shelf / essays
Advice off the page: Rice on camera, Wendig online
Not all of the shelf is a shelf. Two of its strongest voices never asked a publisher’s permission: Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds blog, where the material in The Kick-Ass Writer was road-tested list by list, and Anne Rice’s video channel, where a bestselling novelist spent her later years telling beginners, on camera, that most of the rules they’d been taught were optional (the shelf’s notes on her advice are here).
The two make an instructive pair because the medium is the message in both cases. Wendig’s blog voice — profane, list-shaped, renewable weekly — is advice as training partner: you subscribe, you get punched into motion on a schedule, and the internet-native tone filters readers honestly (the about page warns you). Rice on camera is advice as blessing: no curriculum, no mechanics, just a figure of enormous authority looking into a lens and telling you to write the obsession and defend the voice. Neither would survive translation into a sober craft manual, and the book Wendig did make from his blog proves the point — it’s the blog’s greatest hits, not its replacement.
On what beginners lack. Wendig thinks the missing ingredient is discipline — his recurring imperative is finish, and his advice is a system for making that happen despite yourself. Rice thought the missing ingredient was permission — that beginners are over-ruled, not under-ruled, and that workshop law (write what you know, show don't tell) does more silencing than teaching. Prescribing for opposite diseases, they prescribe opposite drugs: structure from him, freedom from her. Check your symptoms before choosing a doctor.
Cost of admission for both: zero. Which is exactly why they belong on a shelf of books that cost money — read the blog and watch a video before the next craft-book purchase, and you may find the purchase unnecessary this month.