The Worst Writing Advice

"show don't tell" can at times be great advice because showing something is better than a character explaining everything thats the lazy and boring way

I've been told by a writing teacher to make your story unpredictable. Now I know what he was trying to say was to not make your writing boring or uninteresting. but the problem I have with unpredictable writing is that most of the time, after reading the story more than once, it usually becomes an incoherent mess of words and dialogue that doesn't seem to make any since whatsoever.
so moral of the story: try to withhold information from either your audience, or your characters so you can make something flow more naturally, I guess.

Okay but i did a create writing class in college a few years back and in my story there was rain that just got ya know worse as the story went on to match the emotion of the thing cuz i am first and foremost an anime fan. A dude told me i wrote the rain inconsistently and it's become an inside joke with my friend

Jokes aside, how do I avoid using "said" too much?

“People who don’t have a higher education are unable to think complex thoughts” DAMN*.. they really told people if they didn’t have a higher education they couldn’t feel human emotions. Just.. *wow

I can’t believe the word “said” is hated by so many teachers out there.. yeah, I kinda get it! But not every sentence needs to be strong all the time! You can use the word “said” in almost any dialogue just as long as you don’t use it that much. We need balance, right?

Never use commas? Preposterous.

The panda eats shoots and leaves.
Vs
The panda eats, shoots, and leaves.

Or

Help your uncle, Jack, off a horse.
Vs
Help your uncle jack off a horse.

Like Prof. Oak says about riding bicycles indoors, there’s a time and place for using commas.

"Write what you know" should be "know what you write". If you're writing a murder mystery, research how police and forensic scientists work. If you're writing historical fiction, research the time period.

what's the issue with "show don't tell"? like, it works great to add more emotion to stuff. its not always needed but it works great for more dramatic scenes

"People were only given one talent"

Sounds like a skill issue to me.

"Don't misspell anything, ever."
I was writing about a note written by someone who could barely read, let alone write, and how the other characters were having trouble deciphering what the note said.
I'm less frustrated about the advice and more frustrated at how insistant they were about it.

The worst writing advice I’ve ever heard is when Mr. Enter said this in his Drawn Together Movie review. “Prologues are useless.”

The “enemies to lovers” thing being condemned because it’s unethical is so strange. If something being unethical makes it unsuitable for writing, you would need to have a talk with…like every writer ever! I mean, name a classic that doesn’t involve a social taboo or some sort of crime!

I remember when my English teacher told us to never use the word ‘said’ unless actually needed. I had that in the back of my head until I started to actually read fanfics.

What people mean by "show don't tell" is actually "give me the same, but different" (Save the Cat uses this for pitches to summarize movies but I'm not using it the same way). Because instead of saying "It was a dark and stormy night" they want you to use more imaginative details to draw the reader into the moment without summarizing (for example: "The wind beat against our flimsy walls...1000 of undying pellets pounded against the tin roof, trying to find any path into the warm room below").

Comedians do they same thing: they tell you a story that you fill the details in for, then they pull out the rug from under you and hit you with something different that could be equally as true. Like Brian Regen contemplating how high he can reasonably claim his pain to be on the pain scale: it's an unexpected break in the action of the story at a point where most of us would just answer the question rather than having a debate with ourselves about it, but it makes perfect sense as soon as you hear it.

I swear I somehow read "worst dating advices" and managed to get to the "the first chapter should be info dump" part before noticing

I’m not really a writer, but I think “show don’t tell” is still a really good rule to follow.

When I’m reading something, I don’t want to be told that the character is smart. A lot of books and movies do this. ‘X character is an astrophysics student and is working on their phd, they’re like, REALLY smart’.

Okay, cool. So I’ve been told they’re a student in a difficult subject at university. Great? That only implies that they’re smart because that subject is supposed to be hard, so they must be intelligent.

But I don’t care. That’s not interesting.

I’d rather watch the character do something intelligent. Make them solve a problem, make them actually do or say something smart.

Don’t just tell me “Amelia is a supergood assassin” and then leave it at that. Write a scene where she actually kills someone so I know she’s a skilled assassin without you having to spell it out for me.

Telling and not showing is a sign of laziness at worst, and lack of skill as a writer at best.

I really underestimate the "worst writing advice" Title

Most of these are terrible writing advice. But then again, I realize reading and writing have become something common among English speakers. Because, if you look at the writing channels from my country, we almost don't have problems like this. Either because we agree on one general thing, or, writing is not a very popular activity so not many people have varied ways of thinking.

I'm just impressed, really in a good way.

Also, the more i learn about writing, the more I feel like i'm dumb at this

My native language is Polish; I think I've never heard our native equivalent of “never use the word ‘said’, find some equivalents instead”, but I've heard a lot about repeating words. Afaik it's very language-specific (I mean, every language has its own literary aesthetics) but it's true that in my language, for example, repeating basic words like ‘have’, ‘be’, ‘say’ or characters' names (or any other words actually) is seen as a writing error. What isn't told to children hearing this advice at school is that 1) sometimes you can use such repetitions for a comic effect, emphasis etc., 2) you don't have to come up with a gazillion synonyms to your character's name and refer to them as ‘the redhead’, ‘the younger girl’, ‘the blue-eyed one’ randomly in order to not use their name too often. English is far more liberal with repeated words since it's a less inflectional language, but I think some English-speaking people have a similar attitude – they avoid the repetitions in written texts like the plague, to a degree when the result looks silly

In the world of fiction the gender of your characters DOES. NOT. MATTER. unless it's important for the plot or themes of your story. Inclusion falls flat if the characters your using to be inclusive are boring at best or awful people at worst.

Remember my fellow writers, avoid having two sentences that start with the same letter or the same word. Do it for paragraphs to!
Also if you're writing and see that the same word is starting to form a perfectly symmetrical column in your paragraph, rewrite the thing.
All this to give your style more... variation.

"Show, dont tell" is good advice but sometimes teachers, critics, or writers just take it a bit too far. I should be able to say "it was raining heavily outside" instead of always having to be like " the thick water droplets pounded down on the ground one after the other in large quantities" or some shit

For me, my worst bits of writing advice have come from a lot of people in a lot of different roles, but one from when I was much younger and just starting to write for fun sticks out. For starters, I love to do odd, unique things with my writing, such as writing from different perspectives. One time I was writing a story from the perspective of a “fading” god, the god of storytelling who, when the universe is torn apart and nothing larger than an atom still exists, is running out of stories to tell. Gods in this world are inherently tied to the concepts that they govern, so when the last story is told, this god will die. The story I was writing was supposed to be that last story, and was trying to leave encoded messages throughout the story to persuade the reader to write a story of their own. A teacher of mine read the story and told me that the narrator was breaking the fourth wall too much and that I should stick to more traditional storytelling. I was twelve and impressionable, so that convinced me to abandon one of my favorite projects and most interesting ideas to date.

The worst I’ve gotten is never have minorities as characters because you’ll offend someone cause you’ll never know what it’s like to be them. There’s some other bad ones tho, but that one’s just plain offensive.

There’s the painfully common (I’m sure someone will leave an angry reply telling me this advice was good if my comment gets enough likes) advice of “your writing will default to bad unless you read novels / the only way to get better at writing is reading novels”.

Nothing is ever 100%

Some book use a lot of simple sentences but are good.

As a kid in elementary school I wrote a story from the perspective of someone in middle school which I would be in the next year. My teacher (bless her heart) told me I shouldn’t write from a perspective of someone who’s experiences I haven’t had.
So I asked her what she meant because I was confused ngl she told that as a child and a black girl those where the perspective I have so those are one I should write about in my book. In high school I felt so conflicted when I wanted to write a mixed male character in a fantasy setting all perspectives I don’t have but writing that story helped younger me understand their sexuality and identity better! I thing she just didn’t think a child should write about stuff they didn’t understand. But I always do research if I don’t know a topic,it just ends up being closed minded.

I didn't think this ever needed to be explained but "show don't tell" is not ONLY for screen writing... it is however only for when you actually have a visual element to to your story. If you're writing for a live stage show then usually you want to show don't tell... unless you have things going on outside the view of the audience. If you watch "Dial M for Murder" for example, there's a scene at the end of the movie where one of the characters is literally telling you exactly what you're seeing on screen and the reason it's written that way is because the script was originally written for STAGE not film. That entire monologue describing what's happening in the garden was needed in the stage play because the audience can't literally see the garden, it's not an actual part of the set. I know because I was actually in the stage play. The movie version is able to show more than the stage show because the camera can move around and actually show the garden which makes that dialog entirely redundant. I don't know why the movie kept that in when it wasn't needed.

Now if you're writing for a book, unless it's going to have illustrations showing the reader what you want to them to see then you have to describe it to them. Show don't tell makes no sense to give someone as writing advice if they're writing a novel. You have to tell information because it's not visual, there's no way you can show it without pictures. That just tells me you don't know what the words "show" and "tell" mean if you expect a writer to show anything without a visual aid.

Oh and I think "Write what you know" was meant to be a starting point not a limitation. It's advice often given to people with writer's block. I was afraid to ever write characters I didn't personally relate to for a long time because I thought it was a limitation that I couldn't write anything outside my own experience. Better advice would be to just write them as people first. If you're a man trying to write for a female character or vice versa trying to write them as their gender is going to lead to a lot of gendered stereotypes that will instantly give away that the writer is the opposite gender who does not actually have those lived experiences. However writing them as people that anyone can relate to that just happen to be a specific gender is going to make them feel more real.

My favorite piece of bad writing advice is "you can't write fantasy/sci-fi short stories because you won't have time to explain how the world works"

I once had a moronic person try to tell me that by making the moral lines of my story when it came to any character not THE MC and THE main Villain "more gray" that I was killing the narrative in favor of just being 'different' 😂

Like bruh the whole point of my story is that some of the protagonists have questionable morals and some of the antagonists are precious beans. The side of the catastrophic situation they're on decides their role in the story based on allegiance. Not everyone who works with the Hero is doing so with good intent and some folks who are working for the villain may have been misled into doing so 🤷🏼‍♀️. But apparently not having every villain comically evil like a 1970s children's cartoon and every hero behave like jesus was apparently too much for their marble brains to comprehend. Go figure

I am SO glad that someone brought up the "Show don't Tell" thing bcus I've been struggling with it for a while. You NEED to tell. That's your job as an author. No one's going to be able to say how the character is feeling and what they're thinking except YOU. The audience needs you to "tell" bcus that helps them visualize the scene. It's not even COMPARABLE to movies & shows! In movies & shows, the audience already has the visualization, but you have to make sure the audience can see the entire picture without you saying it outright. It doesn't matter if both of them are essentially about telling a story. They're both BARELY the same when it comes to creating them.

(Of course it's a lot more complicated than that in the end. If, for example, you want a character to have a certain trait like being kind or something, you have to SHOW the character being kind rather than just saying it. Excluding either show or tell in general is never a good move. You need both to have a good story, be it a movie or a book)

i feel like treating 'said' as a "bad word" is more of a negative thing than what people are trying to say. yes, expressive and colourful language is great, and it can really spice up a story and make it more exciting or investing, but why restrict yourself from using certain words if they perfectly fit for their use? use "said" all you want! it's nice and simple and gets the point across! literally write whatever you want! no one can stop you!

One teacher literally told the class to not use "said"

You have to introduce your main character at the start of chapter 1. They should be the first person we meet.

Whenever I hear any type of writing advice, my first thought is "Do my favorite writers do this?". Rick Riordan uses "said" all the time, Suzanne Collins has a strong female character that doesn't have a guy to look up to, and on it goes, it is helpful to know when something makes sense or not😂

"Don't use commas" is the most unhinged one💀💀

Literally turning into a animal is a terrible metaphor for gays with or without the terrible writing advice

The thing about using tropes is that almost any trope can be done well or poorly. If you're gonna use a trope, just try to use it well. Attempting to just avoid any and all tropes can often just make your writing feel confusing or like it's trying too hard to be different.

I just hate rules. Because whenever someone insisted on a “rule,” it becomes non negotiable and used to demean me. It silences conversations before
they even start.

Fuck rules. Do what you want. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, oh well.

Once I saw a nice writing advice: write what you’d like to read. It helped me a lot, cause I always gave up on my work thinking people wouldn’t like it, or no publisher would want to publish it, etc. Then I realized I shouldn’t write thinking about what people like, but what I like. You’d like to write a novel with at least thirty cliches per sentence? Go for it! You’re the one writing, and you make your own rules!

The absolute worst advice I’ve ever heard was that using yourself as a reference for writing a character is bad, because you shouldn’t be emotionally invested in your own story..
Got it from a TikTok..

the "said" thing makes me think of how japanese novels often don't even explicitly say who's talking

I think a version of 'show don't tell' that I find applicable is: "actions speak louder than words". Obviously, you can still tell the audience a character is smart, but if their actions are that of a bumbling fool, it's gonna feel bad.

"Never use commas"
Who do you think you are, Cormac McCarthy?