At some point in our lives we run up against a dilemma that seems unsolvable.
This experience is not about those dilemmas. This is about when those dilemmas happen to someone else, when life has handed them something so terrible that they take the desperate step of writing to an advice columnist.
I grew up reading “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby” in the newspaper, but my contemporary favorites are “Ask Polly” (Heather Havrilesky) and “Dear Prudence” (Daniel Mallory Ortberg). There are also the columns “Dear Sugar” (Cheryl Strayed), “Ask Amy” (Amy Dickinson), “Captain Awkward,” and, stretching the definition just a bit, the r/relationships forum on Reddit.
Your job in this case is to be the giver of advice.
There are two broad category of audiences for this piece of writing:
The person asking for advice.
Everyone else who is reading the advice.
You should spend some time considering the needs, attitudes, and knowledge of the person soliciting advice. What are they experiencing and feeling? Why are they feeling those feelings? What risks are they confronting depending on different possible paths forward? One of the pleasures for the uninvolved audience is the feeling of relief and superiority that we don’t find ourselves in such a desperate situation. There is no shame in feeling this way, but an advice giver has an ethical and moral obligation to the advice receiver that we can think of as akin to the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians, often summarized as: first do no harm.
But advice columns are also meant for the enjoyment and edification of the wider audience. If this audience wasn’t part of the calculation, advice columns wouldn’t be so popular.
What to do? What to do?
While there is no strict outline to an advice column, you should be able to identify certain commonalities you should either carry over or have a good reason to reject. For example, most advice columns are written to respond directly to the person asking for advice. What other elements can you identify?
The r/relationship sub-Reddit is a great place to go looking for problems. Some of them are so outlandish as to seem fake, which makes them entertaining but may make it tough to write advice for. Pick one for which you think you might have some wisdom to share.
What should this person do? Why should they do it? Write your response as you would an advice column.
This could be a friend, but you could also post it directly to Reddit. See what kind of response you get.
Based on the feedback you’ve received, how would you change your advice? In some cases, it may be a radical shift from suggesting one thing to another. In others, it may be a matter of wording or presentation to make sure the advice is well received.
Something you probably noticed as you perused examples of advice columns is that the vast majority are written by women. Why is this? What does this say about the nature of advice, or about our culture, that even today public advice is primarily a job for women?
If you found advice columns written by men, what are they like? Are they different from those written by women? In what ways? Again, why?
When I think about the sorts of problems I’ve had in my life where I’ve been trapped between two (or more) bad choices, I find that a series of bad choices, bad luck, or some combination of the two, put me in the situation. If someone had given me advice (and I’d listened to it), I might’ve avoided heading down the bad path in the first place.
Try writing another advice column, only this time write something seeking to head off the trouble before it comes to pass. Rather than addressing the specific advice seeker, think of the audience as a category of people who may be prone to falling into bad situations. What advice can you give to prevent the worst from happening?