Being a Very Online Advice-Giver Has Made My Writing Worse

I (don't) look forward to your feedback.

I’ll never forget this postscript in a fabulous issue of The Whippet by McKinley Valentine (everyone should subscribe):

Writing online—where the barrier to people responding to you is very low—tends to make people slightly worse writers because you always have the voice of the most pedantic reader in your head, so you go with the unassailable generic over the specific, or you dilute the impact of a strong sentence by adding a bunch of disclaimers to head off commenters. Presumably the bigger your audience, the stronger the effect.

This is the disease I suffer from. I’ve spent 15 continuous years being a very online person whose writing appears primarily on websites and in newsletters.

I know that I’m being a bad writer in the way Valentine describes. But as I write I can’t help but anticipate the comments and emails I will deal with no matter how innocuous the topic.

Whatever voice I possessed in my college days, it has been scrubbed down to basic-basic. In my head, I picture a featureless rock. Reader reviews describe my work as clear, direct and pragmatic (kind), or dry (true). As I settle into mid-life, I imagine how my writing could or would have grown if I had never given any consideration to the people waiting to tell me how I didn’t personally take them into account.

Before I read Valentine, I was long aware of Paul Ford’s incisive theory, The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. In it, he gives a name to the dynamic that rules the online world, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?” He writes, “Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before [the web] has been able to tap into that as effectively.”

People online want to be consulted about things. If you don’t, prepare to deal with their consternation.

Reading Ford helps you take a charitable, even philosophical, view of this very human phenomenon. Yet when you face it personally every day in your inbox, charity curdles. I’ll always hear from people explaining how they are the exception to the rule or why my guidance doesn’t work. They’re not trying to be mean, snarky or prove me wrong. Some are more gracious than I would be in similar circumstances, and I certainly want to hear from the exceptions. I want to know about the diverse experiences out there even if I don’t always want to hear about how much I’m wrong.

Seven or eight years into my tenure at Writer’s Digest (not during the early years, in other words), I sat in on a query letter class taught by a novelist. By that point, I had read and seen just about everything on query letters and I taught my own classes on the subject. This novelist delivered what I considered the worst guidance I’d ever heard: Don’t research who you’re submitting to. Get super personal in the query. If you don’t hear back, keep nagging. Go ahead and pick up the phone if necessary. And so on.

I did not stand up and say, “Sir, you are wrong.” This novelist was charismatic (plus a great writer, which helps), and someone I could easily imagine winning over the hearts and minds of agents and editors. But how many people in the audience were like this fellow, a force of nature? Still, he made me re-evaluate how I teach queries. Just about anything is permissible if you’re charming enough, if people enjoy the ineffable you. As the old saying goes from Edison, “There are no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something.”¹

I do in fact believe that, so early on I began to emphasize “best practices.” And I’ve gained buckets of humility. Advice is never universal. Advice can be harmful when it’s received by the wrong person or at the wrong time—or interpreted or remembered incorrectly. (The latter happens a shocking amount.) Expressing brash certitude and forcefulness, a rhetorical flourish I leaned into in my college writing days, I had to abandon. I’m never going to tell people they must be on such-and-such platform or they must do anything. There are way too many “musts” circulating.

The hardest and also most exciting thing about any creative life is figuring out your own path. If we mature alongside our writing, we enjoy (finally) the sweet self-awareness to set aside advice not right for us, without feeling the need to criticize the advice-giver, I might add.

I hate seeing writers play by someone else’s rules, and of course it happens daily. I always know when there’s new advice circulating for writers about social media or email or whatever because everyone starts using the same tactics dictated by a well-known consultant or coach.

These people have jobs to do, I have a job, because people want rules, checklists, procedures, and other prescriptive measures to success which have never existed. It’s easier and sometimes faster than figuring it out yourself, but the trick is sculpting such advice to suit your needs and often abandoning it once you’ve found your way.

I have a job. This job starts and ends with me, and I’m often trying to reduce my risk or at least pick my battles. Which means—so I’ve long believed—being blandly agreeable.

Yet there’s no replacement for you, for your voice, and that’s what most people actually want. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I’m in recovery.

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Do you want to read more personal stuff from Jane like this? Be careful where you click.

1. I did not fact-check this quote initially. After several rounds of editing, I decided I should, lest someone tell me I’m wrong. It seems Edison really did say this.