Conflicting Advice

It can be very confusing to be a student of writing. You are trying to learn how to create in a completely subjective field and you are going to get conflicting advice because of it. Conflicting advice is a pain in the butt because i goes against everything the beginner's mind can understand.

When we are young and learning from our parents or our elementary school teachers, we essentially know nothing about any given field and need to be told what is wrong and what is right. It's simple and easy, so we assume that all learning is like that when you are a complete beginner. But there is extremely little right and wrong in writing, so it is much harder to learn.

I know that I am guilty of giving a lot of conflicting advice, myself. I've said that you should start by creating your world and I've said you should create blank characters and fill in the blanks when you feel like it. I've said you should write the way you speak and I've said that writing and speech are different things and should be treated as such. I've said you should edit as you write and I've said you should get a first draft done and should edit afterward. How can they both be right?

The reason writing is subjective is people. Different people have different thoughts, tastes, and beliefs. People also have different preferences in how they create writing. Some people speak eloquently, so they only need to write down what they naturally say (like me). Other people sound like stuttering morons when they talk, so they need a fair amount of polishing their spoken words to make them good writing (like me). Also, people change. Sometimes a person needs to understand a character to know what he will do. Sometimes that same person needs to know what the character is doing to understand him.

Conflicting advice serves two purposes. For one thing, you will understand that writing is an art and not a science. There is not a right way and a wrong way to do it. Also, you will learn what the various approaches to a given subject are. And if one of those approaches just isn't working, you will still have a number of other methods to try. Pain in the butt though it may be, for the field of writing, conflicting advice may be the best advice out there.