Most Books on Writing Suck and Here’s Why

This article was originally going to be a review for a recent craft book I picked up to read that promised to look at writing through a new lens. However, midway through chapter three, I put the book down and didn’t pick it up again. It had become clear to me that any promises on the cover were just to disguise what turned out to be some very bog-standard writing advice.

Not bad advice, but nothing new.

Beyond my issues with this book in particular, are some issues that pervade writing advice in general. Most craft books are self-help books for writers. There isn’t that much advice that applies to all writers, and what little advice can be given is very boring. So, the industry takes these same morsels of wisdom and finds a million different ways to spice them up.

The issue here is that much good writing advice is very boring. Libby Hawker’s Take Your Pants Off is a good example. At first, I hated this book. Every word in the introduction reads like a sales pitch, and the title is perfectly calibrated to be maximally attention-getting. But once you get past her sales pitch, Hawker has written a very useful book.

What makes Take Your Pants Off useful is that it’s unapologetically technical. Hawker walks you through her system for plotting novels, step by step. Although she pitches it as a one-size-fits-all solution, Hawker’s system is far from it. Hawker clearly spent a lot of time putting together her system, and now she wants to share it with us. Really, the book is a lot closer to a workbook than it is to the legion of writer self-help books.

After reading it, I even went through the trouble of plotting out a whole novel using her system. I’m not saying it’s for me, but in daring to offer advice not suited for everyone, Hawker managed to do something very difficult: write some useful advice.

On the other end of the spectrum are books like On Writing by Stephen King. On Writing is somewhat of a classic, and I imagine that if you stuck your head in the sewer and whispered that you were looking for a book on how to write someone would appear and recommend On Writing.

Despite its name, the book has remarkably little to say about writing. It is part autobiography and part meditation on the writer’s life. Neither of these things is useless to an aspiring writer, but I’m surprised to see this book pushed on new writers as some kind of guidebook when it’s closer to a memoir.

On Writing solves the problem of writing advice being boring in a very direct way: it doesn’t have much to say about the process of actually writing a novel. Other writing books have this same issue, and I don’t think it’s a problem of dishonesty or anything like that.

People assume that great writers must instinctively have some kind of understanding of what they’re doing, but based on King’s memoir I really doubt that’s true. People think that if you want the best advice you should go to the best writers, but this is clearly misguided. What you want is a book that shows you how to go from being someone who hasn’t written a novel to someone who has. King cannot give you this because he’s been a full-time writer for fifty years.

I wouldn’t expect Stephen King to be able to teach me how to write a novel any more than I’d expect a bird to be able to teach me how to fly.

There’s a third category of writing advice that I’d like to examine, and I think it’s probably the most useful. These are books I like to think of as weird little manifestos, like From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler. I once met a writer who summarized this book as, “Well, Robert basically thinks I should kill myself.”

From Where You Dream does not pull punches. Very early into the book, Butler announces that you are probably wasting your time on a novel that you’ll never finish and that won’t be any good if you do. Butler isn’t for everyone, but he is ruthlessly honest. At a minimum, Butler isn’t repackaging the same advice you’ve heard a million times.

From Where You Dream reads like a ransom note: Butler holds your novel at gunpoint, and unless you do exactly what he says, he’ll pull the trigger.

Butler’s advice is anti-advice. He essentially says this: You should write your novel from the same place you dream. Anything else is self-sabotage and a waste of time. His thesis, provocative even for people who disagree with him, is a spur to writing, even if out of spite.

I wish I could end this article by serving you up a unified theory of writing advice on a silver platter, but I can’t. Good and bad writing advice both come in all shapes and sizes. In general, good writing advice comes from writing teachers and eccentric weirdos. Anyone with a sizable back catalog of writing books or with a name you already recognize should be treated with suspicion.

Finally, I’ll say that the aspiring writer should never be afraid to throw a piece of writing advice in the trash. This isn’t just about bucking the rules, but spending your time efficiently. The question should always be, “is reading this book a better use of my time than just writing?” For a distressingly large amount of writing advice, the answer is no.