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.)

Finding Your Roots

Why did I start writing? It's something I think about sometimes, in between hating my work, stressing over my laziness, and otherwise driving myself completely insane.

Original artwork for American Gods.

It's then I try to remember my first story, the first time I wrote something down. I remember doing the National Novel Writing Month Challenge in 2006, but before that I wrote prose and poetry through middle and high school. Even before that I recall hunching over the coffee table growing up and trying to write the sequel to Harriet the Spy. (After all, no one tells a kid about copyright laws. Or, apparently, fanfiction.) Before that, before I could actually write, I would take a crayon and a blank sheet of paper and painstakingly make "letters" and then sit down and tell my mother the story that I "wrote".

In that sense, I suppose I've always been a writer. But surely there was something there that shaped me, that made me into the writing I am today: uncertain and a little shaky, but confident in my own creativity and my desire to craft a story.

And it always comes down to books: The books I read as a child, the ones I read as an adult. More than The Elements of Style or any book on the craft of writing, it's novels themselves that have showed me the way. First with Tamora Pierce, who gave me a love of adventure, then Laurie Halse Anderson and Ann Brasheres whose characters were real, strong, and good, despite being in a real-world setting and written in a genre where it is so easy to portray teenage girls and woman as catty, cruel, and petty. Stephen King proved to me that not only movies can scare, and Haruki Murakami and Kafka melded the real world and the absurd. And Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman gave me someone to admire, someone to aspire to be like.

When I struggle, which I often do, I find myself looking at these books again. Yes, even the Tamora Pierce ones. Even Animorphs, a series I have in it's entirety on my Kindle despite first reading it when I was only ten years old. I'm twenty-three now, and I still sometimes read Animorphs.

I think it's important, remembering, reading, and re-reading these books. Because they meant so much the first time I read them, and they gave me things to aspire to. They make me remember my roots, remember thirteen-year-old Elle sprawled out on the floor thinking about how much I would love to write stories like these. And sometimes they make me realize that even though I did not end up being a published writer at sixteen (just like Amelia Atwater-Rhodes), I've still written stories that I think thirteen-year-old me would like. And that might not be a publishing contract or millions of dollars, but it's something, and it keeps me going.

What are the books that shaped your writing? Do you ever reread them, even if they're directed for younger readers?

A Touch of Whimsy

I suppose I'm an adult. My boyfriend definitely is, being twenty-six and an editor at a well-regarded medical publication. However, despite the fact the label of "adult" generally means certain childish things no longer send you into fits of laughter, there is a word that still sends my boyfriend into a state of uncontrollable giggles.

That word is "poops."

And since said boyfriend is a fairly practical person when it comes to gifts (I made him pajamas for his last birthday), and he jokingly mentioned wanting a decorative pillow for his couch I decided to take up the challenge of making him a classy pillow that quite simply stated the word "poops" on one side.

Now, I have never embroidered before much less inflicted myself to the tricky world of freehand embroidery, but I figured it would be worth a try to craft a pillow that would leave the lad in stitches.

It wasn't fun.

Shut up and write! (Or whatever it is you do.)

I am a compendium of excuses.

I have an excuse for everything, sometimes even two or three, and when it comes to things I have to do, being a self-employed writer/seamstress mucking about waiting to finish college, I have a list of excuses longer than James Joyce's Ulysses, especially since I always have "another day" to push it back to.

And yet, here I am one month into a story and only 3,000 words in. Which, going back to James Joyce, might not be bad for a certain Irish author, but is right terrible for someone with an excess of time, a room of quiet, and no substance abuse problem to speak of. (Which, granted, might be the problem.)

But for those of us with no desire to pick up the bottle and replicate the lives of the authors of yore, we have to figure out how to make time (and keep time!) in a world where the Internet, cell phones, television, and shopping sales are all calling out our names.

For me, the wake up call came from trying a thousand things other people suggested, discovering none of them worked, and adapting them to work for me.

"Write 4,000 words a day, and don't stop until you do!"

Various authors have cried this out to me as a muddle through the rough draft of a short story. "Two pages!" "Four hours!" "Just opening a Word document counts!" All of which are good and well (except for the last suggestion), but were not good for me.

As much as I wish I could sit down and pound out 2,000/3,000/4,000 words a day, I cannot. I am simply not used to sitting still that long. Furthermore, I'm not used to sitting down for more than an hour at a time. During long classes in college I lived for the five minute lecture breaks where I could stretch my legs, and being a seamstress means I'm rarely sitting for too long, even as I'm sewing: there are always things to cut, dresses to try on, and patterns to wrangle.