Salman Rushdie’s Sh*t Detector Tip Is The Best Writing Advice Ever

If that little voice says it’s rubbish, it almost certainly is

Salman Rushdie isn’t my favourite writer.

Oh sure, he’s inventive and clever, and he’s decorated from Kolkata to Kansas City. But magical realism isn’t my favourite genre, and even within that genre, he isn’t the best practitioner of it.

When he launched a course on Masterclass.com, though, I signed up quicker than blinking. I figured that a lauded writer like him would have at least some gems to share. And he did. I loved his no-nonsense approach to writing, and I love that the videos had a minimum of fluff and plenty of examples from his own work and process. Definitely worth the investment for every literary writing.

And towards the end of the course was my favourite lesson of the lot, and one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard.

During his lesson on writing and rewriting, he talks about the importance of having a well-tuned shit detector.

That’s exactly what it sounds like — an inner meter that tells you when something you’ve written is rubbish. Rubbish not in the sense of “scope for improvement”, but “this makes no sense at all/is pretentious rambling”.

And this isn’t just some technique to pick up. What Mr Rushdie is saying is that every writer has a part of them that knows when what they’re writing is rubbish. You can call it “originality” all you want — it’s bullshit, and you know it. You always know it, even when you choose to ignore it.

Because ignore it we do. Wantonly, repeatedly. We release hollow fiction into the world and tell ourselves it’s okay, hitting Mute on our shit detector like we hit Snooze on our morning alarms. And it’s not just you and me— I see established writers doing this in big magazines. They’re able to get away with it better because they dress it up in polished prose, but it’s shit all the same. Gilded shit. And I promise you, they’re well aware of it. They’re just going ahead with it for whatever reason — didn’t have any other ideas, on a tight deadline, had been working on it for years and wanted to get rid of it by sending it out. Doesn’t matter. The why doesn’t matter.

What matters is that we’re sending out bad fiction, dishonest fiction, and it will eventually catch up with us.

There’s another crucial point to be made here, one that all new writers should take note of.

Your shit detector isn’t the same as your inner critic.

To be fair, it can be hard to tell between the two. The inner critic also spots mistakes and inconsistencies, and often devolves into negative comments like “you’ll never make it”. Which is why, when something feels off, we tell ourselves that we’re overthinking, that we’re being too hard on ourselves.

But here’s the difference between the two —

• The inner critic identifies things that are fixable, like vocabulary, tone or sequence of events.
• The shit detector identifies a fundamental lack of substance in the writing. That isn’t fixable — that needs to be put aside and replaced with something realer.

And the more you pay attention to and trust your shit detector, the better it gets at sniffing out actually bad prose from just something that needs a line edit.

Unfortunately, given that everyone’s detector is unique to them, there’s no one strategy that will help you hone yours. You, and only you, can know what’s real in your writing and what isn’t. But here are some tips I followed to hone my own detector that can start you off.

Come back to it after a while

This tip involves two steps, and it’s designed for when you can’t quite tell whether a piece of writing is crap, or just difficult to resolve. I used this to recently chuck one of my older stories as irredeemable.

• Step one — come back to the piece after a short break of about two or three days. This gives you some distance from the piece and helps to “unstick” the stubborn parts, or at least give you some perspective on it. (At this point, you’ll also be able to do some line edits, clean up the prose.) If the story is still stuck, move to step two.
• Step two — come back to it after a longer break, of at least a month (ideally, two or three months). At this point, you’ll be reading the story like an outsider. If your overwhelming impression after the read is that of confusion or something being off, there you go! Pretty prose can’t fix that.

Watch out for known risks

There are certain styles and techniques in literary fiction that are far likelier to result in shit than others, simply because they’re so difficult to execute well. Even famous writers have a hard time with these, so you don’t need to feel bad about yourself. Some of the major risk bombs are:

• A story told in second-person
• A story that’s entirely/primarily internal monologue
• A story narrated as stream-of-consciousness
• An unreliable narrator
• Magical realism

That’s not to say you couldn’t make them work. But like I said, even famous writers don’t always get these right, so as a new writer, you’re better off trying other techniques. (I haven’t been able to make these work either.)

Don’t treat “uniqueness” as a positive

Most of the time, writers try to pass off bad writing as being unique or expressing their “voice”.

Here’s a simple tip — if “uniqueness” is the only redeeming feature of your piece, it’s probably shit. Literary talent isn’t about sounding unlike anyone else. It’s about executing familiar ideas with more grace, wisdom and sass than anyone else. So ditch the weird similes and the pseudo-absurdist narration. (Also, we all know you got that from Italo Calvino.)

Listen to your heart

You know how sometimes you just know that something is so? That the cute guy you exchanged numbers with will ghost you, or that you nailed the job interview you just walked out of?

Every writer has a ticker like that for their writing. We’re born with it — it’s a package deal with the talent. It’s what keeps us from going down blind alleys that no amount of editing can chip through. And it’s a safeguard against months of time and emotion lost on something unfulfilled.

That ticker may be quiet at first. It’ll feel like a tiny prick of discomfort, or a skeptical “Hmm…” when you’re reading over what you’ve written. Listen to it. Pause, pay attention to the feeling, re-read the writing that sparked the feeling. Try to see what’s wrong. There’ll be something for sure, even if it isn’t obvious at first. And that something will save you a world of trouble if you catch it in time.

All of this isn’t to say you should never work on the possibly-shit ideas. Treat them as challenges, by all means — and by some fluke, one or two may even work out. But most of us would rather pour ourselves into something that feels right rather than a futile effort, which is what the detector helps with. The vast majority of careers don’t come with in-built safeguards like that — writing may be a hard and lonely journey, but we do have this one incredible gift on our side.

So if that shit detector dings, pay attention. It may not be pleasant, but it’s always eventually right.