Writing advice

I'm not really here to give writing advice. That's not the point of these on writing posts. I don't want to dictate the way anyone but me thinks about the right way to write, or how things should be read, or anything like that. I just want to try and get down in words the way that I think about it, to try and accurately describe my thoughts and my feelings on the subject. If anything I were to write is able to help someone else understand or think about their own writing, I would be more than ecstatic, but it's not the point. I don't really believe in giving advice, at least not when it comes to writing.

I don't really like it when people try to give me advice about my writing. I'm fine with critiques, don't get me wrong, but it's advice that I have a problem with. Critiques come across as "this is a mistake, and this is how you should fix it." Advice is more of "this isn't what I think is right, so you should do this." At least, that's how it comes across most of the time.

No writer is the same. That's why no two stories are the same. They may follow a dozen of the same plot points, share character names, take place in the same location, whatever. But that doesn't by any circumstance actually make them the same story, as much as you may try to draw the similarities. But it goes deeper than that. No two writers write the same way. They plan differently, they think of their characters differently, so on and so forth to create the worlds and stories that they choose to share with the world. You can teach someone the basic techniques, but you can't teach someone the advanced lengths to which they will go to complete their story.

The only useful advice you can possibly give someone for writing is to keep writing. To write and write and write until you've written so long that you've forgotten to eat. And it doesn't matter how many times you're told to keep writing, it will always be true, no matter how tired you are of hearing it. Because the only way you can learn to write is by writing, and seeing what works and what doesn't, and constantly applying that knowledge and gathering more, compounding further and further on top of each other until you learn how to tell the story you want to tell. And even then you won't be done learning, and there will always be more to understand, and so you keep writing and learning through story after story.

Despite that, I still frequently hear pieces of advice about how you should write to better yourself. Things like eliminating certain words, diligently following sentence structures and patterns, things like this. I'm sorry to say, but doing these things won't make you a better writer. If anything, they'll limit you. They'll make you think that there is a correct way to write, and that simply isn't true. The only correct way to write is the way that works for you. And the only one who can decide something like that is you.