Teach a Writer to Write…

Last year, I attempted to run a BackerKit Booktopia campaign for Turing’s Miscellany and I had the opportunity to meet lots of authors and get a better understanding of their process. Even though the campaign completely fell apart due to my own inexperience, I was able to at least pretend I knew what I was doing. In fact, I was following the wisdom of the times: network in the writing community by joining forums, commenting on people’s work, subscribing to it, etc. I even committed to checking out the various writing and genre subreddits at least once a week to see what was going down. It was definitely illuminating, which I’ll get to shortly. Suffice to say, the amount of nudity I encountered was shocking low.

Think, dammit.

Being “involved in the community” is not easy. (I gave up on it after maybe a month.) By default, I vacillate between two extremes: fearful self awareness and hostile reactivity. Trust people? Ha! Take their advice? Hell no! Physically occupy the same general space as them? Not without deodorant! In most social situations I either hang out on the periphery and entertain cynical notions, or I overshare and outstay my welcome in conversation. Being told that the key to success is celebrating the success of others, is a completely reasonable, sane thing, but applying it in practice feels like a personal attack. It wasn’t always like this. Legends tell of a much younger, more handsome Stuart, adept at speaking with adults and strangers, ready to share his thoughts and feelings with abandon. Paradoxically, I actually thrive when I am around people, but year-after-year of people-pleasing and making naïve character assessments has burned me to the point where collaboration is a non-starter.

All that to say, when I was browsing these writing subreddits I noticed a reoccurring post that kind of drove me nuts. In the same way that authors get (justifiably) mad because Big AI trained on their work, I witnessed a lot of farming for ideas in the name of “collaboration” on these pages. Typically a young writer would say something like, “What’s a good motivation for a male main character to abandon his friend?” and then there would be people filing in to offer their advice. Seems wholesome enough, right? My main issue I have with this approach (other than being an asshole) is that the creative legwork is being outsourced to someone else and the aspiring writer isn’t really learning anything.

This problem stems from a writer’s confidence. This manifests across a spectrum: one side focuses on perfection and the other fixates on safe narrative choices. The perfection side is equivalent to writing 900 drafts of your first novel and laboring over it like it was the cure to cancer. I mean, don’t bother writing two mediocre books, three decent books, and then kill it with an awesome book after 20 years of hard-earned experience. Fuck that! Spend it all on that first, terrible idea, hoping that it will eventually age like fine wine.

The opposite of that is worse though, which I would describe as “idea farming”. On the Surface, it looks like collaboration, but in reality it’s just asking someone to write your book for you. I recall another example where, on one of the science fiction reddits, a user was asking about settings for their book. It was something along the lines of, “which aesthetic would you pick for a story with xyz going on?”, where the user was basically trying to nail down the conceptual world for the book before they started the initial writing. But this is the wrong kind of question to be asking. While there are plenty of different ways to start writing a book, I feel like establishing the setting before establishing the kind of characters that you will be working with is putting the cart before the horse. Depending on the development of the main characters and supporting cast, a book could be very engaging and interesting, or oppressively 2-dimensional. Watching a character accidentally drop a cigarette onto the damp sidewalk after a spring shower, fumble with it anxiously, and engage in the futility of trying to light it, tells a story. (Even the fact that the character is smoking, knowing full well the plethora of health risks, adds an additional patina of regret, self-destructiveness, dread, addiction, etc., on top of all of that.) Does it matter that this is 1930’s Manhattan or 2170 Cyberpunk Seattle? Not really. It’s the character that we are interested in and their motivation.

Now, it’s perfectly reasonable to workshop ideas and ask for help. I do this all the time. Typically, I will rattle off my ideas to my wife, trying to walk her through what this character is feeling and struggling with. She may offer some advice but I always treat it as a suggestion, not a directive. Taking her idea and applying it 1:1 would be plagiarism and also not a true rendering of a work that you conceived of. This all probably sounds like I’m quibbling about minutiae that doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, a book is a book and the reader doesn’t know at all where the ideas came from, right? Well, yes. But you will know.

Lastly, experience intersects with inspiration. I wrote about young families with kids in my first book, using some of the people that went to my church as a guide. I didn’t have a kid back then. I wasn’t even married. The fuck do I know about any of that? Is it any surprise at all that readers might find my characters a little wooden and contrived? While my friends have recently encouraged me that I have high emotional intelligence and a capacity for empathy, this was something that developed over a long time. Like, I’ve always held a baseball bat and thought to myself, “this is a dope lightsaber!” But after living a little bit, I can say with confidence that there are greater layers of complexity to overlay on top of that to make the experience of “holding a lightsaber” more intimate and realistic. Asking someone on a forum “what’s the best way to describe a female main character talking about the car that she drives?” doesn’t prompt you to reach into an index of memories and engage in introspection. You are effectively asking someone else to do that for you, which is why it bothers me.

Anyways, this frustration I have stems from my desire to see others improve their craft. Even just sitting down and writing this is taking a lot more effort than usual, so maybe I’m just out of practice. We all have to start from somewhere, and even I can get out of practice. So, let’s work toward changing how we approach this together!