To become a better writer, you should write every day. You should also avoid forcing it. You should outline extensively before starting. And you should stop outlining and just write. You should write for yourself. Just don’t forget to think about your audience. You should trust the reader, but make sure you never confuse the reader.

There is no shortage of writing advice out there.

Ask ten writers how to approach a project and you’ll receive at least twelve answers. Meanwhile, you’re sitting in front of a blank Google Doc trying to determine which successful stranger is responsible for your future success.

More often than not, writers are describing the solution to their problem, not necessarily yours.

A writer who can’t organize their ideas says, “Outline everything.”

A writer who can’t stop organizing their ideas says, “Just start writing.”

Imagine if directions worked this way. One person tells you to turn left. Another tells you to turn right. A third insists that maps are a limitation and you should trust your instincts. Most people would question the directions; writers are likely to question themselves.

The truth is, most writing advice is effective. Just not for everyone, all the time, for the same reason. 

A writer who spent six months outlining a project they never start has a very different problem than the writer who just produced twenty pages of material and refuses to revise a single sentence. Still, writing advice is often delivered as though all writers suffer from the same disease.

My feeling? Popular pieces of writing advice are less like rules and more like prescriptions. The challenge isn’t deciding whether they’re right, but whether they’re right for you. Otherwise, you’re treating a broken arm with cough syrup.

1. “Write every day”

This is probably the most famous piece of writing advice in existence. It is also one of the most difficult to argue with because it contains just enough truth to survive almost any counterexample.

If you write every day and improve, the advice worked. If you write every day and don’t improve, someone will explain that you weren’t writing correctly. If you miss a day and improve anyway, someone will point out that you write most days.

(For total transparency, the creation of this post involved several days of not writing it.)

It’s useful advice for writers who struggle to build momentum. It is less useful for the college student who just spent three consecutive days surviving exclusively on caffeine and is now feeling guilty for taking Tuesday off.

Often, productivity advice has a tendency to confuse correlation with causation. Maybe the famous novelist wrote every morning, or maybe the famous novelist simply had the time and circumstances to do so. The routine is easy to copy, while the life surrounding it typically isn’t.

Some writers need discipline, and others need a nap. “Just write” might be the writing equivalent of telling a depressed person to cheer up.

If writing every day helps you write, wonderful. If taking a day off helps you write, that’s still writing advice, even if it would make a sad motivational poster.

2. “Kill your darlings”

I personally suspect writers like this advice because it sounds dramatic. The words conjure an image of a writer staring sadly at the most beautiful sentence ever written before deleting it for the good of their manuscript.

But honestly? Most editing sessions are less theatrical than advertised. I am rarely forced to choose between artistic integrity and a beautiful sentence. Most of my editing decisions involve removing the word “really” and adding commas before independent clauses.

I think the popularity of this advice comes from how flattering it is. It assumes your biggest problem is having too many brilliant ideas. The obstacle isn’t that you’re incapable of writing a good sentence, but that you’ve become too attached to the abundance of good sentences you’ve already written.

There are worse things for a writer to believe about themselves.

“Kill your darlings” assumes a very specific writer who consistently overvalues their own work. It imagines a person who needs to be persuaded to let go. But this has not been my experience.

A lot of writers are so eager to be objective that they begin cutting away every unusual inclination they have. Eventually, there are no darlings left to kill. Just a draft that could’ve been written by anyone.

We hear a lot from writers whose darlings needed killing and far less from the writers who deleted every interesting instinct they had in pursuit of being concise or efficient. The evidence is naturally skewed toward the writers who benefited from cutting because it is much harder to recognize the observation, metaphor, or eccentric idea that disappeared too early and dragged the work’s personality along with it.

Yes, killing your darlings can result in stronger writing. But it can also result in excellent instruction manuals.

3. “Read more”

This advice is super straightforward until you start asking annoying questions: How much? And perhaps most importantly: What counts?

We spend most of the day reading. Text messages. Emails. News articles. Subtitles. Menus. Comment sections. The title of the “Terms and Conditions” before immediately clicking “Accept.”

When writers say “read more,” they rarely mean any of those things. They mean books. And they probably have an opinion about which books, too.

One writer reads a hundred books a year, another reads exclusively nineteenth-century Russian novels, a third learns everything from fanfiction, Wikipedia, and internet rabbit holes. Conventional wisdom would probably place them in that order.

I’m not convinced readers do.

The real value of reading has less to do with prestige than exposure. Books matter because they introduce us to experiences, ideas, and ways of thinking we wouldn’t have encountered alone. But books are not the only place those things live.

A writer who only reads literary fiction may develop beautiful prose while knowing surprisingly little about the world. Meanwhile, another writer spends three hours on Reddit reading about shipwrecks, tax fraud, and a man who attempted to mail himself across the country in a wooden crate. None of this information is inherently or immediately useful, but all of it somehow ends up in the writing. And if we’re being honest, the man in the crate is the thing you’re most likely to remember from this paragraph.

Reading isn’t valuable because it satisfies a quota. It’s valuable because it expands the range of things you can think about. The best readers I know aren’t necessarily the most literary; they’re the most curious.

4. “Find your voice”

This piece of advice is particularly fascinating because it implies that your authentic writing style is already fully formed somewhere inside you, waiting to be discovered. Anyone who has actually practiced writing for their whole life would find this idea extremely annoying: If my voice was already finished, what exactly have I been doing all this time? 

The truth is, most things we call voice are learned. They emerge from years of reading, writing, imitating, experimenting, failing, revising, and accidentally developing preferences. Voice is the residue of every word you’ve encountered before.

The more consciously you chase a voice, the more artificial it can become. People trying to “sound like themselves” often end up sounding like someone who is trying very hard to sound like themselves. The result is a sentence that feels less like self-expression and more like branding.

The advice also makes voice sound far more singular than it actually is. Most writers don’t have a voice, but several.

The version that appears in a college essay is not the version that appears in a text message, which is not the version that appears in a diary, which is not the version that appears when writing something you’re genuinely excited about.

None of these voices are necessarily fake; they’re just responding to different contexts.

Voice is less something you find than something you leave behind. Other people often notice it before you do. At which point they will tell you that you’ve found your voice. Which is a much more romantic explanation than years of practice.

5. “Write what you know”

I’ve never understood how this became one of the most popular pieces of writing advice. Taken literally, this advice would make historical fiction, fantasy, and most of science fiction impossible. Fortunately, writers have spent centuries ignoring it.

The real advice is probably something closer to: Write what you can emotionally understand.

If you can emotionally understand dragons and complex murder mysteries, then by all means, write about dragons and complex murder mysteries. Because while I have never personally commanded a medieval army or survived a zombie apocalypse, I have experienced embarrassment, uncertainty, fear, and regret. And I imagine those emotions remain surprisingly relevant when the zombies arrive.

The advice also underestimates how much of writing involves curiosity. A writer doesn’t need to know everything before they begin because half the fun is the learning. Research is the most socially acceptable way to become obsessed with something.

Writers often interpret “write what you know” as a restriction rather than an invitation.

By that logic, my entire body of work would consist of writing about college students staring at laptops. Which isn’t completely absent of conflict, but does limit the number of dragons.

This advice was never meant to restrict what you write about. It was meant to help you figure out where to start. So write what you don’t know, but don’t forget what you do.

6. “Show, don’t tell”

This is excellent advice right up until somebody becomes too committed to it. The phrase itself is oddly ambitious: It doesn’t suggest showing more, it suggests not telling. 

Showing and telling are continually treated like opposites when they’re actually teammates. Nobody says, “Always use a hammer, never use a screwdriver.” The usefulness of the tool depends entirely on what you’re trying to do.

Like, I could tell you that I am skeptical of this rule. Or I could spend three paragraphs describing the increasingly strained expression on my face as I type this section.

At some point, the information needs to be communicated.

Writers repeat this advice so often that it occasionally begins to sound like all forms of exposition are a moral failing. But if a character walks into a room covered in blood carrying an axe, I don’t necessarily need three pages of context clues to infer that he’s upset. (Maybe one or two, but certainly not three.)

Sometimes a scene deserves to be experienced, and sometimes information deserves to be delivered.

7. “Write for yourself”

This is one of the most comforting pieces of writing advice ever invented, but also one of the most confusing.

Some writers don’t need encouragement to prioritize their own interests. Some writers already write exclusively for themselves. You can usually identify them because reading their work feels like accidentally opening someone else’s freezer: Everything inside makes perfect sense to them, and the rest of us are doing our best. (These are the writers whose darlings may actually have it coming.)

The truth is that writing exists somewhere between self-expression and expression.

The moment another human being enters the equation, you are no longer writing exclusively for yourself. You are making decisions based on what another person knows, doesn’t know, understands, misunderstands, finds interesting, or finds boring. In other words, you’re thinking about an audience.

A novelist writes for readers. A journalist writes for readers. A screenwriter writes for viewers. Even a diary is often written for a future version of yourself.

If you write entirely for yourself, you risk becoming incomprehensible. If you write entirely for your audience, you risk becoming generic.

“Write for yourself” is only useful advice because it reminds us that writing requires preferences; you have to find something interesting before anyone else can.

But, I could spend the next paragraph explaining an inside joke between my friends. It would be extremely personal, completely sincere, and almost entirely useless to you. So I make the choice not to. That decision does not make the writing less authentic. It makes it clear and communicative.

It seems to me that writing actually requires a constant negotiation between what interests you and what will mean something to somebody else.

It would be so much easier if there were a universal formula.

Somewhere, a writer was struggling to begin, so they learned to write every day. Somewhere else, a writer was clinging to the wrong sentence, so they learned to kill their darlings. Somewhere else, a writer was over-explaining everything, so they learned to show instead of tell.

Then they succeeded. And like most successful people, they eventually developed a theory about why. 

The rest of us inherited the medicine without the diagnosis.

I spent years searching for the perfect method, only to discover that most of the work involves understanding myself.

If there is a universal rule, I suspect it’s to pay attention. Pay attention to what is and isn’t working. Pay attention to the habits helping you and the ones getting in the way. Pay attention to yourself.

Then ignore anyone who tells you they know exactly how writing works. 

Including me.