Oh dear, oh dear.
I fear my radically autarchic streak will come out strong on this one.
I could be wise, and polite and pick one or two examples of harmless dimwitted advice that I have encountered, but no, I have to open my heart and say it.
All writing advice is bad. All art advice is bad.
What? What? How can you say such things, Wyvern, have you become a rank anarchist in your middle age?
Well, perhaps I have.
I strongly believe art (and writing, which is just an other art) requires technique and diligence as well as inspiration and all artists must necessarily go through a thorough apprenticeship before their work becomes good enough to be shown.
This is normal. A writer must learn their language inside and out, like an artist must learn their brushes and paints, or whatever tools they wish to use. And one must exercise all of this, become adept at using one's tools, so that when the time comes to express something, one's technique is an extension of the mind, and not an obstacle to be conquered. I think one must write a lot, often and well, long before beginning to write that book, the same way a child must make a lot of messy, botched up sketches before making a drawing that is of any interest to anybody except their besotted mom and grandma.
This is all in the natural order of things, I think.
But... advice... especially unrequested advice... advice is tricky. First of all all advice implies the presumption of a superior knowledge. This is always a slippery slope because there's lots of people who imagine they know a lot more than they actually do.
And when it comes to the arts... well, so much "advice" boils down to a dogmatic, myopic, schoolish and mulish crystallization of somebody else's original technique, probably someone who had a good run of sales. But that is often a matter of luck and elevating a single author to a model to be copied is generally a mistake.
I remember a distinctly grim period of my life when I joined a writer's forum (that I shall not name). At the time it seemed that J.K. Rowling was THE writer. We were all advised to write like her. Mind, nobody mentioned the staggering imagination and creativity she put in her world building, the delightful, witty inventiveness with which she names people and things. These things are hard to imitate after all. It's hard to cultivate guru status if you give people impracticable advice. No. These "experts" were nitpicking on things like adverbs, and punctuation and fancy speech tags, and advising to use nothing but say and tell, because that's what J.K. did. (Which isn't true, by the way. The Potter books are littered with people crying, shouting, yelling, moaning and bellowing. And a good thing too). This is the sort of thing that give "advice" a bad name. So much of the advice that is thrown around is BS that people spout to sound important.
I stopped listening, on principle.
I take feedback on my work very seriously. I don't think I ever outright refused an editor's suggestion, but always at the very least tried to meet them half-way, and if I disagree, I try to understand where the correction came from, and why an editor thought it was necessary to make it, and whether anything in the story should be improved, clarified, expanded to make that correction unneccessary.
But in general, as an artist, I don't listen much to advice.
Don't take my advice on this. It's probably bad advice.
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