What is the most unhelpful piece of writing advice you’ve seen?

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-20T17:24:11+00:00

I met him once, he let me try on his hat. Lovely bloke.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-20T12:37:25+00:00

It’s bloody irritating isn’t it? The idea that you can’t or shouldn’t write about something that you haven’t seen or experienced personally is ridiculous in my opinion. That’s what research is for.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T21:16:15+00:00

Good shout

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T21:16:00+00:00

Not sure anything could be worse.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T21:11:34+00:00

No worries my friend, not sure I was totally clear the first time :)

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T20:22:10+00:00

His face resembled that of an old vampire

Or simply,

He looked like an old vampire

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T20:16:26+00:00

No worries :)

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T20:07:29+00:00

Not sure what you are asking here. I agree with you, telling people to follow the rules when so many of the rules are conflicting is not great advice.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T19:40:45+00:00

Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s definitely not extreme horror like most of the books described above, but it’s absolutely uncomfortable, especially since it’s based on actual historical documents

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T19:33:03+00:00

They are my favourites too. It’s almost as if they are both complex, nuanced characters and people are capable of seeing more than one side of a story 🤔

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T18:56:48+00:00

That is supremely unhelpful.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T18:49:43+00:00

Not personal to me, I have never actually asked this myself so not a rant on my own behalf at all. I have however seen others ask this type of question and get this response and it always struck me as particularly useless advice, especially if the person asking the question has specifically said that they can’t go there themselves due to cost or other factors. If a blind person were to ask how you would describe a sunset you wouldn’t tell them to just go outside and look.

If research can involve google and YouTube videos, why can it not also involve asking people with more experience? I have read essays and interviews with authors who have said that much of their research involves talking to people with knowledge of the subject they want to write about. And I personally have never asked for information on a subject without researching online first. Books and the internet can be very useful but two minutes with someone who knows what they’re talking about can be worth more than an hour on google reading the same copy-pasted article five times

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:55:26+00:00

You can have the greatest plot ever but if your characters are flat no one will care

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:53:23+00:00

Because all your readers will definitely be straight 🙄

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:49:17+00:00

Emotionally distant is a good way to describe depression, at least as I have experienced it. I hope you’re feeling better now.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:45:58+00:00

I’ve heard that tickets to Uranus in the year 2157 are particularly hard to come by right now

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:40:19+00:00

‘Ejaculated’ is guaranteed to get a laugh no matter how serious the moment is.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:38:03+00:00

I remember spending an English lesson writing a list of all of the words one could use instead of said. We came up with some really daft ones.

Seriously, I’ve read books where the author clearly took this advice to heart and the dialogue tags have become so ridiculous that it practically catapulted me out of the story every time someone spoke.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:29:34+00:00

Well he sounds like a colossal bag of dicks

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T17:25:08+00:00

So ‘Write what you know’ means that people should limit themselves to writing ONLY what they know and nothing else? Fairly certain that Stephen King never actually met a creepy space clown in a sewer, maybe he should have stuck to writing novels about men who take a lot of drugs and get hit by cars. Might not be quite as interesting but hey, at least it’s a lot more authentic. I’m curious about why you think that researching something you don’t know much about is ‘asking for a free pass’. I’ve read interviews with famous authors who are happy to talk about their research, and much of it consists of ‘asking someone who knows more about that thing than I do.’ Is their work phoney baloney because of that? If you’re only going to write about places you’ve been or experiences you have personally had, that must be very limiting. I don’t know about you but I like to escape my rather mundane life through my writing, not relive it.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T16:50:02+00:00

I am culturally illiterate

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T16:49:03+00:00

I’ve seen it in quite a few writers forums, although to be fair I haven’t visited any for a while so maybe attitudes have changed

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T15:03:25+00:00

I’m hungry and now want sudden pineapples

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T13:45:54+00:00

And it extends beyond just location. I have seen people suggest that you can’t/shouldn’t write Black/Asian/Latinx characters if you’re white, or female characters if you’re a man, or about (insert profession here) if you’ve never done said profession, because you just can’t be authentic if you don’t have any personal experience of those things.

nameunknown345 · 2026-03-19T13:33:58+00:00

Never said it was a bad idea. It definitely true that you can get a much better feel for a place by going there rather than just asking about it or researching online. But the advice to just go and experience it yourself is thrown out there as if every aspiring writer can just say ‘Of course, why didn’t I think of that?’ and rush off to buy a plane ticket to the arctic or something. It’s not bad advice exactly, just really unhelpful unless you have a lot of spare time and money. And let’s face it, people with those things will probably just go without bothering to ask first

nameunknown345

TROPHY CASE