Advice: The Problem with Advice

Gateway to the partially known

Fictional work is not for offering advice. It is to tell a story or explore something, or I'm not quite sure what. My advice to myself is to use it as a diving board. Don't think too much. Jump right in. Swan dive or belly flop. The experience can be transcendent, unpleasant, indifferent, but the exercise is still good for my health.

Writing to offer advice in a work of fiction? I don't think so. There is too much searching in the dark, too much contrivance, and too much intentional ambiguity, too much playing Devil's advocate. Too much uncertainty about the nature of social expectations and individual sensibilities. In any act of explorative communication, meaning slips around. It changes all the time.

In fiction, this slippage of meaning between writer and reader is a good thing. It creates the space for a story to develop beyond the page. Readers bring unique understanding, assumptions, and emotional profile to a story so that certain aspects of a story loom large, while others recede. The story adjusts itself to the reader, for better or worse.  At its best the work stimulates debate. At its worst, silence. Writer and reader are partners in the process of meaning-making.

Where does advice belong? If it belongs anywhere in writing, it seems that it belongs in the realm of Self Help. The contract between writer and reader is clear - the writer wants to give advice and the book-buyer is seeking advice (although possibly for somebody else - we don't often feel that we are in need of instruction on how to live our own lives. I wonder how many self-help books are bought as presents? I might be wrong.) And when it comes to instructing others on the how-tos or the rights and wrongs of something or other, how a person should help themself, flexibility of meaning is usually unintentional.

Giving advice carries with it an assumption regarding certain beliefs that the other person might have, and also carries the assumption that the advisor knows more than the advisee. Sometimes this is justified. Sometimes not. Regardless, a status discrepancy is established. The advisor assumes superior knowledge on a particular matter, and this circumscribes the relationship.  Advice can be respectful, as provided by the advisor to an American President (Sorry, I can't think of a stereotypical English, or Australian, Prime Minister, without thinking Yes Minister). Commonly, advice is proffered within a symbolic adult to child relationship, teacher to student, parent to offspring. To be an advisor is to assume a temporary position of power. The upside for the receiver of wisdom in this relationship is that, if the advice is wrong, he or she is not entirely responsible.

Some of us have an automatic aversion to advice. I know I do. I have an aversion to both giving and receiving. At this point I can't help thinking of Shaun Micallef's 'Wisdom of the Elders.' I'm the elder, in case you're wondering.

So in the spirit of 'playing opposites,' I have proffered some rambling advice here. For the uninitiated, playing opposites is a technique employed in performance rehearsals to help an actor discover hidden things about the character he or she is playing. An angry monologue is delivered with great self control and gentleness, for example; a loving speech with underlying irritability, or disdain. Something there for all of us, I think.

A final word of advice: It's worth remembering when reading or writing a work of fiction - you don't always get what you expect. And a good thing too!