The Thing About Advice

If you’ve been following the writerly world on Twitter, it would have been difficult for you to avoid a particular edgy take on how to view your fellow authors.

I won’t repeat it here because I’m not letting that kind of crap into my house. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you’re probably better off.

Personally, I think it was put out there by someone trying to get a rise out of people – which it did. What it also did was to kick off discussion about writing advice.

Now you’ve probably heard a ton of writing advice. Some of it you’ve adopted, some of it you haven’t.

That’s the thing about advice. You take what works for you and you leave what doesn’t. And that thing that works? It might always work for you. Or it might work for you on a particular project, but not on the next one.

Every project is different and the way you go about it may be different each time. Not entirely perhaps but bits and pieces. Or you may try something entirely new that you’ve never tried before.

That’s you growing as a writer. You’re changing, developing skills, evolving. You come out of project a different writer than you were when you began.

Writing advice shouldn’t be – but it often is – seen as a series of commandments. Any given bit of advice is a tool. You tuck it into your toolbox, maybe in the pouch where you keep things like the rules of Grammar and your vocabulary. When you need it, you take it out and use it. Not every project is going to require it, and that’s ok.

Thanks for reading.

Be safe out there. Be Excellent to Each other.

I’ll see you on Thursday.

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Weird Wild West

Trials

Predators in Petticoats