On the Worst Writing Advice Ever

Revisited

Off to visit an Auntie today, so up early and sitting in the living room with the laptop oblongingly bright in front of me and the Christmas tree twinkling behind.

(I can’t be at my desk — we have a guest still asleep in my workroom.)

I hope your Christmas, busy or quiet, has gone well. I know for many, it’s anything but the most wonderful time of the year — too many present absences. And I confess to always delighting in the first day back to normal.

So let’s survey and perhaps add to some truly stinky writing advice —

In another, bleaker place than

Substack

, back in March, I asked friends what was the WORST writing advice they’d ever received.

The answers were appallingly fascinating.

Real pain was being shared here.

Self-doubt and crises of confidence, all caused by precisely the wrong word at the wrong time.

What was also noticeable was that there was some crossover with the BEST writing advice, which I asked about the following day.

If I were to sum up, then I’d say this was the least liked advice —

Write every day.

This was unpopular because it assumed there was even the slightest possibility of getting something down, given work, caring responsibilities, mental health, everything.

Considerable anger was expressed about this presumption.

Also up there, because they are given out so freely, were —

Kill your darlings.

and

Show, don’t tell.

There was much to say about this last, including from Dr Sarah Lodge (@LearNonsense) —

Blanket rules offend. If you are writing a fairytale, you can ‘tell not show’ all you damn like, you’re allowed to write not ‘what you know’ but what you imagine. You can even use stereotypical characters. Peril is optional.

Any advice that puts one off = de facto bad.

Which is all-round wise.

Also broadly disliked was —

Write what you know.

Because, as @Jimzovich said —

God forbid that writers should imagine stuff.

Michael Packman added —

My dear, late friend DM Thomas had a better way of putting it: “Cultivate the field you were given.”

The final coup de grâce for this bull was administered by Ursula K. Le Guin c/o @Keirh —

‘As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things.’

(From her essay ‘On Rules of Writing, or, Riffing on Rechy’.)

But as soon as we moved away from the Creative Writing clichés, we hit weird.

For example, @Lauramhall23 shared —

A paragraph should be five sentences.

Anyone heard that before?

And Lucy Miller gave us —

You can’t write the story if you don’t have a title.

A few snappier pieces of bad advice were Join Twitter, Attend university, Build your own desk, and Plan.

To this last, @JonSparks, of this parish, replied —

I am no stranger to close planning. However all attempts to carry this across to fiction were abject failures. I have had to accept that in this context I am an irredeemable pantser. And autocorrect obviously approves as it wants to change it to ‘panther’.

Penultimately, Jude Cook (@judecook_) had —

Rewrite the whole book again from the first sentence to the last.

But that’s what I’m doing right now, on the novel I’ve re-re-writing.

I will give the final word to Jenny Colgan, who did not build her own desk —

I would say the ability to completely ignore all advice, and in fact much common sense, and barrel on regardless is almost a writer’s defining characteristic.