The Worst Writing Advice You've Ever Received

[BellaLestrange87]

We already have a topic about good writing advice, so I thought that I might as well make a topic about bad writing advice as well.

 

I'm pretty sure that most of us have, at some point in our lives, received a piece of writing advice that wasn't beneficial at all and actually damaged our writing in some way. What was that piece of advice? And how did it damage your writing?

[lovegood27]

I can't seem to recall anything specifically about this tbh. I think I remember a lot of teachers at school telling me I should do drafts before writing and I just...I thought no. They suggested it for all types of writing pieces e.g. Essays, stories, fanfic (for me, obviously) and even letters, I think.

 

For some people, this might be good advice? For me, absolutely not. It wastes tons of time, for one, and my drafts and finishing writings are always completely different. I tried it with fanfic and I ended up using, like, 25% of the draft plot in the main story. So really, it's just pointless (for me, at least) because why spend all your time on a draft you'll barely use? (Yes, part of this stems from me being lazy)

 

It also makes me get very indecisive. I think "I should have used the plot I had in my draft" and then I think "no, the plot now is fine" so, yeah. Not my thing, I guess

[Professor McGonagall]

"You should outline your work!"

 

Particularly for essays, it stifles my flow if I have to follow a rigid system rather than just letting loose. For fanfiction, it's useful only for Machiavellian master plans because eventually I get 'off track' so to speak as I'm writing.

[scooterbug8515]

I am going to soo 100% agree with the whole "outline everything"  I have always hated this 'wisdom'. I cannot do full outlines.  I do notes, I may 'outline' but I find it more as a timeline than anything and it is just a few plot points if I can't write the whole set of events in one sitting.

 

There was one time I did a full outline and it killed the whole muse to write the story because it felt the story was written and done.  I

 

Doing an outline may not be full bad as it works for some but I am with the others that it isn't for me.

[Mistress]

Oh, mine was definitely "said is dead! Be descriptive!"

 

I was young and naive and word-happy. My stories sounded like you opened a thesaurus and went to town. It was miserable.

 

It wasn't until I got to an actual workshop in college my professor told everyone the reader skims over the word said and if it isn't said, attention is drawn to it - it slows down the pacing and draws attention to the different action being performed.

 

Enlightenment.

 

Another piece of rubbish advice was when a writer told me I had to write every day to be a writer. Really, some people work so well doing this. I don't. Sometimes I get burnt out - I can put away 30,000 words in one weekend, but then some days I struggle with a sentence so I pick up a book instead. Everyone is different.

[Stella Blue]

Yes, the one about 'said is dead'! In sixth grade my teacher encouraged us to use all sorts of synonyms that ended up being really distracting.

 

Also, a pretty common piece of writing advice is 'write what you know', which at a basic level makes sense - you want to know what you're talking about - but it doesn't encourage you to broaden your horizons and therefore I feel like it's really limiting advice. If you don't know a lot about a topic you want to write about, then do some research - it doesn't mean you can't write it. The stories I've written from POV's drastically different to my own and about things I have little experience with have been the most rewarding, tbh.

[GinnyPotter242]

Oh yes, I agree completely with "said is dead!" that is the worst. Obviously, synonyms are useful in some cases- that what they're there for. But sometimes they're just so distracting and young naive writer me did not understand this so I tried not to use "said" more than once in a scene, in a chapter if I could help it. Made my writing a lot worse than it should have been.

 

Other than that, I can't recall any explicitly bad advice altogether. There were some things that I had to get a handle on before they were actually useful, but I don't think I've gotten much other "bad" advice, thankfully.

[Elena]

I had the love of writing Fan Fiction literally sucked out of me a few years ago. I haven’t written anything since.

 

There was this notion that some sites were made to make you a better writer. In all honesty, there is no such thing. It took my journey through Original Fiction to realise this.

 

But there were some sites that really didn’t want my stories – not because they were bad, poorly written, or anything of the sort. They just didn’t like my pairings.

 

I do not write for the masses. I will not write a story or pairing because that seems to be the trend. I write what I want to write. I write about the things I want to read about and about characters that I love.

 

I write for me.

 

You cannot help me be a better writer, because I am already great at what I do. You don’t have to like what I write, and that’s OK. But just because you don’t like my stories, this does not, and has never made me a bad writer that needs helping.

 

“I’m here to help you become a better writer” is the worst thing to ever happen to me in the fan fiction world. This is why I will never ask for or give CC reviews.

 

[dirigibleplums]

Mine was planning. More specifically, the Snowflake Method. I've heard that this method works really well for people and hey, maybe I might use elements of it when I'm writing a book I actually want to publish in the future? But as of right now, all the Snowflake Method does for me is suck the fun out of the story. It's just so rigid. Everything is planned out to the t and I just can't have that. I need a solid skeleton (which I do have) but room to work around it too and the Snowflake Method does not do that.

[FlamingQuilltips]

I'm with Plums. The snowflake method, or any other planning guide I found online kinda sucked the fun out of writing.

 

Previously I used to go with the flow and then end up somewhere I had never intended to. And my teacher introduced me to the snowflake method. But then, I found that when I had finished planning the story in such detail, I felt like I had already written it, and words just refused to flow. One of the reasons I abandon a lot of my well planned stories.

 

I like to keep a little spontaneity to my writing, I like to go with the flow sometimes. I tend to strike a balance between planning, and over planning. But it took me years to figure that out for myself.

 

[Slide]

Back in my early days of fanfic, when I was a very young and fresh writer... possibly even last century, I was told my writing contained too many 'talking heads'. Too much speech without tags, people lost track. Now, this is very likely, but I took that advice to heart. Way too much to heart. Almost 20-years-later to heart. I suspect I have fallen over the years far too far the opposite way.

 

It doesn't make it bad advice, but it's a reminder of 'everything in moderation,' or to at least understand the motive behind the advice you get instead of taking it as a blanket statement. Like the dreaded 'write what you know': it means I'm going to do some research before I invent a fictional US east coast city but I don't feel compelled to go on a coastal tour before I can write my book.

[Aphoride]

I'm definitely going to agree with the 'write what you know' advice. While, yes, writing about things you know about can be helpful - you have a good base understanding, somewhere to work from, it's likely to feel more real, etc. - it doesn't necessarily guarantee a good or true portrayal of something. Yes, if you write about something you don't know you should do research - and a lot of it - (it's so important!), you need to research even - often - on stuff you do know about. For a lot of things - experiences, situations, reactions, etc. - people can respond differently, or feel things differently. Besides which, writing what you know might be cathartic for some people, but there are topics for me which I would find incredibly difficult to write, if not impossible, and which might be hard for me to read other people's opinions on things which are so personal. Really, it's very limiting advice, imo.

 

The other one I hate was one of the things we were sort of told at school - in the single, vaguely-linked to creative writing lesson we had - which involved thinking about what you were writing: what did it mean that your character was wearing red in this scene, what did it mean for her to give the other character a clock as a present, or for it to rain in this scene; why are you using this sentence construction, this grammar form, this particular word... /ad nauseum. Honestly, the idea of sitting there and spending hours agonising over what does it show that my character is wearing pink (that, er, he likes pink?) or loves marzipan animal sweets (he... likes marzipan animal sweets?), or what sentence structure I'm using at this point (one clause conveys sharpness, directness; two conveys... /headdesk), or whatever is just so impossibly tedious. Maybe it helps some people to break down what they're writing like that, to scrutinise it in that way, but, personally, I don't understand how you can be creative and spontaneous and fall in love with your own stuff as is so helpful, if you're thinking about something down to that kind of detail - critically analysing your own work before you've written it. It felt so rigid and so absurd, to do that rather than just sit and write. Yes, everyone will think about word choice - but I can't explain to you why I choose a particular word or give any kind of deep, underlying meaning to Gellert's choice of clothing through chapters 1-26, because it just doesn't work like that for me.

 

Sometimes, after all, no matter what critics and literature students might say, the curtains are just blue because.

[sibilant]

The worst advice I ever got was write every day. I'm all for practice, but I know from experience that my best writing comes when I've let the idea "marinate"--boil and develop, where I've done a little pre-writing in my head, which often means that I shouldn't write everyday, but carve out some time maybe every week or every couple months. Frankly, the idea of writing every day would make my writing forced--I prefer to let my muse run its course.

Oh, and also, someone told me that I need as much detail & description as is humanly possible. I was like.... no. The reader would skim 90% of that! It's so important to pick the right details to share, something that I think the usual "show, not tell" mantra doesn't really get across. 

[Guest Rumpelstiltskin]

Yesssss, I hate the 'write every day' advice!  I write most days, but some days I just can't get in the mood and I definitely agree that it feels forced, which then translates into my writing.  If I don't think some things through deeply enough, I'm liable to have a bunch of stuff that needs to be deleted or changed, anyway (and that's not very productive).  I'm all for 'write whenever you can', though -- whenever it best suits the writer (and if that's once a week from 2 to 6 in the morning, then that works).  I think a better piece of advice would be to think about your writing often and keep a notebook with any ideas that might spring up.  That way, when you find an appropriate time to write, you have those ideas handy.

I agree with the vast majority of 'bad writing advice here', but I'd also like to throw something else into the mix.  

My most hated piece of writing advice is to get rid of your favorite scene, quote, paragraph, description, or whatever else that doesn't progress the plot.  I mean, I can understand if my writing is full of purple prose why I should be getting rid of extra scenes or dazzling writing, but come on .  If my favorite scene doesn't move the story forward but serves some other function (a comic relief, character development, revealing a tidbit of information, etc.) then I downright refuse to get rid of it.  My favorite pieces are things that I'm proud of, and I think that those moments translate through to the reader (that could also possibly lend to making them care more).

[DictionaryWrites]

People regularly tell me "Write for yourself! Don't write for anyone else!" 

For a while, that really screwed me up. Sat there, obsessed heavily over whether I was writing "for me", but the fact is that I like writing in general. I don't need to write fanfic for me - I'm not the one that's going to be reading it. I appreciate that for a lot of people find it helpful to write for themselves, get very attached to their own stories, and I totally do that, but the reason I write them is so people will read them. I fill requests, I read my reviews, and I like for the stuff I write to be popular. 

Maybe it doesn't work for everyone, but it works for me.