Books on writing (and why most of them suck*)
So I recently (foolishly!) posted something on Facebook about how maybe books that purport to teach you to do a particular thing should probably be evaluated by people who actually do that particular thing professionally instead of enthusiastic amateurs. The usual level of Facebook discourse was achieved swiftly thereafter, but one of the things that struck me about the response was that one of my friends expressed agreement... and then chirpily recommended Stephen King's book on writing.
Three guesses as to which book review on Tor.com had inspired my comment in the first place.
I don't intend to be mean to Brit Mandelo here, and I'm perfectly aware that I'm violating the precept I set out in my Facebook post, since I'm by no means a professional novelist. But seriously, On Writing bridges two of the most common - and frankly, ineffective - types of books about writing fiction - the mostly personal inspirational piece ("You can do it! You are not alone!") and textbooks for Remedial Craft 101. I haven't read Scalzi's book, so I'll just note that based off on Brit's comments and the fact that it's a collection of blog posts, it's pretty firmly seated in the first category - whatever its other virtues might be.
I'm not opposed to these types of books existing. (Thus the asterisk next to 'suck' in this post's title.) They serve useful purposes for new writers or the young, who are often surrounded by people who want to score points by sneering at their desire to write, or who haven't had the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of language and drama and structure in some other context, or might be easy prey for faux-agents and the like without warnings against their practices. But it bothers me to see books like On Writing held up as being good for writers of all levels of experience and critical development, because yah. Not so much. There really aren't that many books out there that talk about craft in at a meaningful level (like that of swan_tower's posts about fight scenes, for instance).
There are lots of forces agitating against books on writing actually being useful to experienced writers. Experienced writers are a small market, and are less likely to seek out books on writing than aspiring writers. A book is also going to do a lot better in the market if it entertains the reader and makes them feel good than if it actually puts much effort into teaching them something, especially if that something is complicated and nuanced and hard (like, uh, writing well). Finally, books generally sell a lot better if they're accessible and don't require too much prior knowledge or education to appreciate.
The result of this is that most books on writing fall into one of a few categories, or like On Writing bridge them:
Personal inspiration & philosophy: See the memoir sections of On Writing and Scalzi's book, as well as Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. There might be nuggets of writing advice to be mined out of these books, and maybe there's value in going back to them for motivation or inspiration if you're feeling down, but seriously - there's not much value here once you actually know what you're doing. Coincidentally, these books or sections of books tend to be the most entertaining and accessible.
Remedial Craft/Genre 101: On Writing falls into this category very firmly. So does Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (which I pored over constantly as in junior high and high school), Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, and Robert McKee's much vaunted Story (which I was completely disappointed by). Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction maybe gets up to the 200s, but it's still firmly undergraduate-level. Again, not saying that these kinds of books are bad, but you're not going to learn much from them after a while.
Exercise Books: Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones (which also drifts into the Personal Inspiration category). More power to you if you use free-writing or writing prompts and have learned to write better or produced usable material from said exercises, but my experience with said processes is that they're easy to teach people, might help you clarify your ideas or develop your technique a bit, and don't have that much value in the long term. I thought Steering the Craft was the bee's knees when I bought it, but the fact is that I've learned far more from being as ambitious as I could in writing actual stories rather than from any set of exercises I've ever done. These are accessible, but that's about their only virtue in my eyes.
You've hopefully gathered that there are a few books on writing out there which I do approve of (though sadly, I think I'm at the point where I can't get much more out of them either). Samuel R. Delany, in his essays in On Writing and Shorter Views, is very good about going beyond the superficial discussion of plot and structure and character that characterizes the books I've pilloried above, and actually digging into questions of craft and structure in revealing ways. John Gardner's On Being a Novelist and The Art of Writing are also intensely concerned with the craft of writing, the rhythms of language, and the cumulative effect of an author's choices on a book or story. I don't always agree with Delany and Gardner's conclusions (and I often find Gardner's specific examples tedious) but that's healthy, I feel. It means that there's enough meat in their books for me to disagree with them while still finding what they're saying valuable and thought-provoking.
I'm trying to make a few points here, and I don't want them to get lost in the preceding ocean of snark, so let me break them out a bit. First, I think that books on writing fiction tend to cater to inexperienced writers, and that most of them lose their value as their readers gain experience.
Second, I think it does both aspiring writers and more established ones a disservice to pretend that books which are little more than inspirational stories plus a remedial course in the basics of language or fiction are going to be equally useful to both audiences.
Third, I feel that the discourse about craft in fiction as a whole is a little impoverished - not just in books, but also on convention panels and (much to my dismay) even on LJ. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that panels and other public forums for the discussion of writing often have to deal with the same issues of accessibility and audience size that writing books do; why start a conversation about something really technical and fiddly when you'll engage a lot more people by talking about something more basic? One of the reasons I keep going back to the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention every year is that the level of discourse about craft and technique on display there is much higher than usual. And even so, panels can end up rehashing the same, familiar, novice-level questions if the panelists are directed that way by the audience.
I do what I can to oppose this tendency; I really liked matociquala's sentence evolution posts, for instance, as well as swan_tower's fight scene posts (referenced above), and I try to engage in conversation on topics I find of interest as much as I can. My own posts on information density (which I mean to get back to someday, honest**) and temporality in fantasy are also efforts in that vein. But the fact of the matter is that A) I'm not a published fiction author, so most people aren't going to give a damn what I say, and B) engaging in ongoing high-level discourses on craft takes time and energy that a lot of people don't always have, myself included.
tl;dr version: Most writing books suck, most convention panels on craft aren't much better for much the same reasons, boo, hiss, whine whine.
And with that, I'm going to call it a night.
*: For serious and experienced authors.
**: My job + commute eats up 45-50 hours of every week, so bandwidth is scarce if I want to manage to eat, read, sleep, and exercise every day. Woe! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth!
Three guesses as to which book review on Tor.com had inspired my comment in the first place.
I don't intend to be mean to Brit Mandelo here, and I'm perfectly aware that I'm violating the precept I set out in my Facebook post, since I'm by no means a professional novelist. But seriously, On Writing bridges two of the most common - and frankly, ineffective - types of books about writing fiction - the mostly personal inspirational piece ("You can do it! You are not alone!") and textbooks for Remedial Craft 101. I haven't read Scalzi's book, so I'll just note that based off on Brit's comments and the fact that it's a collection of blog posts, it's pretty firmly seated in the first category - whatever its other virtues might be.
I'm not opposed to these types of books existing. (Thus the asterisk next to 'suck' in this post's title.) They serve useful purposes for new writers or the young, who are often surrounded by people who want to score points by sneering at their desire to write, or who haven't had the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of language and drama and structure in some other context, or might be easy prey for faux-agents and the like without warnings against their practices. But it bothers me to see books like On Writing held up as being good for writers of all levels of experience and critical development, because yah. Not so much. There really aren't that many books out there that talk about craft in at a meaningful level (like that of swan_tower's posts about fight scenes, for instance).
There are lots of forces agitating against books on writing actually being useful to experienced writers. Experienced writers are a small market, and are less likely to seek out books on writing than aspiring writers. A book is also going to do a lot better in the market if it entertains the reader and makes them feel good than if it actually puts much effort into teaching them something, especially if that something is complicated and nuanced and hard (like, uh, writing well). Finally, books generally sell a lot better if they're accessible and don't require too much prior knowledge or education to appreciate.
The result of this is that most books on writing fall into one of a few categories, or like On Writing bridge them:
Personal inspiration & philosophy: See the memoir sections of On Writing and Scalzi's book, as well as Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. There might be nuggets of writing advice to be mined out of these books, and maybe there's value in going back to them for motivation or inspiration if you're feeling down, but seriously - there's not much value here once you actually know what you're doing. Coincidentally, these books or sections of books tend to be the most entertaining and accessible.
Remedial Craft/Genre 101: On Writing falls into this category very firmly. So does Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (which I pored over constantly as in junior high and high school), Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, and Robert McKee's much vaunted Story (which I was completely disappointed by). Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction maybe gets up to the 200s, but it's still firmly undergraduate-level. Again, not saying that these kinds of books are bad, but you're not going to learn much from them after a while.
Exercise Books: Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones (which also drifts into the Personal Inspiration category). More power to you if you use free-writing or writing prompts and have learned to write better or produced usable material from said exercises, but my experience with said processes is that they're easy to teach people, might help you clarify your ideas or develop your technique a bit, and don't have that much value in the long term. I thought Steering the Craft was the bee's knees when I bought it, but the fact is that I've learned far more from being as ambitious as I could in writing actual stories rather than from any set of exercises I've ever done. These are accessible, but that's about their only virtue in my eyes.
You've hopefully gathered that there are a few books on writing out there which I do approve of (though sadly, I think I'm at the point where I can't get much more out of them either). Samuel R. Delany, in his essays in On Writing and Shorter Views, is very good about going beyond the superficial discussion of plot and structure and character that characterizes the books I've pilloried above, and actually digging into questions of craft and structure in revealing ways. John Gardner's On Being a Novelist and The Art of Writing are also intensely concerned with the craft of writing, the rhythms of language, and the cumulative effect of an author's choices on a book or story. I don't always agree with Delany and Gardner's conclusions (and I often find Gardner's specific examples tedious) but that's healthy, I feel. It means that there's enough meat in their books for me to disagree with them while still finding what they're saying valuable and thought-provoking.
I'm trying to make a few points here, and I don't want them to get lost in the preceding ocean of snark, so let me break them out a bit. First, I think that books on writing fiction tend to cater to inexperienced writers, and that most of them lose their value as their readers gain experience.
Second, I think it does both aspiring writers and more established ones a disservice to pretend that books which are little more than inspirational stories plus a remedial course in the basics of language or fiction are going to be equally useful to both audiences.
Third, I feel that the discourse about craft in fiction as a whole is a little impoverished - not just in books, but also on convention panels and (much to my dismay) even on LJ. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that panels and other public forums for the discussion of writing often have to deal with the same issues of accessibility and audience size that writing books do; why start a conversation about something really technical and fiddly when you'll engage a lot more people by talking about something more basic? One of the reasons I keep going back to the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention every year is that the level of discourse about craft and technique on display there is much higher than usual. And even so, panels can end up rehashing the same, familiar, novice-level questions if the panelists are directed that way by the audience.
I do what I can to oppose this tendency; I really liked matociquala's sentence evolution posts, for instance, as well as swan_tower's fight scene posts (referenced above), and I try to engage in conversation on topics I find of interest as much as I can. My own posts on information density (which I mean to get back to someday, honest**) and temporality in fantasy are also efforts in that vein. But the fact of the matter is that A) I'm not a published fiction author, so most people aren't going to give a damn what I say, and B) engaging in ongoing high-level discourses on craft takes time and energy that a lot of people don't always have, myself included.
tl;dr version: Most writing books suck, most convention panels on craft aren't much better for much the same reasons, boo, hiss, whine whine.
And with that, I'm going to call it a night.
*: For serious and experienced authors.
**: My job + commute eats up 45-50 hours of every week, so bandwidth is scarce if I want to manage to eat, read, sleep, and exercise every day. Woe! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth!