Is it helpful to read critical essays about writing?

Is it helpful to read essays about creative writing? It’s an interesting question that I’ve given a lot of thought to recently. As a creative writing student at a university you seem to be steered towards the view that it is helpful. You’re encouraged to read essays so you can write critical commentaries on your own writing. You’re loaded with five different essays at the end of each seminar to read for next week. And it’s true that you can learn some interesting lessons from reading essays about creative writing.

However, the more I think about it, the more I believe that reading critical essays on writing is, in fact, unhelpful. It fuels the biggest enemy of good writing: over-thinking.

‘Fail Better’, an essay written by Zadie Smith, teaches that ‘writers have only one duty… the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.’ This is really interesting and, in my opinion, correct. But did we need to know it? Isn’t it obvious that that’s what writing should be? And now I’ve read that essay I’m over-thinking. I’m wondering whether I should abandon the screenplay I’m writing about a dystopian reality TV show were twelve people have communal dreams which are watched by the public and whether I should be writing something that I myself have experienced.

But I shouldn’t be worried about this. Because, even if you write a story about something you’ve never experienced, you automatically, instinctively, as a writer,

draw on your own experiences. So reading this critical essay has made me worry about a silly thing that I never would have thought about before.

The rest of Zadie Smith’s essay tells us that nearly all writing is failure and always ends up feeling dishonest. I think if I started to over-think that, I’d go crazy.

In my experience, reading critical essays on what makes writing good turns writing into a cold, clinical, academic discipline rather than an art. Obviously technique is important. But if you start trying to conform your writing to what a critic thinks it should be like, your writing is going to lose its authenticity, its emotion and everything that makes it a part of you.

When you start to overthink a piece of writing, especially the technical side of it, it saps your inspiration – in my experience, at least – and makes you lose sight of the vision you had before you started writing. So what’s the point in reading something that will inevitably make us overthink something that should come naturally to us?

Thanks for reading.

8 Creative Writing Rules to Follow

In most creative writing classes you will be given a list of basic rules to follow that make your writing more effective. Obviously these rules can, and in some cases should, be broken. It’s always up to the artistic discretion of the writer. But if you’re just starting out and haven’t developed your own unique writing style yet, these rules can be really useful.

Here are the eight most important rules I’ve learned:

1. Show don’t tell – This will always be my number 1 rule. A sentence is much more effective if you can demonstrate how your characters feel or look without having to spell it out for your readers. The reader is always cleverer than you expect them to be. And ‘he was old’ sounds much more juvenile than something along the lines of ‘beneath his wrinkles you could see the young man he once was'.


2. Try to cut down on ‘ly’ words – If you can find a verb that accurately describes what your character is doing, it’s much better to use it than to stick an adverb on the end of your sentence. 


3. Try to cut down on ‘ing’ words – I disagreed with this rule when I first heard it. But now I’ve realised that a lack of ‘ing’ words tends to improve a sentence. ‘He walked down the road and shook his head’ sounds better than ‘he walked down the road, shaking his head’. I can’t explain why, but I genuinely believe this rule works. 


4. Avoid long sentences – I mean really long sentences. It worked for Dickens and Tolstoy but modern readers will get bored and lose focus if they have to read paragraph-long, convoluted sentences. 


5. Don’t use verbs other than ‘said’ to describe speech – I’m not sure I agree with this rule. It’s one that could definitely be broken if you do it in the right way. But ‘he said/she said’, or even no verb at all, often sounds better than ‘she exclaimed’ or ‘he gasped’ which always sound like they’ve been snatched right out of a children’s book.


6. The best dialogue doesn’t state exactly what characters mean or want to say – Sometimes people find it hard to express what they really mean. Our characters are no different. Dialogue doesn’t sound very realistic if characters come right out and say exactly what they’re thinking. They need emotional depth and complexity in their conversations.


7. Less is more – My stories normally end up half the length they were in my first drafts. It’s usually best to cut any unnecessary description or anything that doesn’t really add to the overall effect of the story.


8. And of course… write what you know – This has to be the most common creative writing rule there is but that’s probably because it’s the most important. Writing what you know doesn’t mean that you have to recreate your life but it does mean you can make your fictional story more realistic and relatable.

So these are my top 8 basic tips for good creative writing.  I hope they’re helpful. 

Thanks for reading.