I have published five books, ghostwritten a full manuscript on patient experience, and written over a hundred video scripts. Along the way, I have collected enough bad writing advice to fill a shelf. Some of it came from well-meaning mentors. Some showed up in craft books that thousands of people swear by. And some were repeated so often that everyone assumed they were true.
The problem with terrible writing advice is that it contains a grain of sense. "Never use adverbs" sounds like discipline. "Only write what you know" sounds safe. But when you treat a rough guideline as an iron law, you start making choices out of fear instead of craft. I wrote this guide to walk through the advice I have seen do the most damage, explain why each piece falls apart under real writing conditions, and give you a practical filter for judging any advice that comes your way.
Why Bad Writing Advice Spreads
Bad advice travels fast because it is simple. "Show, don't tell" fits on a bumper sticker. "Never start with weather" takes five words. The rules feel authoritative, and repeating them makes a person sound like they know what they are talking about. That is the trap.
Most terrible writing advice started as reasonable context-specific guidance. Stephen King warned against adverb overuse in On Writing, and a generation of workshop leaders turned it into an absolute ban. Hemingway favored short declarative sentences, and suddenly every writer was told that long sentences were amateurish. The original author understood the nuance. The people who passed it on did not.
The other reason bad advice sticks is survivorship bias. A novelist who outlined every chapter and sold a bestseller will preach outlining. A novelist who winged the entire draft and found success will preach spontaneity. Both are telling you what worked for them, not what will work for you. Context disappears, and the advice becomes a commandment.
Process Myths That Hold Writers Back
These myths target the habits and routines behind the writing itself, the ones that dictate how you get from blank page to finished draft.
You must always use an outline
Outlines are valuable. I outline almost everything I write, from books to long scripts. But the idea that no book can succeed without one is flat wrong. Some writers discover their story by drafting it. They need the momentum of forward motion to find the thread, and a rigid outline kills that momentum before it starts.
If you find outlines helpful, use them. The point is to match the tool to your brain, not the other way around.
Only write what you know
If every author followed this rule, there would be no science fiction, no fantasy, and no historical fiction. Tolkien never visited Middle-earth. Ursula K. Le Guin never lived on another planet. What they did was research deeply, observe carefully, and imagine with discipline.
The better version of this advice is: write what you are willing to learn. If you are building a world from scratch, your curiosity and research will carry the reader. Fiction depends on emotional truth far more than autobiography.
Write exactly how you talk
Conversational writing is powerful. But speech is full of filler words, backtracking, and half-finished thoughts that no reader wants to wade through on the page. Good prose sounds natural because it has been edited to remove the mess, not because it was dictated and left alone.
Your goal is clarity and rhythm, not a transcript. Read your sentences aloud to catch awkward phrasing, then cut the parts that feel like throat-clearing. That process gives you a conversational tone without the baggage of actual conversation.
Great work always takes years
Some books take a decade. Others come together in weeks. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on a rented typewriter. Faulkner reportedly drafted As I Lay Dying in six weeks while working night shifts at a power plant. Speed does not determine quality. Focus does.
I have seen writers use this myth as an excuse to stall. They tinker with a manuscript for years, not because the book needs it, but because finishing feels risky. If you sit down consistently, the timeline takes care of itself.
More words equals better writing
Word count serves a purpose. It sets genre expectations, meets contest requirements, and helps publishers estimate production costs. But piling up words for the sake of volume does nothing for your reader.
A tight, well-paced story of two thousand words will always outperform ten thousand words of bloated prose. When I draft, I aim for a target length and then cut anything that does not earn its place.
Never rewrite anything
The logic behind this advice is that rewriting will erase your original spark. It will not. The spark lives in the idea, and ideas survive revision.
First drafts are almost always rough. Rewriting is how you discover what you meant to say. Save your originals if you are worried about losing something, but never skip the step where your manuscript goes from adequate to good. Every published book I have worked on improved dramatically during revision.
Style and Craft Myths
These myths zoom in closer, targeting the sentence-level choices that shape how your writing sounds on the page.
Never use adverbs
Stephen King wrote, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." He was warning about lazy modification, not calling for a blanket ban. When a verb already carries the weight ("she whispered" instead of "she said quietly"), the adverb is dead weight. But when the right adverb sharpens a sentence, removing it out of principle weakens the prose.
Treat adverbs like seasoning. Too much overwhelms the dish. None at all leaves it bland. The skill is knowing when one serves the sentence and when a stronger verb does the job alone.
Stick to short, simple words only
Plain language matters. Clarity is the foundation of good writing. But that does not mean every word should be a monosyllable. Sometimes a longer, more precise word communicates an idea that a short word cannot.
Consider your audience. A picture book for young children should use accessible vocabulary. A literary novel for adults can reach for the exact word, even if it sends a reader to the dictionary. The goal is precision, not dumbing things down. If the complex word is the right word, use it.
Never use a semicolon
Kurt Vonnegut joked that semicolons only show you went to college. It was a joke. Every punctuation mark exists for a reason, and the semicolon connects two related independent clauses without the clunk of a conjunction or the full stop of a period.
Used sparingly, semicolons give your sentences a rhythm that no other mark can replicate. Avoiding them because someone told you they are pretentious will narrow your toolbox for no good reason.
Skip suspense and just be clear
Clarity and suspense are not opposites. A reader can follow what is happening on the page and still feel tension about what happens next. Suspense is the engine of mystery, thriller, horror, and crime fiction, and it shows up in romance and literary fiction, too.
The key is to resolve the tension eventually. If you withhold information so long that the reader gives up, you have a pacing problem, not a suspense problem. Controlled uncertainty keeps pages turning. Understanding how story structure creates those tension-and-release cycles will help you deploy suspense without losing clarity.
Leave out character descriptions
The backlash against purple prose has gone too far, with writers being told to skip physical and emotional descriptions. Readers need something to latch onto. A well-placed detail (a scar, a habit, a piece of clothing) makes a character vivid in a single sentence.
The real advice should be: describe with purpose, not with a police-report level of detail. A paragraph-long inventory of someone's appearance bores a reader. A sharp, selective detail pulls them in.
Avoid foreign phrases entirely
English has absorbed thousands of foreign words and phrases. "Deja vu," "faux pas," "ad hoc," and "angst" are all borrowed, and all are standard usage. Telling writers to avoid every foreign phrase ignores how the language works.
If a foreign phrase is the most natural way to express an idea, use it. If you are reaching for an obscure term just to sound intellectual, reconsider. The test is whether your reader will understand it without a footnote.
Throw away the dictionary
Hemingway reportedly advised reading a dictionary a few times, memorizing it, and then tossing it. That might work if you have Hemingway's memory. For the rest of us, a dictionary is a daily tool.
A strong vocabulary does not come from memorization alone. It comes from reading widely, encountering words in context, and then confirming their meaning. Keeping a dictionary close is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you care about using the right word in the right place.
Identity and Mindset Myths
These myths dig deepest, targeting the beliefs about who gets to write and how they are allowed to work.
You cannot be a writer and a parent
Toni Morrison wrote several of her novels while raising two sons as a single mother and working a full-time editing job at Random House. J.K. Rowling drafted the first Harry Potter book while caring for an infant. The idea that parenthood disqualifies you from writing is contradicted by the careers of some of the most celebrated authors alive.
Children reshape your schedule, not your ability. I write in focused sprints, early in the morning, because that is when the house is quiet. The constraint forces discipline, and discipline is a writer's best asset.
Only write when you feel inspired
If I waited for inspiration, I would have written one book instead of five. Inspiration is unreliable. It shows up at random, disappears for weeks, and never announces itself in advance.
Professional writers treat writing like a job. You sit down at the same time, put in the hours, and produce pages whether or not the muse cooperates. Inspiration tends to arrive after you start, not before. Consistent daily output separates writers who finish from writers who talk about finishing.
A real writer only needs to write
Writing is the core of the job, but it is not the whole job. Brainstorming, researching, outlining, getting feedback, editing, and marketing all belong to the process. If you ignore everything except the act of typing words, the work will stall or stay invisible.
Research grounds your work in real detail.
Editing turns a rough draft into a finished product.
Marketing ensures the finished product reaches readers.
Feedback reveals blind spots you cannot see on your own.
A writer who refuses to participate in these steps is not protecting their art. They are leaving the hardest parts of the profession to chance.
You must be great before calling yourself a writer
No one starts out great. Every published author began with a terrible first draft and a shaky sense of whether they belonged. If you write, you are a writer. Publication, awards, and sales are milestones, not entry requirements.
Gatekeeping the title "writer" discourages beginners from committing to the craft. My own first manuscript was objectively bad. But calling myself a writer while I worked on it gave me the identity I needed to keep going.
Avoid writing tools and software
Some writers romanticize the typewriter era and insist that software gets in the way of real writing. This is nostalgia masquerading as advice. Modern writing tools handle formatting, version control, research organization, and grammar checking so that you can spend more of your energy on the actual words.
That does not mean every app is worth your time. Choose tools that solve a real problem in your workflow and ignore the rest. But dismissing technology entirely in an era where it saves hours of busywork is advice rooted in ego, not craft.
Never use a long word when a short one works
George Orwell included this rule in his famous list of writing guidelines in "Politics and the English Language," but he himself broke it regularly. The rule makes sense as a check against pretension, not as a blanket restriction.
Sometimes the long word is the precise one. "Defenestration" says something that "throwing someone out a window" takes six words to approximate. Precision and clarity are the real goals. If the short word is less accurate or less vivid, the long word earns its place.
How to Filter Writing Advice
Not all advice is bad, and not all bad advice is obvious. Here is the filter I use before applying any writing guidance to my own work.
Check the source. Does this person write in your genre, for your audience, with your constraints? Advice from a literary novelist may not apply to a thriller writer, and vice versa.
Look for absolutes. Any rule that uses "always" or "never" deserves scrutiny. Writing is too varied to be governed by universal commandments.
Test it on a small piece. Try the advice on a single scene or chapter before overhauling your entire draft. If it improves the work, keep it. If it does not, discard it.
Trust your readers’ response. Beta readers and honest feedback tell you more about what works than any rule. If readers enjoy a passage that breaks a rule, the passage wins.
Consider your stage. Advice for a first draft is different from advice for a final polish. A beginner benefits from structure that an experienced writer can safely ignore.
Writing well is about making informed choices. The best writers I know read advice widely, test it honestly, and keep only what serves their work.
Every piece of terrible writing advice listed above started with a kernel of truth and then lost its context. Outlines help many writers, but they are not mandatory. Adverbs can be lazy, but they are not illegal. Speed does not determine quality, parenthood does not disqualify talent, and no one needs permission to call themselves a writer.
The next time someone hands you a writing rule as if it were law, ask yourself whether it fits your project, your process, and your reader. If it does, use it. If it does not, let it go and get back to writing.
Related Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are answers to the most common questions about terrible writing advice.
What is the most common piece of terrible writing advice?
"Write what you know" is the most repeated and most misunderstood piece of writing advice. It discourages writers from exploring unfamiliar topics, genres, and perspectives, even though research and imagination are core writing skills. The better version is to write what you are willing to learn.
Should I follow writing rules from famous authors?
Famous authors offer valuable perspectives, but their advice reflects their own process, genre, and era. Hemingway's rules were shaped by journalism. King's rules were shaped by horror and thriller fiction. Read their advice, test it against your own work, and keep only what improves your writing.
How do I know if writing advice is good or bad?
Good advice comes with context and nuance. It explains when a guideline applies and when it does not. Bad advice tends to be absolute, using words like "always" and "never" without qualification. Test any rule on a small section of your work and let the results guide you.
Is it bad to use adverbs in writing?
Adverbs are not inherently bad. Overusing them is a sign that your verbs are not doing enough work, but the occasional well-chosen adverb strengthens a sentence. The goal is intentional usage rather than reflexive avoidance.
Can I be a good writer without following any rules?
You can, but most successful writers understand the rules before they break them. Knowing why a convention exists helps you decide when ignoring it serves the story. Breaking rules out of ignorance rarely produces the same result as breaking them on purpose.