet.

Stop taking advice built for novelists. You’re not writing a novel. You’re getting 3 decades out of your head into a shape somebody else can use, and that’s an entirely different job with an entirely different method.

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