Too much advice - just write it!

Every so often I have to call a halt to my Twitter and Facebook reading.  Many people disparage both platforms, but if you use them carefully they can be brilliant places to do research.

For instance, recently I came across several blog posts about coping with rejection.  It really helped to read these writers' experiences of that process.  It's shown me that I'm not alone.  Reading these has reminded me that an essential part of getting to that coveted'yes' is not getting felled by all the 'noes' that come before it.  I don't feel as ashamed of my rejections now.

And I've recently come across another blog post that suggests that introvert personalities take rejection harder than extroverts.  And guess what?  I'm strongly introvert, and for a long time I did take rejection very hard.  But reading other people's experiences of clocking up hundreds of rejections has cured me of that.  I now realise that I'm not unusual, that this is perfectly normal for someone knocking on that closed publishing door.  And it's a great example of where advice gleaned from the Internet can really help.  I am not alone, and I'm not unusual.

But not everything I read is so helpful.  There's no shortage of posts offering a formula for the perfect first page, which must in include ingredients A, B, and C, and preferably in that order.  And against that we have the posts that advise a writer to "just be yourself".  The posts that insist that it's a writer's "voice" that  people fall in love with.

But what if my voice, or my viewpoint character, doesn't want to tell the story in the order A, B, C?  Should I worry about that, or just write it?  My answer is always just to write it.  And certainly all advice needs to be put out of my head while I'm writing the first draft.  That's a process of plucking the story out of the aether.  And if I challenge it by thinking "Oh, you can't go there, that's not the right place in the structure", the offended story idea is most likely to leave me.  It'll go and find someone else who wants to tell it like it is.

So yes, advice is useful, but so is trusting your own gut about a story.  So is writing a strong idea the way it wants to be written.  For after all, editors want "fresh new voices", don't they?  And those aren't likely to appear from slavishly following the A B C formula.  So sometimes it's a case of turning off the advice, and just writing the thing the way it wants to be written.