Not All Self-Help Is Created Equal
Not All Self-Help Is Created Equal
When self-help writing is valuable and when it’s best avoided
Self-help is a best-selling genre and it’s hardly a mystery why. We’re overstimulated and worried and our future doesn’t always look the brightest. There are more causes for concern than ever before, and with cell phones, they seem to permeate our lives from all corners.
Fortunately, there are more people offering advice on how to deal with our ills than ever before. It can be found in books and YouTubes, TikToks, and Reels. And while much of what’s on the market is useful, it’s important to be able to distinguish between what’s valuable and what’s recyclable.
To cultivate a higher standard of writing at my publication, I decided it was for the best to exclude what’s most easily referred to as “self-help” articles. My hope was to cut down on some of the submissions that most of our readers are unlikely to find much value in. It’s the “7 Ways to Be Happy” and “How to Beat Depression in 3 Simple Steps” listicles that I’m trying to avoid. It’s the “How to Be a Better Writer Overnight” articles that I neither care to read nor review.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized just how many branches of writing fall within the self-help purview. Help can be found in many different places. It’s arguably one of the most pliable genres of writing. According to Wikipedia, “A self-help book is one that is written to instruct its readers on solving personal problems.” And personal problems take many forms. They can be emotional, physical, financial, spiritual, mental, societal, creative, communicative, nutritional, and just about anything else.
There is no shortage of problems that need solving. However, not all solutions are created equally. If you’re approaching a broad subject like happiness or writing, there are few bits of advice that aren’t hackneyed. To bring something new to the table won’t be easy, so honing in on who you are and what you know well is useful.
One of the greatest metrics for whether self-help has value is whether the information conveyed can be easily found elsewhere. If you’re writing an article or book that’s already been written in slightly different words, people aren’t always going to find your stab at the subject all that insightful.
If the tips you have to offer aren’t completely your own, make them your own by embedding yourself and your life experiences into their presentation.
If your message is that “practice makes perfect,” it’s important that you embed the point with enough of your personality to make it worth reading. Sprinkling in the often uncomfortable details of the adversities you’ve faced is what makes this sort of writing feel human. On Medium, one of the most recurrent patterns I’ve seen in “self-help” articles is a lack of emotion. The tips might hold merit, but if personality and experience don’t permeate the words, readers will want more.
When I consider how many of my pieces have been geared toward helping or advising others in some way or another, it may seem a little strange and hypocritical to exclude “self-help” articles from the mix in the submissions at my own publication. But in each piece I’ve offered that has an emotional takeaway, I’ve always tried to insert enough of myself into the writing for those points not to feel too hollow or overdone. Most of the time, I would be hard-pressed to ever call my work “self-help.” Considering just how broad that vernacular can be, though, I can’t fairly dismiss the label.
When I’ve written about grief, I’ve spoken to a universal experience. And I’ve hoped that by sharing the details of those losses, that my words might help others feel less alone. Even when I’ve spoken about suicide there’s a self-help component to my conclusions.
In each case that I look at one of my pieces that has self-help aspect, my voice, opinion, and memories are discernible. In the pieces that have helped me, I can hear the voices of the authors I’ve grown to know.
Memoirs often finish with a moral of some sort. But it’s the story that carries that moral to a place where it appears as something far deeper than a cheesy truism. We can make concepts into something palpable.
You can hear that “cheaters never prosper,” or that “two wrongs don’t make a right” a thousand times over throughout your life. But it’s these stories that bring those aphorisms to life. They’re what linger with readers for the longest. Whether a movie, TV show, or novel, the takeaways don’t always extend beyond a mere sentence or two. And yet, they can take up hours, seasons, and chapters to properly position them for impact.
Bad self-help writing will feel vacant. It will come across as knowledge without wisdom. Sometimes, it won’t even appear to be knowledge.
It isn’t all self-help that feels appropriate to ban. I wouldn’t even say that it’s most self-help that falls into the category of bland and impersonal. But on Medium, writers can often feel the pull to regularly publish before they feel the desire to hone and improve their craft. When so many fall into the thinking that quantity is better than quality it can lead to a proliferation of content in which few will find true value.
Self-help should strive to bring something new to the table. If it can’t, it should pack information into a box so personal that it makes the old feel fresh. After all, there’s little these days that doesn’t explore ideas that haven’t been touched upon elsewhere. Hardly a novel or movie released within the last 20 years doesn’t borrow from the work of predecessors. But in nearly every case, it’s the novelty and personality of stories in which they establish their legacy.
If it feels like someone else can tell your story, it’s probably not personal enough. If the tips you’re offering can be found in a quick Google search or a conversation with ChatGPT, it’s probably not worth publishing. Good self-help contains humanity. And at Thought Thinkers, novel human thought is the main mission.