Part time Ninja Russell Smith responds to the Guardian’s advice on writing fiction by examining the parasitic cottage industry of advice writing and wondering at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
It’s strange that a publisher is almost guaranteed to sell a few thousand more copies of a book about how to write fiction than it would an actual work of fiction. Books of anecdotes about the eccentricities of writers or compilations of rejection letters are always popular too. A recent very entertaining one of these is Canadian: It’s called Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, and it’s by the veteran journalist Harry Bruce. It doesn’t teach you anything coherent about the creative process except that everyone’s is wildly different.
And yet the advice keeps coming, unvaried in its inconstancy, every year. It’s interesting that The Guardian article on how to write was inspired by a book that came out in 2007, and that book was itself simply a reprinting of an earlier New York Times article. Which was itself in many ways similar to Stephen King’s much earlier handbook On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. And there are a few dozen others with titles like Why I Write; it’s almost mandatory for hugely successful writers to give up a few secrets toward the end of their careers.