Scott Alexander's Writing Advice
Finally got what I paid for
Today, after great anticipation, Scott Alexander arrived at Inkhaven.
Three people with the foresight to submit pieces ahead of time1 had their writing critiqued live on a big screen by Scott Alexander. (One of them also managed to get a free psychiatric consultation.)
Scott gave very good writing advice. For one thing, he suggested we avoid using words like “very”.
One idea Scott kept coming back to was to make every section serve a purpose. Sections should start strong, end strong, and focus on one idea.
One of the pieces Scott critiqued opens with a mystery. The author has noticed a strange smell, but cannot locate its source. Then, they hit us with this sentence:
“I can’t find it because I am imagining The Smell”
Two paragraphs of detail follow. Scott said to drop them, and end the section right there.
An uneasy point was sentence structure.
At the end of office hours, Scott asked us for meta-feedback. Someone suggested that he had been too nice2, that they would have liked to have heard stronger critiques of the pieces presented.
Part of Scott’s response was that he didn’t want to nitpick individual sentences; he wanted to give high level feedback.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it does feel bad to get your writing critiqued at a low level. In the worst case, it can sabatoge you as a writer; you’ll be so conscious about every sentence that you might end up not writing.
On the other hand, I’d say poor sentence structure is the biggest turn off for me when I read someone else’s writing. To be frank, it’s a roadblock in producing my own. I often write a sentence, recognize that it sounds bad, but am unsure how to make it sound good.
Perhaps if Scott picked one sentence per piece as an example, but otherwise focused on high level stuff, that would be optimal? I think his sentence level feedback could be very helpful.
One piece of Scott’s advice surprised me. He suggested we should start by writing for a small audience, that too much early growth could be a curse.
Scott’s original blog posts were LiveJournal entries intended for his family and friends. And because his readers were people he knew, he didn’t have to feel insecure about his writing. He was able to post casually, about things like his trip to the store.
When people blow up too quickly, they get nervous, they write defensively against imagined critics, they don’t develop their voice.
Maybe Scott’s just afraid of competition. But it’s nice to know my diaryposts might actually be good for something.
Someone asked Scott how to write good endings. Scott responded that this was everyone’s least favorite part, that he didn’t have any good answers.
Perhaps because they were not busy battling an illness
For what it’s worth, I disagree, I think he was the correct level of nice.