Writing is taught, not tutored

On the Internet there are tutorials for everything: from digital design to digital camera use, from "how to be scene" to "how to wear a strapless dress" (which, by the way, you only have to put on), but there are times I am truly flummoxed by what people try to pass off as lessons on the online world.

Before I go farther however, in order to limit any confusion over definitions, I want to note that by "tutorial" I mean the often step-by-step instructions that describe how achieve a certain result. These "how to" pages try to put sometimes-complicated procedures into simple-to-follow steps that makes things easier for the learner to follow.

For the first time, today, I saw the rare "writing tutorial," a how-to of fiction, a step-by-step paint-by-numbers of literary craft. It was no minimization of The Elements of Style or simple "Five Tips to Better Your Writing!" It was a list, moments of books and what to write, a beefed up version of a favored Lewis Carroll quote—

"Begin at the beginning... and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

You see, you begin with describing your setting (gone are the days of powerful first lines), then introduce your characters, and go on and on with these instructions until you have a short story that reads of starts and stops and trying-too-hards. I'll spare you all the details. (And oh! There were details.) And while writing may be a step-by-step process for some, it is not something that can be quantified and numbered out like a new Photoshop trick. It is something that needs understanding, dedication, and more than a few quick clicks of a mouse or fancy filter.

And, really, that is why I love writing. If I love math for it's hard rules and static answers (and I do), then writing is my affair of strangeness and confusion. It's learning rules and learning that when you write two and two do not always equal for and sometimes you really do need that -ly word (begrudgingly, you admit). It's using long and languid words to lay out the lyrical and hard, tough, rough words to stab out a tense sentence. You do not need to always open a novel with a description of the setting, not in the way you always need to multiply before you add in an equation.

You cannot put the process of writing down into "ten easy steps." You can show a man proper rules for parenthesis, or write the best way to pen an unbiased article, but no two stories are the same, and no singular method can word for everyone, or even anyone. To try is to insult the craft, and to insult the people who love it. Truly, it's a shame that people try to do even that.

But what about you: Have you ever seen a baffling "how to" online? And what's the worst writing advice you've ever been given?

(And for the record, I love sewing because it is the perfect melding of the mathematical and the creative.)