Writing advice should stop targeting people who hate to write

That's fascinating. Are they writing what they want to write, or are they only writing for the money or adulation?

I've written commercially, but not at the rarefied level of your cohorts, and I've never wanted to make a career of it. I've always wanted to write well, but I've never had to rely on it to make a mortgage payment, much less to establish my place in the world, and I've often wondered if that explained the fact that I don't hate writing first drafts.

If I need to fix a toilet because a fixed toilet is needed, I like having fixed the toilet but might not enjoy fixing it. But if I'm creating what I want to create--writing or painting or a software project--then I feel like creating it, not just having created it. But for some it apparently is more like fixing very valuable toilets.

What makes you feel more favorable towards first draft in comparison to your friends. Is it a mental model that you've adopted? Some interest in screwing around before composing in earnest? No multi-million dollar contracts or other stressors hanging over your head?

> There's a common mentality of, "I hate writing, but I love having written."

I don't think this is that surprising: I love doing startups, but I hate screwing around with boilerplate code, doing zillions of early customer development interviews, and doing taxes.

I love playing competitive volleyball, but I hate drills and conditioning.

That seems like a bizarre group, may I ask how you joined them?

100 times this. I like listening to podcasts and interviews with great creators in the various areas I work or hobby (music, writing, variety & comedy), and if one thing comes up over and over again in interviews with masters, it's this. It makes you better, faster, and saner. Seinfeld has a great rule for this: never show something you wrote to anyone on the same day you wrote it. It's brilliant in its simplicity. You need to firewall creator from editor from performer.

Thank you for your reply, it added another dimension to the whole process!

Many topics branch exponentially as they become more complex making it difficult to train on the many variations that may occur. Do you want to get a student comfortable with the concept and get them going and then guide them to a place where they can begin to help themselves.

In tech, docs are difficult to use if you don’t quite know what you should be referencing. But after becoming familiar with the concepts, terms, and having gained some practical experience, the docs begin to unleash their power.

Saying that I agree that there is often quite a bit of track left even after the basics. At the least, taking the student down an increasingly complex path that although maybe not directly useful, helps build more experience.

But, you will probably get fewer views from content that is possibly more difficult and time consuming to build.

I’m curious how you feel about editing.

For me, I do enjoy writing the first draft, even when I don’t know how or where many scenes will go. It’s definitely hard work, but enjoyable, especially when I get into the moment.

But editing, on the other hand, I don’t look forward to.

As somebody who writes and codes, I am certainly not typically in a good mood for the entirety of my problem-focused period. Somebody could say that I "hate coding but love having coded", but it's actually very different from the other states we would describe this way. For instance, I code for fun in my free time, instead of only coding for money and prestige, and so I'm getting some kind of intrinsic enjoyment out of it -- even if it's simply the catharsis of solving a difficult problem. I feel almost exactly the same way about writing (although I find writing a lot easier than coding most of the time).

There are a lot of writers (mostly young naifs and beginners) who have fallen in love with the romantic ideal of the tortured artist, and have the completely unrealistic expectation that if they suffer for their art they will inevitably be rewarded with prestige. It's a common, and toxic, mentality. Failing to distinguish the teeth-grinding dubious pleasure of working at the edge of your ability (something familiar not just to programmers and writers but to athletes, gamers, and craftspeople) from egocentric paranoia is problematic, because it risks supporting the former tendency instead of the latter.

This is not to say that writing can't be difficult, but writing is also something that almost definitely does not pay enough to justify doing it despite genuinely hating it! I think if you describe writing as your "passion", then you're coming to it from the right perspective -- plus, you're a skilled enough writer that it's clear you put the work in long before it became profitable. As they say in the Dwarf Fortress community, "failing is fun".

Folks who hate writing but love "being a Writer" -- the crowd who post bookstagram shots of their color-coded shelves -- are not setting themselves up for a fun time on the other hand. You've gotta have a little bit of masochism to survive in any 'creative' job, but if you're spending all day doing something you genuinely hate, only extrinsic rewards like money and the warm embrace of your fans are keeping you afloat. Extrinsic rewards are mercurial.

Of course, I've got a pretty casual perspective on writing. I do some freelance when it interests me, but most of my writing is done for communication first with profit a very minor concern. But my day job is my other passion. The nature of day jobs is that you're required to do a lot of stuff that's boring, stupid, and offensive to your sensibilities. If coding was not a passion, I would have burnt out far harder far sooner.

> She told her brother who had done this to her and he turned up dead not long thereafter.

For those who don't know, the boyfriend turned up dead, not the brother.

Writing is powerful and involves a lot of responsibility. Torturing yourself does not necessarily improve your ability to wield this tool responsibly.

> Good writing often contains some piece of the author's soul and that's always a risk to take.

Ego risk or reputational risk should not be treated the same way as risk to others. It's also easy to avoid.

Very few writers are so monumentally important that the world would mourn for them having never published -- and most of those who would have been were, of course, never published. My advice to people is that if writing feels like self-harm, you're better off not doing it & the world probably won't notice. Folks who have something so important to say (or who are so desperate to say anything at all) that they ignore my advice have made their choice :)

I'm not anything like a professional writer but I was going say something like your point. There's no easy advise list for serious writers. Even more, no being able to write is specific speed bump that many people experience and getting past that is a key thing. Not knowing basic style and grammar "rules" is another common experience. After that, the rules and the choice are much less clear - the style, tone, etc of your writing relates holistically to what you want to say.

But the opposite pole is that for an advanced writers, any book you consider great is a kind of advise - it's an example of the choices one writer made to create a text said something well. If you want more here, you can also read an analysis of such texts.

And with so much available once someone is at that level, there's also not a lot of reason for people write advanced advise books.

Perhaps. It seems awfully counterproductive though, even so.

Other fields (even ones that benefit from or effectively require in-person guidance -- like mathematics, or martial arts) have books aimed at more advanced practitioners. Theoretically, some writing advice books are aimed at more advanced practitioners.

This essay was spawned by my experience reading a book that was literally intended as the textbook for an undergraduate creative writing workshop (i.e., a class for juniors and seniors who are english majors with a focus in creative writing). Surely twenty-five year olds who have already spent three years dedicated to the craft of creative writing are in the same position as their peers who have majored in mathematics, and do not need to be assigned the english equivalent of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus".

I've read a number of other writing guides, only one of which was aimed at folks who did not self-identify as writers, and they all had at least one chapter on navigating ego hangups -- even the ones called things like "Creating Engaging Character Arcs" and "Promoting Audiobooks on Kindle" that you'd expect to be highly technical and specifically aimed at professionals.

My wife had some luck taking a couple of courses by established writers, who had their own private Facebook group you can join afterwards. Seems like most of the people who are willing to pay a few hundred dollars for the course are more serious about wanting to make a career of it.

I belong to a local writer's group, and except for a short story anthology that gets put out every year (and I participate in sometimes), it's pretty clear that 90% of the people in the group are never going to put forth the effort to probably ever even get a self-published book out there.

And they definitely aren't serious enough to spend any money to have any success. Can't even get them to chip in $15 apiece to pay to get a decent looking book cover so the anthology might grab some eyeballs and their stories get more readers.

If someone wanted to "cancel" me, I have greater sins than having accurately summarized other writers' descriptions of their emotional relationship with the craft. Since I am taking umbrage at exactly these descriptions, I don't see the grounds.

This is how programming generally feels to me. I love having written a useful / interesting tool or function, but sometimes getting started is like pulling teeth.

For the same reason people who like to paint seek advice about painting and people who like to program seek advice about programming. Writing is a craft. You can learn how to do it better (although not usually from books about how to write well).

Sounds like he's a fan of the Count of Monte Cristo.

It's the most precise word and also is readily understood by his target audience of writers. A correct term of art can replace swathes of text. Compare using the abbreviation DAG as opposed to trying to explain the same concept without appealing to shared knowledge.

The article doesn't claim that these descriptions have no place, but merely laments that they form the vast majority of writing advice.