Skills and Projects

[skip.knox]

I do think it gets taken into account. It's why the most common piece of advice, by far, is: it depends.

It's easy enough to provide examples at the extreme ends and say. advice from here doesn't apply as well there. But if we start reducing, things get slippery fast. Does advice on historical fantasy apply to epic fantasy? How about werewolf novels versus vampire novels? It's as easy to reduce the argument to nonsense as it is at the other extreme to make it applicable.

But I do see a place where the distinction would matter, at that lies over in the marketing arena. Agents and publishers are going to say yes, a fantasy romance novel is going to have some requirements. You had better learn (which is another way of saying take advice) the requirements of your genre and sub-genre.

Self-publishers aren't necessarily released from this, especially if they are concerned about selling in quantity (breaking even, livable income, fame and fortune). The same logic applies. If I expect thousands (or even dozens, I suppose) to buy and like my story, then I need to meet their expectations, or at least not disappoint them. So, that might mean snappy dialog, or no snarking, or nailing the history, or whatever. Indeed, a great bulk of what I think of as writerly advice is really about genre expectations.

I guess it comes down to what we hear about grammar or other basic writing: know the rules. Make sure you can write well using them. Then, if you wish, go ahead and violate them to effect. Just don't break them out of ignorance.

 

[The Dark One]

I wonder how much those writers who wrote those works that stood the test of time fretted over the things we look at as the bars they set for us. Did Dicken's for instance write a 100 revisions, and send out for proofs over and over again...or did it just kind of happen, right place, right time kind of thing.

Dickens mainly wrote in weekly instalments for a magazine.

Pretty difficult way of writing a novel and no chance to rethink things already published.

 

[Incanus]

Yes, I felt I needed to resort to a rather extreme example to make the point. Most of the time, things would be less extreme. Using a vampire vs. werewolf example would almost certainly have led to some misapprehension.

Genre expectation--I wish I'd thought of that when first posting. That just HAS to factor into this. I'm glad you brought up that term.

This issue plays out when offering feedback on stories/chapters as well. Not that I'm overly concerned, but I think it was 6 times running where I offered feedback at this site, and I guess I ended up killing the conversation dead each time (?). I assume the comments were ultimately unhelpful, but I don't really know one way or the other. Genre expectation may have played a part. I'll still do it from time to time though.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I think this also very much depends on how you look at it and what kind of advice you're looking for.

If you're going for very specific advice, then only advice aimed at what you're doing is helpful. For instance, if you're asking advice on how to improve a specific paragraph you're asking, then anything about that specific paragraph will be not very useful, even if it's from someone in the same genre. After all, even if you're writing Epic Fantasy, getting advice on a paragraph which says "Tolkien did this" is no help at all (unless there's a very specific point to the comment).

However, if you zoom out, different advice becomes useful. And then it very much depends on what kind of advice you're looking for. If I was writing Epic Fantasy, then perhaps Tolkien's advice would apply. However, if I wanted to include a romantic subplot in my story, then perhaps the advice of a Romance author would be more helpful. And if I wanted to write a novel that will be read in 100 years time and hailed as one of the great novels of the '20s, then actually Sallinger's advice about how to layer stuff in a novel might actually help as much as Tolkien's advice about building an epic. After all, The Catcher in the Rye isn't still being read only because it's about an angsty teenager introspecting.