One of my pet peeves is books on how to write, particularly those that promise that the author's formulas and rules will result in a publishable book. I admit to some mystification as to why people continue to buy such rubbish and believe it to be a map to the Holy Grail of publication.
As in cooking, following a recipe exactly doesn't necessarily guarantee a tasty outcome. It's also unwise to assume that a given recipe will please everyone who tries it. Since that is the case, it's better to cook to your own taste and to realize that just because not everyone likes a particular dish, that doesn't make it a substandard dish. Those whose taste is similar to yours will like it; others will find something else to tempt them.
Advice given in how-to books is often contradictory; this is true whether you're talking cooking or writing, or probably any number of other activities. How do you decide which is the "infallible truth"? Better to start from the knowledge that only experience will teach you what works--for you.
In cooking, it's the way the cook varies a given recipe that makes a dish her or his own. Recipes, whether for cooking or for writing, should be seen as starting points, as inspiration, as idea generators. Often, I've ignored my inner alarm when following a recipe, only to end up with a mighty odd concoction that makes me say, "I was afraid of that! Why didn't I follow my instinct?" I think this is as true for writing as for cooking.
Writing "rules" like "show, don't tell," "don't use adverbs and adjectives," and "eliminate wordiness" aren't hard and fast rules. Fashions change in writing as in everything else, but surely there is always room for writing that breaks the rules. Formulaic writing shows itself to be exactly that. I would be willing to bet that the writers who urge the most formula (every scene should move the plot forward; every scene should have a rise, climax, and fall; etc.) upon would-be published writers break their own rules not infrequently. And some writers really shouldn't be giving advice at all, in my opinion. Stephen King, though wildly successful in the marketplace, is hardly the greatest writer of all time, yet he's got an advice book out there. Sure, I like some of his stuff, but come on. What has made him successful is something most of us don't have: a cultivation of the dark and the grotesque, powered by an amazing imagination. So it is with many writers. They write not from formula, but according to some way of perceiving and ordering the world, a powerful inner orientation toward reality (and its opposite) that drives their work.
What I don't understand is why people eat up these books, buying up every one that comes out over a period of years and years, even when the attempt to follow this mass of advice doesn't result in publication. All the cookbooks in the world won't make you an inspired cook if you're too timid to follow your own instincts and your own knowledge of flavors, textures, and colors.
I have cookbooks of which the recipes rarely produce the promised results, but I keep the books anyway, because--now that I know I have to make adjustments--they give me ideas, suggest combinations, and have taught me to be bold in putting a dish together. The only kind of writing books I like are those that generate ideas, that inspire me to try something I hadn't thought of, that jump-start creativity.
Will I ever be a gourmet chef? No. Will I have fun cooking? Continue to gain confidence in my cooking skills? Keep learning? Have the nerve to invent my own dishes? Hell, yes! And a few people will enjoy my creations. That's enough for me.
Better to write for the same reasons many of us cook: because it's
sustaining, because it allows us to be creative, because we can
experiment, because we can delight ourselves with the results, because
there's always something new to try, because it's a labor of love. If
you like what you've produced, what's wrong with self-publishing?
You'll have a smaller audience, but you won't have had to follow a complicated recipe that you've found difficult to follow and even more difficult to swallow.
This is a position, however, that many writers find impossible to take, they're so hungry for publication. And so they keep hoping that the right recipe will transform their writing into publishable work. Sadly, publication for publication's sake is meaningless when so much of what is published is completely worthless. I've seen stuff so bad that, had one of my students written it, I'd have been hard pressed to award it a passing grade. Such writing is not only just so many empty calories, offering a reader nothing in the way of substance; it's downright toxic. Yet publication remains, for so many writers, the ultimate validation of their talent, their view of who they are and what they are capable of (I believe that the issue of money is secondary for most).
So the how-to-write books will continue to proliferate, and published-author wannabes will continue to snap them up and attempt to follow the recipe faithfully, whether or not the results are interesting, tasty, satisfying, and capable of sustaining life.
