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Probably not the safest post to make when you recently released a ‘how to’ book.  Do I Need to Use a Dragon? is full of advice, so you would think an author would want people to use as much of it as possible.  I mean, it worked for me, so all of it together should be perfect, right?  Well, that’s ego talking.

The reality is that not every piece of advice you receive is worth taking.  I’ve gone into this before, but I want to talk about the danger of following every tip that you receive.  This is fairly common in people who are starting out and wanting to learn the trade that they have stepped into.  The new person will look to those with experience as being wise and this can lead to a misconception that every tip they hear is gold.  They’ll rush home to work the new advice into their writing, meet another experienced person, and continue the cycle of ‘building skills’.  It doesn’t always work out well.

Especially in artistic trades, a person might grab so much advice that they start turning their works into hodgepodge blobs.  You can see the influence of others in there, but no individuality of the actual author.  Pieces won’t fit together because they took advice from those who have opposing styles.  There wasn’t an attempt to see if things meshed or modify them to unite.  It was just slapping in the advice and thinking that would be enough to elevate the works.  I believe this is what some people would call a rookie mistake and it can be a big one.

I know this because I did this to Beginning of a Hero back in the day.  From the years of 2002 through 2007, I went to a few writing classes or approached indie authors online for advice.  An important note here is that only one person I ever interacted with during this time was a fantasy author.  Everyone else was either a journalist, lyricist, letters to the editor writer, fan-fiction writer, romance, and historical fiction.  This meant that I was getting advice that worked for their genre and path.  I learned that authors tend to give advice in a general way instead of adjusting things to their audience.  Guess that ability is saved for actual book writing.

So, what were the results?  When I sat down to prepare Beginning of a Hero for publishing in 2013, I found myself staring at a terrifying mess.  Now, this book was already a little shaky being my first big step into fantasy writing.  Taking everyone’s advice and jamming it into the story had me staring at a patchwork maze.  The story was still there and the characters had their proper forms.  It was the presentation of the story and the personalities of the characters due to dialog that was a nightmare.  I had at least three different methods of portraying dialog jockeying for domination.  Info dumps were written blandly and I had random asides that showed Luke Callindor’s childhood, which served no purpose.  So, I had to go through it several times to fix everything and develop a style that I was confident about.  Couldn’t even tell you if a kept any of the advice or if I jettisoned everything though because it was that big a headache.

This is the danger of taking too much advice.  Not only with writing, but with anything in life.  As we hear many times, you can’t please everyone.  This includes accepting all advice and ignoring our own identities.  You truly run the risk of losing yourself as an individual if you go along with too many people.  It’s the opposite of going nowhere because you won’t accept any help.  So, always try to take a step back and think about what was suggested to you before you adopt it.

Also, check out Do I Need to Use a Dragon? and consider what’s inside.