This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. Then, of course, intellection sometimes needs a lot of time to think.

With the internet, never before have we had such an abundance of information. When I was growing up, I went to the library and prowled through the single shelf of books on fiction writing. Today at Barnes and Noble, it’s still a single shelf.

But if I go to any of the online book sellers, I can find hundreds of ebooks on fiction writing. If I run a search on Google or Bing, I’ll find thousands of hits on fiction writing.

Instructors also teach online in videos. My county offers one writing class every season. Smithsonian Associates offered a four part writing class. Dean Wesley Smith has a stable of writing courses. Margie Lawson offers monthly courses.  Jonathan Maberry offers courses periodically. And of course, quite a few writers like James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, and Amy Tan are on Master Class. I could probably search Ted Talks and find something there.

But there are problems with having so much information “available.”

1. Just because an individual posts information about this topic doesn’t make them an expert. 

If I searched online for pantser vs. outliner, I would get a lot of writers explaining pantsing with great puzzlement, then explaining their outlining process. People who have tried pantsing will explain why they switched to outlining. Yet, many writers explain something they’ve never done.

There’s a lot of this out there. Not just in fiction writing. It’s everywhere. People are told they need to be influencers so they start blogging, filming, or podcasting. A few months ago I fired my fitness coach. I have reasonable knowledge of fitness (not an expert), so I popped online to find exercises. I’m not twenty. I’m at the age where some exercises doesn’t play well with the joints. Yet, I found very few sites where the “expert” understood that; they tended to treat everyone as if they were 20. I suppose that’s like outlining or productivity; you teach your process as if everyone can do it because it works for you.

If any of the influencers is successful, everyone parrots what they say. This is particularly true with basic writing advice because it’s easy to write instructions for that. I’m taking an information flow class now and getting some of the same topic in another class, though that author didn’t call it that. What’s information flow? There is no simple explanation, no bulleted list of things you can check off. The topic is so big you could write a book on it. A blog post? No way.

2. Just because someone is published doesn’t mean they’re an expert.

This one’s tough. We see someone with three or four books out, and they must know more than we do. Unfortunately, that’s not always true. The old way of publishing forced writers to learn how to be better so they could get a book accepted. I’m now reading indie books where the author’s writing does not change from Book 1 to Book 20. As reader, one of the things I loved was when I got the next book and it was better than the last one. It’s the thing that makes me buy the entire In-Depth series, one right after another; or the entire Kate Daniels series. It’s also the thing that made me stop reading one urban fantasy author because the next bunch of books declined in quality.

One author wrote a sci-fi mystery series and decided to teach about genre. But I read the first book and it was clear—to a spec fiction reader—that she was writing two markets she didn’t understand. Science fiction needs a lot of world building, much more than she did; mystery needs a lot of cryptic clues (and delicate pairing with science fiction; mystery readers do not cross genres). A third genre took over the story, so it became a story that didn’t know what it wanted to be. But she was teaching genre.

So read their work before you invest money and time.

3. Just because they’re a multi-published or best selling author doesn’t mean they can teach.

There was a best selling writer I wanted to learn a skill from. He’s very good at it in his books, a master. He has an online class up. He’s also horrible. I hit a video on research—every writer always has something to say on what they do here. He was shockingly vague.

The challenge here is that some parts of writing are intuitive. Not everyone can explain how to do it. Yet, everyone is expected to do exactly that.

4. If they say “It’s easy” or “It’s that simple,” run in the other direction.

We want writing to be easy. We want someone to explain writing a book, boiled down to its simplest steps. We want the secret sauce when someone else says “It’s simple.”

Writing fiction is not simple.

Let me repeat that: Writing fiction is not simple.

Anyone who tells you it’s simple is marketing to you. We’re in a complicated world with too many things coming at us. People want simple. But if you picked fiction writing, you ain’t getting simple. At least not if you want to be published.

Beginner advice, as Tiago Forte says:

But beginner advice is also inherently limited. It’s a deliberate oversimplification, hiding or ignoring a lot of the complexity of the real world in order to make it easier for beginners to take action. It may not be true (as in, describing the full reality), but it is often useful (providing a clear next step).

He also notes that beginner advice tends to be one-size-fits-all. Which is where you end up with writers assuming that you must outline to write a novel.

I searched for “Is writing fiction simple?” to see what I would get. There were a lot of posts like 10 Steps to Write a Novel.  The steps attempted to make it look simple, when it was anything but. One included steps on fleshing out your idea, outlining (with substeps on how to outline), writing a draft, and revising. These are all things that could take an entire book to discuss!

But we also currently have a problem: Writers are learning how to be beginners and not learning how to transition to the next level. This is the real danger of “simple.” You don’t create books that keep readers buying the next one. The ending does sell the next book, but if the writing doesn’t engage the reader they wander away (this is where information flow comes in as well; botched flow can make a reader stop reading).

So what’s a writer supposed to do?

First, you always have to respect your own processes of writing. Process is NOT craft. Everyone starts duking it out not only about pantser vs. outliner, but the nuances of how to do it. Some don’t understand the difference between craft and process; others are marketing.

You also have to know where you are in this. For a while, I had to completely avoid any instructor who was an outliner because it would mess up my writing. Now I can separate it better. Still I was quite impressed to hear one of my instructors say that he had started out as a pantser but switched to outlines because of deadlines. Then he noted that, depending on what your process was, how you approached things would be different. Yes!

Ask questions. I ran across a closed community promoting itself as being for beginners and advanced writers. I was suspicious, so I emailed the writer in charge. He assured me that they would have material for advanced writers and that they had a seven day refund policy. He asked me what I was looking for and did not know what I was talking about. Given the seven day timeline, I signed up to poke around. Everything was what I’ll call “beginner advanced.” I asked for a refund after three days.

Do research the writer. See how many books they’ve published. Explore at least the sample chapters to see if they grab you. If you’re on the fence, take the least expensive option that works for you first to see if you want to invest more. 

If they teach beginner topics, they are beginners, even if they are professionally published. There’s a writer who won a major contest. He immediately started an academy for writers and has courses on Teachable. They’re basic topics like “how to get ideas” and “kill your darlings.”  An advanced writer is not going to teach beginners. Just not going to happen. There are too many beginners who will question him because it conflicts with the beginner advice. Or look for the secret sauce of being a best seller. They won’t actually be serious about writing.

However, one of the problems is that once you get past the basic level, there are few consistent terms for other skill levels. Depth, coined by Dean Wesley Smith, has been talked about in writing magazines since the 1940s. Never had a name. Now people also talk about Deep POV or Immersive POV.  Dean Wesley Smith also calls the actual ending of a story the “validation.” But it’s also listed as the denouement (often applied only to mystery), resolution, or epilogue.

So you almost have to stumble across the skill to even know it’s there.

These are a few to look for:

Tags and traits: Jim Butcher has talked about this in Superstars, and I believe it’s on his old blog posts. Deborah Chester discusses them in her books. Dean Wesley Smith has an online course as well. This is not an easy skill where you check off that your character has brown hair and bites her nails. These are used throughout the story and series and can include not only characters, but setting. Please, please do not have your character smirk or tuck her hair behind an ear. Spend a little time finding tags and traits that are unique.

Word Use: This is also one that you’ll have to do a lot of digging because it comes in from a variety of sources. Margie Lawson has a lecture packet on the topic. Dean Wesley Smith has classes on Power Words and Information Flow that both address word use. Anything more advanced on pacing may touch on it. You would need to understand Depth/Deep POV/Immersive POV to work the word use.

Pacing: Tough to find advanced information. Most of what’s available is “write short sentences” and seems applied only to action scenes. Pacing can be the length of your scenes and chapters. There are also parts of writing that are paced differently. For example, description is necessary, but you also have to make sure it’s paced properly by using many techniques include word use and the rule of three. Jonathan Maberry has an excellent class on pacing. Dean Wesley Smith has Pacing and Advanced Pacing. You can also study James Patterson and Dean Koontz.

It’s not enough to have abundant information available to us. It has to be good information, information that will actually help. The hard part is finding it.