Notes to friends and relatives of writers.

So today my mom informed me that I should be writing 8 hours a day. Of course, she works at her clinic 8 hours a day, so I should write that much. It annoyed the heck out of me, but I know this is a common problem about writers. For some reason, everybody is an expert. If you say 'I'm a writer' or 'I want to be a writer' people will go off onto some spiel about how you should write THIS type of story because it will make more money, or self-publish, or do this and that, and the thing is, these people have no knowledge of the business. At all! My mom is a doctor. I would never presume to go to her office and say 'well, did you check for this?' or 'why don't you treat with this instead of this?' You know why? I'm not a doctor! I didn't go to medical school, and even though I grew up around medicine, I am not qualified to make a diagnosis. Now, I understand that writing is 'different' (anybody can do it, right?) in that it's a creative field, so there's more wiggle room than tried and true scientific methods, but people think that because they wrote one short story in high school (20 years ago) or because they read a lot, that qualifies them to tell you how to write, how much to write, how to get published. Here's a secret: IT DOESN'T.

So here are the following questions I think all friends, relatives, and acquaintances of writers should ask themselves before giving writing advice?

1.) Have I ever studied the craft of writing?
2.) Have I ever been published?
3.) Is there any reason I should know more than this person?
4.) Do they look like they want my advice?

Probably, the answers to all of the above are no. Writing a short story is not the same as writing a novel. Trust me, I can write a mean novel, but my short stories are woeful. They take different skills. I read agent blogs, editor blogs, writer blogs, Writer's Market, as well as read and watch fiction voraciously. Do they? Do they watch a tv show and evaluate the character development, the dialogue, and the timing of action in the scenes? Probably not. I get flack for wasting my time watching anime, but you know what? Watching anime and writing fan fiction about it is how I learned to write! I watch for how the plot unfolds, I look at the character development, and I do it in a way that I guarantee is different from non-writers. Telling a writer how to write a novel is just as bad as telling a doctor how to treat a patient. I don't have the education necessary for that, and likewise, they don't have the education necessary to tell me I should write 8 hours a day, not watch tv, not read books, do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that and I would most certainly appreciate it if people would stop doing it.