Why Most Writing Advice Is Useless (and What to Do Instead)

Three common rules meant to be broken.

Note: I know many of you adore Felix just as much as I do. He’s much better but I’m trying to get him a vet appointment within the week for an overall checkup. Thanks for your kindness.

Photo by Mykyta Kravčenko on Unsplash

My first big girl word was difficult. Teachers told me to use it in a sentence. Roll the word around your tongue — get a feel for it. Speak it aloud and often. Don’t worry that there might be better words, or the scenarios you use them in would be considered bizarre at best (I found it difficult to watch my mother’s boyfriend bang her head against the wall).

Your job, right now, is to learn the word. We’ll sort the big bad world beyond it later. When you’re ready for it.

Write every day! Kill your darlings! Show, don’t tell! Axioms circulate like bad memes in “how to write” essays and middle school English classes. Cliches reduced to memes. But here’s the thing — there’s truth in cliché. The problem is two-fold: overuse, and the way we forget we can bend and break the rules once we’ve learned them. It’s as if you learned the word difficult without realizing a thesaurus exists. Or you refused to crack open the word and play with its meaning.

New writers need a compass, a roadmap and all the tools at their disposal to commit those first words to paper. Show the action to the reader rather than telling them so they can visualize and feel invested in the scene. But great advice isn’t great if it solely exists in a vacuum. The compass and maps can only take us so far if we don’t have the keys to the car and the desire to ride. If we’re not willing to veer off course, hurtle into a ditch to claw our way out.

Imagine how difficult it would be to show every single action, thought, scene. Proust would be considered quick reading. You learn the extremes of the rules and your job is to find your middle.

By the by, if all this advice worked on its own, wouldn’t we be novel-writing geniuses by now? Spoiler alert: we’re not. And that’s okay.