Recently Nick Mamatas wrote a nice blog post about advice experienced writers should stop giving inexperienced writers, and the first thing on the list was “Never Give Up.” Mamatas pointed out that some people definitely should give up, and before telling them to waste more time on a fruitless enterprise, writers should perhaps consider the person they’re talking to a bit more carefully.

I have to admit, when I first read that particular piece of advice, I was a little taken aback. I used to judge contests (although I don’t judge as many now), and I used to routinely run across entrants whose work was so hopeless that I just felt like writing “find another hobby” on the MS. I didn’t, largely because I kept thinking how devastated I would have been if someone had written something like that to me when I was just starting out. My usual strategy in cases like that was to recommend that the writer find a critique group to work with. And yet, as a critique group member, I also came across writers so hopeless that I had no idea how to help them. Still, as a judge and a critiquer, I never considered it my job to stomp on people’s dreams (usually, I leave that to the publishing industry).

But Mamatas has a point. Writers who have no feel for English grammar or style, who fall back on cliché after cliché, who write the kind of overwrought prose that stopped showing up in romance thirty years ago, who have plots that are either hackneyed or hopelessly over the top are simply not going to put out a readable book unless they undergo some kind of miraculous transformation. Is it better to let them go on flailing, becoming ever more frustrated at the lukewarm response they receive or is it better to be brutally honest and tell them this isn’t going to work?

My problem here may be more philosophical than anything else. Back when I was an English teacher, I taught for a few years at a college that specialized in students who might not make it into more traditional institutions, particularly students from inner cities on the East Coast. Many of these students were desperately far behind where they should have been, given that they were all high school graduates. And, sad to say, several of them stayed right there. Advancing required a lot of work, and not everybody was interested in doing it. But some students were. They took advantage of every resource available to them, and they got better. It was painful and it took a while, but eventually they were functioning at something close to the level of their fellow students.

So it’s hard for me to say absolutely that somebody is hopeless. To some extent, the degree of possibility depends largely on how willing writers are to put in the necessary hours. Some writers aren’t, and I can’t blame them. But some writers are. And they may actually be able to pull it off.

Who am I to say they can’t?