This post was originally written during my long hiatus in an attempt to keep the blog active, but never published due to personal issues I was having at the time - it's still relevant now, so please enjoy!
Every single piece of writing advice I've ever seen has been countered by another piece of advice from someone else. I've even read about Stephen King and George RR Martin discussing tips and finding themselves completely at odds. I never felt like I was "learning to write" - I've always Just Written - but when I was actively trying to improve myself and my writing, I'd look at these long lists of tips by Victorian-era authors, by self-published modern novelists, by fanfic writers, by JK Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and people I admired or had literally never heard of... Either it would make me go "Well, shit, I don't do that so I must be A Failure", or "Oh nice I do that I must be okay after all". If anything I read did ever inspire me to change my habits, I'm pretty sure I either changed back or adapted whatever I'd read into my own new style.
Every single piece of writing advice I've ever seen has been countered by another piece of advice from someone else. I've even read about Stephen King and George RR Martin discussing tips and finding themselves completely at odds. I never felt like I was "learning to write" - I've always Just Written - but when I was actively trying to improve myself and my writing, I'd look at these long lists of tips by Victorian-era authors, by self-published modern novelists, by fanfic writers, by JK Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and people I admired or had literally never heard of... Either it would make me go "Well, shit, I don't do that so I must be A Failure", or "Oh nice I do that I must be okay after all". If anything I read did ever inspire me to change my habits, I'm pretty sure I either changed back or adapted whatever I'd read into my own new style.
I don't really get asked for "writing advice", but I do get people asking to compare methods, or asking how I managed to plan a whole novel/stay motivated/think up that scene, or just complaining about how much they suck and then looking at me hopefully.
Maggie Stiefvater said my favourite thing about writing advice when a fan asked her for some (she also said my favourite things about a lot of other topics, but lbr i could cry about how much i love maggie stiefvater for days, so let's not go into that now). I can't find the specific wording, but it was pretty much:
"Every time I finish a book, I think I've learned how to write a book. Then when I start a new one, I realise that I just learned how to write that book."
Honestly, it's perfect. Not only does everyone write differently, but every story requires a different set of methods... Almost a different writer. I have some consistencies, but everything from my schedule to my tone of voice to my way of structuring the novel changes with every novel and every character. Dany, North, and Kiah all had as much difference between them as each of them does from Sylv.
So if you want writing advice from me, all I've pretty much got is: write, ya ho. Write well. Write badly. Write as smutty or as gory as you're comfortable, and a bit further than you are. Write unfamiliar stories. Try spider diagrams and boxes and bullet-point lists. Make character profiles and portraits and if they don't work then just keep them inside your head. Maybe it would help if you took a class, or maybe that would just mess you up. Listen to other people's ideas and opinions, but remember that at the end of the day, the words are in your chest.
The only other piece of advice I've ever really taken to heart is one from I can't remember who. Possibly several people who were all in agreement.
It's:
Don't write for a market audience. Write for one person.
I guess if you wanted to make money you'd write A Book For Boys Aged 11-14, or A Book For Divorced Women Aged 37-45, or A Book For Fans of The Hunger Games, and I don't want to disrespect anyone who maybe does really love writing very specifically for any of those target audiences by suggesting that they're any less ~valid~. But one of the most destructive things for me when I started trying to write not things, but novels, was trying to find an intended audience.
There are essays and dissertations about there about why modern YA manages to be one of the most diverse and popular "genres" out there at the moment. It's filled with so many new and groundbreaking writers that it barely has any tropes or standards any more; what started to become famous with The Hunger Games and Divergent, which can be considered fairly similar, is now led by The Raven Cycle, Six of Crows, Throne of Glass, Shades of Magic... The only consistent features of the genre seem to be inverting old tropes and refusing to fit into any other genre. It's even hard to say that a genre literally named "Young Adult Fiction" is actually aimed at Young Adults any more. I'm not even sure what a Young Adult is.
Vicious, by VE Schwab, is one of my favourite novels and also a perfect example of this. I read a post by the author about writing it, saying how difficult it was to get a publisher to take it on because of the struggle to find a market audience - and I think that's one of the reasons I love it so much. The market audience is, like... Me. Vicious' main characters are two thirty-ish men and an eleven year-old girl. It's about superpowers and a dysfunctional non-family and a dog and it has a big clever scheme the good guys have to pull off - all very YA things. But it also features the "good guy" main character torturing people, and little girls getting shot, and quite graphic suicide attempts. The issue publishers have with something like that is that "adults" apparently don't want to read about superpowers and eleven year-old girls adopting dead dogs, but "kids" apparently don't want to read about thirty year-old men, and certainly shouldn't be reading about murder and torture and such things.
And Vicious is one of the best books I have ever read.
Maybe my problem is that I've always read such diverse things, in such a wide intended age range, that my fiction-brain has never been set to one genre. My tastes in novel haven't changed my entire life; while the staples of my child/teenhood reading were Warrior Cats and Wolf Brother and Artemis Fowl, these were intersected with no discrimination with Discworld, The Pillars of the Earth, A Game of Thrones... If the librarian let me check it out, I read it. I read a book about teenage pregnancy before I'd had my school sex ed. I read White Fang when I was eight. I think I was fourteen when I went through Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - yet at age twenty, I still read literature "aimed at" early teens with glee. I went through all the standards of "my age range", most of which were about teenage girls with cancer, with as much polite enjoyment as I read overly descriptive masculine sagas about manly men fighting entire armies single-handedly.
So... How am I supposed to pick one genre to write in, when I read so damn many?
The cheat answer is that I don't.
Each Separate Dying Ember is definitely most enjoyed by people who loved Six of Crows, The Raven Cycle, and The Hunger Games. However, I wouldn't necessarily say that those people are "Young Adults". Did my nan enjoy it? Not especially. Did my dad enjoy it? No. Did my friends enjoy it? Half of them were meh, half of them were hell fucking yes. Did the 30 year-old mother of two who ran my old book club enjoy it? More than almost anyone else I know.
But Each Separate Dying Ember is actually fairly easy to categorise, if one insists on doing so, because it features a dystopian world, some class divides, some heavy-handed metaphors about our own society, and main characters aged 17-21 (click for an entire post about, like... all of that stuff). It also features some very intentional inversions of tropes associated with those genres, all of which are spoiler-heavy, but all of which were also intentional.
I asked what was good about YA, and then I asked what was bad about YA, and then I made a novel that pointed at YA and said "dare ya".
Sylvestus is more difficult in that respect, though I'd argue that it follows the same rules. In the same way Dying Ember is about winged people in a dystopian city, Sylvestus is about the Roman invasion of a fantasy island. In the same way Dying Ember is about people and change and social hypocrisy, Sylvestus is about survival and the courage to let yourself fall.
Like Vicious, it is to some degree Sylvestus' themes and characters that make it difficult to call YA. The protagonist is a 40 year-old man. He is to no degree a "good guy". Violence and gore are at points described just slightly too graphically for the parents of, say, a fifteen year-old to be comfortable with them reading. And I will genuinely warn that the themes in Sylvestus get very heavy at times.
But there are intentional trope inversions from YA and a dozen other genres all over the place. In a way, my aim at some points was to take a trope that would make any reader who was familiar with it comfortable - and then turn it on its head. Oh, you wanted Sexy Jungle Princess? Fuck you, take Lavi. Oh, the protagonist is a 40 y/o soldier so he should be tall and buff and hypermasculine? LOL, Sylv is gonna shake you up fam. There are epic battles that could have come out of a David Gemmell trilogy, but the characters are more like some of Maggie Stiefvater's. It was only when I read a Terry Pratchett novel for the first time in years a few months ago that I realised just how much of my dry writing style I learned from him - a writing style that seems perhaps at odds with a novel whose plot seems superficially to be about war and magic tigers and nothing Discworld-y at all.
I think that the thing is, I write like someone who grew up on every different genre imagineable, and decided that none of them were quite right. The heroes in fantasy aimed at middle-aged men were never relatable to me. The narrative voice of "teenage novels" bored me. Books that enchanted me with their magic and alternate universes lacked any theme I could relate to; books designed to be about themes recognisable to my age group lacked excitement to keep me interested.
I always wanted to write about dragons and shapeshifters and werewolves and Romans and winged people and pirates and kings and detectives - but I also wanted to write about the suffering I had experienced, about how I had survived. And that kind of thing was only found in depressing short stories which got nominated for a lot of awards and had no happy ending, which didn't feature dragons or Romans or pirates but rather had a small cast of depressed teens and depressed friends and depressed parents.
So who do I write for? Who's my one person? You'd think after that whole monologue, I'd say "young me who wants something like Sylvestus to read" or something soppy like that.
It isn't.
I write for Beta. Beta is my best friend. My Arch-Bro. Beta reads everything, before anyone else. When I plan a new world, I want to tell Beta. When I think of a new plot twist, I imagine Beta's face when they read it. When I wonder if this metaphor is too heavy-handed, I run it past Beta. When I'm not sure if a chapter is a little too dark or whether it works well with the themes and the lightness that came before, I imagine how it will make Beta feel to read it.
With something like Sylvestus, but also with Dying Ember, a big dang concern is whether anyone at all will want to read it. If my nan won't like the violence and my dad won't like the themes and half my friends won't like the fantasy elements, who the hell is going to like it?
Beta will. As long as Beta enjoys reading it, I know I've done good. And, from a marketable standpoint, presumably Beta isn't, like, the only person whose interests align specifically enough to want to read it.
Who's going to relate to a 40 y/o Roman soldier if he doesn't fulfil all the key tropes of any character aimed at 40 y/o men? If I've done my job right, anyone. Anyone who likes dogs, or anyone who enjoys dessert, or anyone who needs time to themselves after dealing with people, or anyone who has suffered, or anyone who has pulled themselves up off the ground, or anyone who has hurt someone else and enjoyed it for half a second, or anyone who has run from what frightens them.
Sylv is a person, maybe the favourite person I've ever written. To show him to the world is terrifying and exhilerating.
You know what? You might not like Sylvestus. Maybe you just don't like fantasy. Maybe the fire-tigers put you off. Maybe novels set during fictional historical wars aren't your thing, or they're only your thing when the narrator's tone isn't so sarcastic he can't get through a page without insulting either you or the universe.
You might not like Dying Ember. You might not like the winged people, or the city, or the sci-fi, or the themes.
But Beta liked them.
And Beta is, after all, their intended audience.
