A writer who greatly admired Kurt Vonnegut once gave him a bagel in a Chicago coffee shop. Danielle Dutton, the author, later spent years attempting to understand why his well-known advice—don’t use semicolons, they are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”—had always seemed to her to be not only incorrect but also actively detrimental to the writers who took it seriously. Vonnegut was a genius. People still read his novels. If Virginia Woolf had followed his advice, she would not have been able to write the way she did. Proust would not have been possible as a result. It most likely made a generation of young writers arrogant about punctuation, which is not the same as improving them.
This is the main issue with writing advice, and it’s worth considering: those who are most qualified to offer it are frequently the least adept at describing their actual actions. Prominent authors who describe their own processes frequently confuse personal habit with universal law, describing one path up a mountain as though it were the only one, even though there are hundreds of paths. Elmore Leonard advised against describing locations and objects in great detail. One of the most bizarre and amazing works of the twentieth century is Georges Perec’s entire novel, which is essentially an exhaustive, room-by-room inventory of a Paris apartment building. According to Naipaul, sentences should not exceed ten or twelve words. On every single page he ever wrote, Henry James disregarded that directive.
Advice that initially sounds like permission to do something wrong is typically the kind that actually works. Write your first draft as quickly and poorly as you can. Just keep going without correcting typos, rearranging sentences, or researching the information you’re unsure of. This seems careless. It goes against every instinct a meticulous writer has, such as the need to finish a sentence correctly before going on to the next and to avoid letting a poor paragraph stand for even a second. However, instinct is a trap. You never get above ground when editing while drafting, much like when you try to build a house while also checking the foundations. The flawless first chapter that never made it to the second draft is far less useful than the terrible first draft that is completed and sitting on a desk.
In his essay “Not-Knowing,” Donald Barthelme presented an alternative interpretation of this idea. He characterized the writer as someone who takes on a task without knowing how to proceed. That is an accurate description of how meaning is created on the page, not an act of mystery or false modesty. You don’t write something after thinking about it. You write your way to the goal. The draft is the thinking, and pausing to polish each sentence as it appears is a way to stop the thinking before it gets interesting. In more bizarre terms, Marguerite Duras described writing as an attempt to anticipate what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward. She might have been purposefully being evasive. It’s also possible that she was describing an actual situation that is difficult to articulate clearly.
More confused prose has likely been produced by the “show, don’t tell” rule than by any other piece of advice currently in use. Although it isn’t exactly incorrect, it is so frequently applied incorrectly that it has become the norm. Yes, highlight the pivotal moments—the ones that change the plot and carry emotional weight. However, attempting to dramatize every aspect, even the parts that don’t require dramatization, results in slow and tiresome fiction. The reader doesn’t have to see every mile of a character’s journey from London to Edinburgh. It’s not a failure to tell the dull parts. It’s pacing. The recommendation to display everything confuses quality and intensity, which are two different things.
It sounds conceited, or at best like advice for hobbyists, to write for yourself rather than a potential audience. It isn’t. When prose is written to satisfy an imagined reader with specific desires, it usually results in writing that fulfills expectations and nothing more. The observations that are both unexpected and true at the same time, as well as the sentences that take the reader by surprise, are almost always the result of a writer pursuing their own interests rather than controlling those of others. Reading some paragraphs gives you the impression that the author discovered something in the middle of the sentence. It is impossible to create that quality by speculating about what the audience desires.
Kathryn Davis, a writer, once talked about giving up on her first book after a talking horse in a dream told her it was dull. After putting it in a box, she went on to the next project, which turned out to be her real debut. That cannot be systematized as advice. However, there is something sincere about it—the recognition that sometimes the best course of action is to give up, and that knowing when to do so necessitates an internal signal that cannot be produced by an external rule. The majority of writing advice is predicated on the idea that the issue is either beginning or ending. It seldom takes into consideration the possibility that discernment—knowing which drafts belong in the box and which should be completed—is the most useful skill. It’s more difficult to teach than semicolons, which is probably why no one tries.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.