Fuck Writing Advice

Just tell your story

You may or may not have read my most recent article, in which I laid bare all the reasons I stopped writing for nine months — here it is in its angry glory if you want to catch up:

Why I Stopped Writing.

I’ve been so angry for most of this year (aside from politics), and admittedly, as I noted in my tirade above, this was mostly, almost wholly, my fault. I let everything about writing get to me, and I started believing all the bullshit. I started trying too hard, instead of just writing.

Medium is so full of “writing advice” and “how I posted articles for 100 days and gained 10M followers,” and blah blah oh my fucking fuck you blah.

I’ve almost canceled my Medium account a dozen times from opening it up and seeing that shit. But it’s not just Medium; that poison is everywhere, and it’s been everywhere since around 2010 when writers started focusing on writing being a side gig instead of a passion. 

Every fucking other post on Twitter (fuck X, which I happily deleted on or about November 6th), was writers posting about how to write, handing out writing advice, dropping golden nuggets on how they gain followers, or asking completely inane questions to get responses from randoms who follow them to get engagement. All the words in italics above make me angry, maybe a little nauseous. All the words in italics above are the reasons I wanted to just call it quits.

And that shit is everywhere, and now, anytime I see writing advice, I just move on. Sometimes I check to see — is that person just writing this clickbait bullshit over and over? If so, unfollow, delete, block. Nope. I’m leeching out all that poison. All of that has to go because it ruins the joy of putting words together to tell a story. Your story doesn’t have to be monetized. It doesn’t have to be a commodity. It’s not your side hustle. It’s you, and you shouldn’t be selling yourself so cheaply. You deserve better, and your readers do, too.

Just fucking write your shit. 

Just write it. One hundred followers or zero — does it matter if you don’t tell your story? Did you follow the guide to achieving maximum reach by aligning your social media plan to the platform’s algorithm? Ugh! Fuck all that noise. This is how writers are destroyed. This is how your story never gets told.

You’re not Stephen King. I’m sure not. You don’t need 10M followers. I don’t. Hell, we don’t even need five followers. Who cares? (I got one, and he rocks!) Just write your shit. Write your story. Write your dream. Open up your chest and let that shit out. Let everyone see your soul. Get it out there to the world. Other souls will find you, or they won’t. But your stories will be told, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Being a writer means that there are stories you have to tell. You have to. The stories are there, and they’re waiting, calling, clamoring, and crying to be told. Tell them. Those stories might not be necessary to anyone else — we’re not reporters, journalists, or scientists publishing papers. We’re writers, and we are our stories. And our stories are us. Our stories matter to one soul above all — ours; if they matter to others and we see those souls reflecting our love back at us, then more’s the better. But you must still sit down, hammer out that story, and tell it to anyone who will listen. Just write it.

And if no one reads it, it still doesn’t matter because you gave life to someone somewhere in some undiscovered universe where two people meet and fall in love, where a young woman goes on an incredible adventure, where a young man overcomes all odds and defeats the dragon. These universes depend on you for their existence.

Now, I’m telling you to run from generic clickbait writing advice because it will destroy you. But, there is great content out there that will help you become a better writer, and it isn’t writing advice or a laundry list of writing rules. It’s writing analysis. Writing analysis isn’t telling you what to do but how to get the most out of your stories, your characters, your scenes, your dialog.

Read (or listen — there are some really great channels on YouTube for this) about how other writers create their characters and how they build their worlds. Listen to them tell you how their universes came into existence. Listen to them break down examples of great dialog in movies, TV shows, and books. Read about world-building. Read about tempo, crafting scenes and escalating tension. Study your craft through careful analysis.

The rest is bullshit. Writing rules and advice are mostly cheap clickbait.

Write whatever you want to write, and in the end, write it however you want to write it. Some writing dos and don’ts can help you, but if they take away from the story you want to tell, then shitcan them. Write a story using nothing but dialog; I have. Write a story backwards and forwards at the same time; I did. Write a story that follows the rhythms and tone of a famous song; I have one of those. Write a story with ten main characters. Write a story in present tense. Who cares? Just write your story.

And if you do write something — and you certainly don’t have to do this, because the last thing I want to do is set a rule or give you writing advice...

…think about posting it somewhere someone else can find and read it. Medium. Substack. Blogger. Literotica. WattPad. Etc. Because every time you put words on paper and create a new universe, those people and places and things, those adventures and triumphs and defeats — they want to be discovered and loved. We, the readers — because how can you be a writer and not be a reader? — want to find your new universe, and we want to go on those adventures with you.

So, just write it. Fuck all the other bullshit. Just write it. Because if you don’t, those stories will die, and it just means there’s one more universe we’ll never get to explore.

SJ Stone lives in Baltimore with his wife, two Yorkies, and a wiener dog named Sloppy Joe. He’s been around the world 13 times with the Navy, has jumped out of a plane three times, has two grown kids, and has this idea that later in life, he’ll live in Aruba, kite surf all day, and write bad novels all night.