It’s helpful to take bad advice sometimes. Three examples:

Bad advice that is bad

Three readers complained that Twilight was too emotional in scene two of The Corpse Bride. I rewrote that scene to instead have Rainbow be emotional, and have Twilight give a calm, rational, and ironically correct explanation (ironic because her tragedy came from not taking her own advice seriously).

All three readers were pleased by the revision, so I guess I didn’t botch taking their advice. I liked the new ironic twist. But I still didn’t like the new version as much, and GhostOfHeraclitus [1], Cypher [2], and the Equestria Daily pre-reader all also wanted more emotion from Twilight there.

The advice sounded reasonable, so why didn’t it work?

– I wrote the story with a flat, matter-of-fact tone and pace that Twilight’s emotional outbursts contrasted nicely with, like sudden gusts of wind in a still November forest.

– In the first version, when Twilight kills Fluttershy, she commits the hubris of believing that she knows what is best for Fluttershy out of empathy, and we sympathize even as we see what a terrible thing she is doing. When she explains herself calmly, she’s just a twit with a theory. [3]

I’m good at thinking analytically, so it’s easy for me to take one scene in a story, divide one character’s business among two separate characters, and rewrite it. Pacing, and whatever you call the equivalent of pacing with regard to tone and mood, are things I don’t understand analytically. I feel the story’s shape intuitively. I learned explicitly why I had intuitively written the story the way I did by writing it the way that I didn’t want to, and seeing the result. I also learned that if I write a story the way I feel it, then go back and change one part radically without re-imagining the entire story, I'm liable to ruin it.

Bad advice that means there is a problem

The first Equestria Daily pre-reader for Big Mac Reads Something Purple said that the writing was flat, and needed more description. I had written the first 500 words sparsely, because it was Big Mac, and I wanted him to be hiding his feelings inside, only able to speak them disguised as a story. There wasn’t much that I could do to create tension or drama before he began telling the story, so I hurried through the scene setting that up.

Nonetheless, I rewrote it to be more descriptive and resubmitted it. This time, the pre-reader said that the story was “Big Macintosh doing his best at not been particularly interesting.... What is the conflict?” He had, I think, completely missed the story.

Both times, the pre-reader was correct that there was something wrong with the story. I think the problem was that the conflict began in the story within the story, but Big Mac gave up almost instantly within that story when the CMC challenged him. That made it easy for that conflict to slip past the reader. And if that happened, the reader would never see the connection between the story that Big Mac told and what happened after he told it. Adding description only made the problem worse, because the lengthier opening buried the critical part of the story even deeper. But if I’d just said, “This is bad advice,” and dismissed it, I’ve never have realized what the problem was.

“Bad” advice that’s good

You can’t know for sure that advice is bad until you try it. The first EqD pre-reader for Moving On said that I had a tendency to summarize scenes that could have been dramatic. I wrote a lengthy justification of my summarizations. But then I rewrote one of them in detail. It worked much better. I looked at the other places where I had summarized, and saw that sometimes it was justified, but sometimes I was being lazy.

TL;DR

You can’t learn much by taking only advice that you think is good. You already understand the advice you think is good. Stuff you don’t know yet will probably sound like bad advice. Most advice is bad advice, but if you take some losses following advice that sounds bad, you might learn things you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. So take my advice.

(How much this advice generalizes beyond writing is left to the reader as an exercise.)

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1. Whom you already know has a keen understanding of story.

2. Whom you may not know has a keen eye for subtle details of language and story.

3. That we sympathize with someone who does the wrong thing when carried away by emotion more than with someone who does the wrong thing due to faulty reasoning, probably proves that humans are broken. But it’s mostly true.