We’ve all been given terrible writing advice.
Many of us have even tried to follow these chestnuts of misplaced wisdom and only discovered that it’s not great advice, at least not for us and at least not at that moment.
That’s the thing about writing advice, though. It’s all good, and it’s all bad. Like Jane Austen wrote in Persuasion:
“…advice is good or bad only as the event decides.”
Here are a few examples of simultaneously good and bad writing and publishing advice:
- Write what you know.
- Show don’t tell.
- Write every day.
- You don’t need professional editing.
- Hire a developmental editor for everything you publish.
- Write to please the reader.
- Write to market.
- Write whatever you want, however you want to write it (something I actively advise!)
- Deepen your work with complex prose.
- Wait for inspiration to strike.
- Edit as you write.
- Don’t edit until you’ve finished.
- Promote your work on social media, with paid ads, or both.
- You must have an email list.
How many of these do you already know won’t work for you and your writing?
How many of these do you already know are your best practices?
When we’re just starting out as writers, we don’t really know what’s good or bad advice, so we try it all. The person giving the advice is successful to some degree, after all, and it worked for them. It might work for us, too!
When advice doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t make that poor advice. It just makes it bad advice for you, for that story, for that moment in your life and career.
There are bits of writing and publishing advice that are “best practice” (like editing, and having an email list, for example), but even with these recommendations that seem entirely solid, working for the vast majority of people, there are many authors doing great things with self-editing, or with no email list.
So with all of this in mind, I think there is only truly one piece of terrible writing advice. And here it is…
The worst writing advice is any piece of advice that comes with any indication that this is the ONLY way to succeed as a writer.
That goes for craft tips, publishing advice, marketing strategies, anything.
The worst piece of writing advice is the advice that does not come with the caveat, “this might be bad advice for you.”
The only way to really know the difference between good and bad advice is to know yourself, know and trust your process. And the only way to do that is to try out lots of different things and see what fits, see who you are as a writer, and see what your unique process is. This might be bad advice for you
