The Craft of Writing: Avoiding Overwhelm
Is too much advice from writing gurus paralyzing you?
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Weekly Writing Tip
Recap of the week’s other Substack posts
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Weekly SFF News Report:
Books & Publishing
Sci-fi
New June releases roundup: Book Riot published a list of notable new science fiction and fantasy titles landing through June, including “Rostam Wrecks the Realm” by Olivia Abtahi (June 9) and “The Sixth Nik” by Daniel Kraus (June 23). (BOOK RIOT)
Fantasy
New June releases roundup: Highlights from a Book Riot list include “The Unicorn Hunters” by Katherine Arden (June 2) and “Kill All Wizards” by Jedediah Berry (June 16). (BOOK RIOT)
New short fiction: Reactor published “Trail Cam” by Benjamin Percy on June 3. (Reactor)
Romantasy
The Times reports the UK’s first dedicated romantasy bookshop, “Bad Girl Books,” is set to open in Oxford on July 2, following pop-ups and crowdfunding support. (The Times)
Film & TV
Sci-fi
“Stargate” update: Space.com reports Amazon MGM has cancelled its planned new “Stargate” series, which had been in early development under Martin Gero with input from franchise veterans. (Space)
What’s coming next (roundup published this week): Space.com published a 2026 sci-fi TV preview including items like “Spider-Noir,” “Star City,” “Silo” Season 3, and more. (Space)
Audio & Radio
Fantasy and sci-fi
Listening pick: Book Riot’s podcast episode “The It Books of June 2026” dropped within the week, spotlighting major new book releases (useful if you like your “to be read” (TBR) with commentary). (Apple Podcasts)
Fandom & Events
Romantasy
The Times notes “Bad Girl Books” in Oxford plans themed merchandise and a summer “romantasy festival” featuring 50+ authors, alongside the shop opening July 2. (The Times)
Weekly Writing Tip: Avoiding Overwhelm
A revelation
The other day I was busy being mystified by the YouTube algorithm when a revelation struck me. . .
Instead of watching TV, I sometimes relax by watching YouTube videos that encompass my interests, such as landscape, science, handcrafts, scifi, fantasy, history etc. Apparently, the YouTube algorithm knows me better than I know myself — or at least, it thinks it does. It often suggests videos I’d not have deliberately picked, and lately these have been videos teaching ‘the craft of writing’.
I’m always happy to learn something new, so I started watching them. After viewing half a dozen or so, I realised I’d better stop, or I’d probably never write anything again.
Flooded with advice
There is an entire industry built around teaching writing, and while much of it comes from knowledgeable people with real experience, there is also a risk that beginners end up swamped in a morass of rules before they have even written a page.
There’s no shortage of experts on the craft of writing. Many are professional editors. Many run successful YouTube channels and/or sell courses aimed at aspiring authors. Some undoubtedly have valuable knowledge to share. Yet I sometimes wonder whether new writers are being overwhelmed before they have even begun.
Imagine sitting down with the desire to write your first story, only to be met with endless warnings: avoid this mistake, master that structure, follow these ten rules, understand these tropes, learn pacing, tension, character arcs, point of view, scene structure, market expectations, how to write good dialogue, how to excel at prose rhythm, and so on. Before long, writing starts to resemble an arduous examination rather than a joyous act of imagination. I suspect some emerging writers are in danger of becoming frightened to pick up a pen at all!
Help! I’m trapped!
Restriction is another potential danger for emerging writers who depend on advice from “gurus”. They can fall into the trap of patterning themselves on successful writers, or following market trends, instead of developing their own unique voice.
The most helpful method for becoming a good writer
Here’s my opinion: if you want to become a skilled writer, read.
Read for enjoyment, and read the best authors. Read classics, no matter how old, and read contemporary books. Reading teaches things that formal instruction often cannot, and it usually does so without you really realising it, while you’re simply immersed in a great story. You begin to recognise voice, rhythm, pacing, story arcs and all the rest.
You can choose to read passively, (immersing yourself in the narrative and absorbing writing-craft goodness by osmosis), or read actively — dissecting the author’s methods.
Did you know you know more than you know you know?
You already know much more about writing in your native language than you might think. Here’s an example for English-speakers - does this sound right to you? “The green, great dragon flew across the skies. . . “
You instinctively know it sounds wrong; and not because you’ve never seen an actual dragon.
JRR Tolkien wrote about this in a letter to W. H. Auden dated 7 June 1955, later published as Letter 163 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.
He recalled that, when he was about seven, he tried to write a story about a dragon. He remembered almost nothing of the story, except that his mother corrected his phrase “a green, great dragon” and told him that it had to be “a great, green dragon.”
His mother was correcting the natural English order of adjectives: an adjective of size or scale, such as great, normally comes before an adjective of colour, such as green. In English, adjectives generally appear before a noun in the following order: opinion, size, physical quality, age, shape, colour, origin, material, and purpose or type. English speakers usually apply this order instinctively, which is why the corrected phrase sounds natural and the original phrase sounds unusual.
THEY did not formally ‘learn the craft of writing’. . .
Think of beloved writers from the past. Did Shakespeare enroll in a writing masterclass? Did Tolkien undertake a writing course? Not at all! They read, studied, observed, and then wrote.
Of course, Tolkien was a scholar, and Shakespeare received an education far beyond casual reading. There are, however, many successful authors who had little formal education. Their lives do not prove that higher education is unimportant, but they do show that deep reading, curiosity, and persistence can have enormous influence.
A few examples:
Agatha Christie
Christie had little formal schooling and was educated mostly at home. She became one of the bestselling authors in history.
Charles Dickens
Dickens had only a limited formal education. His family’s financial troubles forced him into factory work as a child. Much of his learning came through voracious reading and experience. He became one of the most influential novelists in English literature.Mark Twain
Twain left school around age 11 after his father’s death and worked as a printer’s apprentice. He educated himself through reading and experience. His observations of people became central to his writing.George Bernard Shaw
Shaw disliked formal schooling and considered much of his education self-directed. He spent years reading extensively in libraries before success arrived.Ray Bradbury
Bradbury never attended college. He famously said: “Libraries raised me.” He spent years reading in libraries several days a week and became one of the defining science fiction writers of the twentieth century. His work includes Fahrenheit 451.
Many authors without university education were still highly educated in another sense. They read constantly, they memorised poetry and they delved into history, mythology, religion, politics, languages, or philosophy. Their education was often self-built.
People sometimes say, “You do not need education to write,” and hear, “You do not need to learn.” Those are very different ideas. The authors above learned relentlessly. Libraries, newspapers, observation, conversation, and life supplied what universities did not.
If I looked for one habit shared by successful writers across a variety of backgrounds, whether university-educated or not, I would choose this: they spent enormous amounts of time among books.
Writing advice has value, but perhaps its proper place comes later. A young tree needs sunlight and soil before it needs pruning.
For beginners especially, perhaps the best encouragement is not, “Learn all the rules first,” but rather: read constantly, write often, and allow experience to teach what formulas cannot.
I sometimes post writing tips on this blog, because when I surveyed my beloved subscribers, they told me that was what they wanted. However I try to keep those tips broad and fluid.
Reading and writing alone do not always guarantee improvement. Guidance has its place, and a skilled editor can accelerate development enormously. However, when advice becomes overwhelming, or when consuming content about writing begins to replace writing itself, that’s the danger.
The writers who progress tend to do this — they read voraciously, they write obsessively, and sometimes they seek advice.
Recap of other Substack Posts this Week
Dear Subscribers: I only send you one post per week, because I love not cluttering your email inbox. However, I write other stuff, which you can read on the Substack website and app. This past week, it included:
Crafting a linocut print (probably procrastination in disguise)
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This is such good advice, ironically, advice about writing to take less advice about writing, but that is exactly what so many people need.
I read very little on Substack these days, because so little of what is on Substack is worth reading. It is just keyboard vomit. People writing for the sake of writing, instead of having something to write. Worst of all are the writing prompts. Just stop them, they are writing junk. Prompts are for Ai or for writing sprints in writing groups. If you want to write stuff, itching to find something to bash into your keyboard, just stop, go and read a book instead. Nobody cares if you tap out 2000 words based on a mythical sock that is found by a hat seller by a church gate, just stop it. If you are that bored, go and read a book. You will learn a lot more than by writing yet more of the same drivel into Substack because somebody posted up a writing prompt.
Reading far too much advice about writing destroys your ability to write. You start to write to the rules instead of telling a story. One of the worst offenders is the first-line hook. Make sure you grab the reader's attention with the first line, dreadful advice that results in some of the worst writing you can imagine. Would you want to read something that starts with a sentence that has so much description forced into it that you have forgotten the beginning by the time you get to the end? No, you wouldn't, so why write like that?
Don't even get me started on structure. In the third chapter, which will be 3000 words, split into three scenes, with the main character...
Aaaggghhh!
Just tell the bloody story. Do you even have a story?
You can pretty it up later, but for the sake of all that's holy, people ultimately want to read a story. They do not pick up a book hoping it will have a good structure, they hope it will tell a good story.
So yes, you are so right. Writers need to read, and writers need to write, and the more time they spend reading, studying, and perfecting writing advice, the less time they spend doing either of those two much more important things.
So true about the writing advice. I'll watch one "how to write" video then, "Oh, this one looks good," and so on and so on until I'm 10 videos deep with all different advice 😂 BTW, none of them will have mentioned how important reading is for learning what good writing looks like