This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 39: The Worst Writing Advice.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner.

I have realized that I spend probably 90% of my time giving or receiving advice. It sounds like a lot, I know, but what I do all day at work is essentially give advice to clients about what can help make their websites better or what would be a more strategic choice for campaign A or campaign B. I give and receive advice to and from my coworkers, my manager, everyone around me. When I go to lunch with a friend, it’s essentially advice giving and advice receiving. When I talk on the phone with a family member or a friend, it’s the same thing. When I go home in my free time, if I have any, if I’m reading a book or watching something, there’s a message in there that is sort of surreptitiously… well, that sounds really negative, subliminally maybe, transferring a message to me about how to act, how to behave, what to do in a certain situation or what not to do.

I mean, heck, when I sit down to record this podcast, that’s what I’m doing, I’m giving advice. I hope that it’s been good advice and useful advice for you. But I realized this this week, that this is what I do, I give and receive advice, and maybe it’s what you do too. Today though, I want to focus on the bad advice, how to recognize it, how to avoid it. I spend a lot of time on social media and I’ve noticed that whatever platform you’re on, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever, I have noticed an increase in the appearance of these sort of beautifully done quotes. They may be done in beautiful calligraphy or be scripty white texts super imposed over photographs. And I laugh because I of course create these as well.

If you follow me on any of my social media platforms; Facebook, Pinterest, Ello, Instagram, Twitter, whatever it is, you know that every day I post an inspirational quote from an author whom I admire. And they’re usually intended to get you thinking or offer you a positive perspective for the day or inspire you to write, or in some cases give you a piece of advice for your writing. I try to make sure that everything I share is beneficial to you and is good advice. But I think as we’ll explore throughout this episode, good advice for one person might not be good advice for another person, and so we’ll talk a little bit about that. But really, I wanted to talk about this subject because I’ve seen a lot of really bad advice done up in beautiful, scripty calligraphy, but still really bad advice.

I’m sure you’re familiar with bad advice in general, such as, “Oh, just gun it through that yellow light,” or, “Oh, come on, have one more drink,” or, “Blue hair would look really good on you,” or, “Oh, save the airfare. You can just drive the 1200 miles. Road trips are fun.” Road trips are fun, but they can test the patience of anyone involved in them as I’m sure you know if you’ve been on a road trip. There’s also the very popular, “Live for the moment. Yeah, that money that was supposed to go to your rent check, come on down to the club, live for the moment, have fun now.” So that’s bad advice, and I think that we all know just really bad advice when we hear it. Then there’s questionable, bad advice. And what I mean by that is that good advice is not necessarily equally good for everyone.

So to illustrate this, I’ll tell you a story using my brother, Harrison, as an example. Sorry, Harrison. Back when my brother was a teenager, he had trouble retaining weight. It’s a condition that I’m a little envious of now, but at the time, it was a serious condition. His body was simply burning through calories too quickly for him to maintain a healthy body weight. So my mother took him to the doctor and the doctor said, “You know what, Harrison? Just eat as many calories as you possibly can, get seconds of dinner, have dessert, put chocolate syrup on absolutely everything. So for my brother, this was very good advice. For me, however, as much as I would love it to be true, the advice to put chocolate syrup on absolutely everything is not good advice.

This is because I do not have the same situation as my brother. I don’t have the same metabolism unfortunately. What was good advice for him was bad advice for me. And a lot of advice works this way. I’ll give you another example using a piece of advice that I see all the time on social media. This is the advice to follow your passion. This is actually advice that I give you every time you listened to this podcast. I say, “The Write Now podcast gives you the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write every day.” And I maintain that this is good advice if your goal is to write every day. Yes, pursue your passion, follow your passion, become a writer by writing every day. That’s good advice.

Now, if you are a pyromaniac and your passion is watching the world burn, please do not follow your passion. If you are a scientist whose passion is discovering the next horrible bio weapon, please do not follow your passion. If your passion is quitting your job and trying to make it as a full-time accordion player, follow your passion, but don’t let it dictate your life. So continue playing the accordion, but also make sure that you can provide a home for yourself, for your family, and also food, which is important, and clothing and new accordion music. This is important stuff. This is one of those cases where I want to stress that how we feel about a certain piece of advice does not necessarily mean that it’s good advice. So like, “Yeah, follow my passion. That’s really inspiring.”

But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good advice. Sometimes you have to question it a little bit. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily bad advice. I’m just saying, make sure that it works for you and for your goals and will help you find whatever it is you have defined as success in your life. So first of all, when someone gives you a piece of advice, consider the source. Ask, “Who is it that’s giving me this advice? And why are they giving me this advice?” So that first question, who’s giving you this advice, is it someone you trust? Deep down in your gut, you’ll know. Your trust can be based on past experiences with this person, with books of theirs that you’ve read and enjoyed, whatever it is. Is this person and trustworthy?

Then second, why are they giving me this advice? Is it because they genuinely want me to improve or find success or get a promotion, get a raise, blah, blah, blah, or are they trying to take something away from me? What are their motives? Are they good or are they bad? Are they pure or are they selfish? Even beyond all that, I read a really, really good article on the Muse.com, which I’ll link to in today’s show notes. It’s called, A Simple Test That Will Help You Tell if You’re Getting Bad Advice. The article is by Alex Cavoulacos, and in it, she relates her own experience of speaking with a mentor and considering leaving her job at a consulting firm to start the Muse.com.

She notes that her mentor told her, “The vast majority of advice you’ll be given in your life will be one of two types; either do what I did, or, do what’s best for me right now. Make sure you take the time to identify if either is the case before taking the advice at face value.” I found this to be extremely helpful actually, and as someone who spends a lot of time giving advice, I found it to be really true. Even before reading this article, when I would give someone advice in response to a question, so they would say, “Sarah, how do I start my own podcast?” Or, “Sarah, how do I get to where you are in my career?” I would respond, “I can’t guarantee this will work for you, but here’s what I did and it worked for me.”

I know that I give a lot of, do what I did advice, but hopefully, I am self-aware of it enough and I sort of broadcast that caveat to people. So here’s some examples of these two types of advice in action provided by the article. One of the partners in her firm that she talked to said, “Yeah, go ahead and start your own thing.” Then she realized that he was giving her, do what I did advice, and she followed it, but she knew that it was do what I did advice and she went in with the full knowledge that it might not work for her exactly as it worked for him. Advice that works for one person or is good for one person is not necessarily good for everyone or even anyone else. I’ve actually noticed this a lot lately.

There’s been conversations cropping up all over social media and just all over the internet in general about this tension, this really unpleasant, uncomfortable tension between two different generations. And this might be purely an American thing, I’m not 100% sure, but suffice to say that methods that maybe worked and led the way to success for an older generation might simply not work for a younger generation. The do what I did advice; the advice to graduate from high school, go to college and get a degree, graduate, get married, buy a house, have 2.5 children, and retire comfortably on your retirement income, can ring a little bit hollow. This path to success is simply not possible for a lot of younger millennial folks.

That model, that “do what I did”, simply doesn’t apply because of a ton of different factors, based on the recession, student loan debt, and just so many other factors. And oh my gosh! I did not mean to go on this tangent. I only meant to point out that advice that works for some people does not work for other people, so we’ll talk about generational differences another time, I guess. So we talked a little bit about the, do what I did advice. The other one I want to talk about is also very interesting, and this is the, do what’s best for me right now, mindset. This one’s hard for me to talk about because I am just extremely… I tend to be very naive and trusting and I don’t always know when people are taking something from me that they shouldn’t or taking advantage of me.

So the author of the Muse article asked another partner what she should do; should she leave her job to start the Muse.com or should she stay in consulting? And his advice was, “No, no. Stay.” And he said he was doing it for her best interests. Like, “Oh, you don’t want to take this risk right now. That’s just not something you can handle.” But really, she later found out that he was saying these things because she was a good employee and she did a lot of good work for him and her work lined his pockets. And so of course, he didn’t want her to go. He was essentially saying, “No, no. Do what’s best for me right now.” That’s not cool. It’s not cool. I’m really, really bad at recognizing when people are taking advantage of me or taking something from me that they shouldn’t.

I’ve had to learn the hard way that most people want something from you, which is really unfortunate because I love people and I want to think the best of everyone and I want to trust everyone without having to worry about little things like that. But this happens to me all the time. Someone will invite me out for coffee and I’ll say, “Hooray!” And I’ll go and halfway through I’ll realize, “Oh! All they wanted was a couple free hours of consulting. Great.” And then I’ll never hear from them again because they got what they wanted. They just want what’s best for them at that time, and that’s not okay. What I’m saying here is, it took me a long time to realize when someone else was giving me advice that instead of helping me helped them, even though it was presented as something that would help me.

This usually, I think, leads to bad advice. So consider the source and identify if the person giving you advice is saying, A, “Do what I did,” or B, “Do what’s best for me right now,” and use those as extra points of evaluation when you’re considering following that advice. Identify if either of those is the case before taking the advice at face value. You can still follow it and it might still be good advice, but it’s still really, really good to understand the context around the advice that you’re being given. You may even get advice like this from a mentor. I’ve talked before about how important it is to have a mentor in your life. And even then, from this trusted source, you don’t have to take every of advice at face value.

Again, the advice may be coming from a context that you don’t understand. For example, sometimes people ask me, “If I wanted to start my own podcast, what is the absolute best piece of advice you can give me?” And my answer is going to be relative to what I went through in producing my podcast. So here’s what I mean by that. I first got the idea for a podcast… Oh my gosh! Three years ago now. And it took me two years to work up the guts to record. And really, what got in the way was, I was terrified of learning, how do you use sound equipment? I’d never used it before, the mixing board was extremely intimidating to me, and I just got scared and I procrastinated. And so of course, my number one piece of advice is relative to that situation, and it is, just start.

Just start podcasting. Don’t let anything slow you down. Now, if someone were to follow that advice, it might not be good advice for them because they don’t have the same problem that I did. I’m giving them the solution to a problem they don’t have. While I was busy procrastinating learning sound mixing and editing and all that stuff, I was busy preparing for my podcast in other ways. I generated a list of 183 possible topics that I could talk about for episodes. I planned out my social media presences, I built my website, I figured out how to create an RSS feed. I created the imagery for the iTunes Store, all this stuff I did. And so if my advice to someone who comes off the street… because I guess that’s how people ask me for advice, is they just walk into wherever I am off the street randomly.

If they say, “Sarah, what’s your number one podcasting advice?” And I say, “Just start,” and they say, “Okay,” and they go and they pick up a microphone and they just start, they’re not going to have all of the background stuff. They’re not going to have all of the careful planning and strategy that I put in place to find the success that I found. Good advice for one person might not be good advice for another person. So I want to turn the conversation back over to writing, because that’s what you came here for. And I’m going to go through a couple of pieces of just really, really… well, I think is really bad writing advice. So I’m going to start with something that I just saw on Pinterest the other day, and that is, “Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” This is not simply bad advice, this is just blatantly untrue.

That’s just not true. Don’t get me wrong. I love writing, I’ve always been a writer, and I will always be a writer. In fact, I have 39 episodes of the Write Now podcast that I think talk about my love of writing. And I write for a living and I love it, but I also work every single day. The notion that if I do what I love I’ll never work a day in my life is not true. It’s kind of crap. I say this because writing is hard even if you love it, and you know this. It’s so hard sometimes. It’s hard work. Getting those words out, fighting with them, wrestling with them to support your ideas, trying to get your characters to do something or act in a certain way or say something in a way that’s not clunky or weird, carefully editing your manuscript for like the 12th time, submitting it to publishers, doing your own marketing, I mean, this is hard stuff.

I work hard every single day of my life even though I’m doing what I love. Maybe there’s the argument to be made that doing what you love is not really working, but I’m not buying that. Writing is hard work, and I don’t like the thought that people might start writing because they love to do it and they think that it’s just going to be easy, because it’s not. Another quote that I recently saw on Twitter is a quote from Leonardo DaVinci, who’s a smart dude. The quote says, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” Okay, in one sense, I get what he’s saying, that art is ever evolving and organic and you’re never really finished with a piece per se. So I get that. There’s truth in that. But as writing advice, this does not work.

I mean, unless you have the time or inclination to spend your lifetime perfecting one piece. And even then, I mean, it’s not possible to make something that’s perfect. There comes a point when you have to stop and submit it for publication even though it’s not perfect. I don’t like thinking of that as abandoning your work. You’re not abandoning anything. You’re not abandoning your work. You’re pushing it out into the public view. You’re sharing it, you’re not abandoning it. So, it’s a great way to think about art, it’s a terrible way to think about writing. Another one that I read recently says, “You can’t force good writing.” I think that if you take this as writing advice, even if there is a hint of truth behind it, if you take this as writing advice, it kind of gives you the license to just stop.

You can just be like, “Can’t force good writing and I don’t feel like writing today, so I better go, may find something on Netflix.” I would never say that you can’t force good writing. I think that at some point in our lives, we’ve probably all forced good writing to come out. Whether it wanted to or not, we dragged it out kicking and screaming. I remember this was especially true whenever I had a deadline of some kind, so whether I was writing a paper that was due within the next two hours or if I was writing a story for the newspaper or even if I had a project that was due at a certain time at work. You don’t always want to write, but sometimes you have to. Sometimes you’ve got a deadline, sometimes there’s a reason that you need to get some writing done.

And a lot of what I’ve written under pressure like that, the stuff that I’ve had to force out, a lot of it has been good. I think you can force good writing. Now, what you might not be able to force is creativity. I get that. Sometimes you’re feeling creative and sometimes you’re not, but regardless of how creative you’re feeling, you can always write. So I mentioned earlier that sometimes writing advice contradicts other writing advice. And both might be true, but they might be true for different people in different situations. And so an example of this is, for me when I’m writing, a good piece of advice I received was to schedule my writing time into every day. And the reason that I have to do this is because I’m so fricking busy. If I don’t schedule in time to write, it won’t happen.

My time will just get eaten up by a million other things. So if I don’t reserve that time and set it aside and dedicate myself to writing within it, I won’t get to write that day. I’ve shared that advice with other people with busy schedules, but it might not be good advice for everybody because not everybody has the same context that I do. Not everybody has that crazy busy schedule. Opposing that view is a quote by novelist Rick Moody. And he says, “I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect.” This is one of those pieces of advice that makes me feel really good. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s awesome.” But if I actually followed through on this advice, I would probably write like once a month. If I only wrote when I felt really excited about writing, it might be more fun, but I also would not get a whole lot done.

I had my friend, Joanna Vermeer, who’s a poet, on coffee break last week and she actually does this too. She only writes when the muse shows up. And for her, that works. So she only writes poetry when a poem comes to her. But again, for me, if I did that, I would just never write at all. I would only write once in a very great while, and that’s not what I want. Sometimes to determine whether advice is good or bad, you simply have to experience it. So I’ve done both of these things. I’ve written with a schedule and I’ve written without a schedule. Again, this is just me in my experience, I have noticed that if I don’t have a writing schedule, I don’t write, even though I love writing. So experience has taught me that one of those is good advice for me and one of those is bad advice for me. Experience might teach you something completely different, and that’s awesome.

So I encourage you to ask questions. Tentatively try out a piece of advice with a lot of self-awareness as to what you’re doing to find the advice that is good for you. I’ve just got a couple more pieces of bad advice for you. One of them is the advice that you need anything beyond yourself to write. So what I mean by that is, people who say that they need a specific pen in order to write, or they need a specific typewriter in order to write, or they need coffee to write. I’m guilty of that one. Or that they need a special program like Scrivener in order to write. If anyone ever tells you that you need something to write outside of yourself, and outside of the basics of a writing tool and something on which to write, whether it’s chalk or charcoal or ducks blood, if anyone says that you need the Scrivener program to write, they’re probably trying to sell you the Scrivener program.

That is bad advice. You don’t need anything outside of yourself and your wonderful brain. The very last bad piece of writing advice I have to share with you is, I think, the most egregious, and this is, to write what you know. Now, I’m sure originally, this piece of advice was meant for a specific person in a specific situation, and I’m sure that for that person, it was good advice. So maybe there was a young man who was trying to write a novel about what it was like to be an elderly woman with cancer, and he was just writing about stuff that he had no clue what he was saying and he had done no research and the stuff that he was writing was potentially offensive or harmful. I’m sure at that point, someone said to him, “This is okay, but you should just really stick to what you know.” I’m sure for that person that was good advice.

But like we’ve been saying, what’s good advice for one person is not necessarily good advice for another person. I think that telling someone to write what they know and only what they know is really, really dangerous and really limiting. If I stayed within that limitation and wrote only what I know, then I would end up with a story about a very nerdy girl who went to the library a lot and got made fun of going to the library a lot and went to college and got a degree in English and went to work for a software company in downtown Chicago and blah, blah, blah, and that would be the only story that I could tell. So we can turn this into a piece of good advice and say that, “Okay, if you want to write about a plasma physicist who lives in Germany, then you should probably know a little bit about what a plasma physicist in Germany would do and say and what they’re researching and what Germany is like and all of these things.”

So maybe don’t write what you know, maybe instead turn that into a piece of good advice and say, “Maybe do a little bit of research if you’re writing about something that is outside of what you know.” At the end of the day, even well intentioned people can give you advice and it’s up to you to determine whether the advice that you’re being given is good or bad. It’s your responsibility, because while people are giving you advice, it’s your choice to follow it or act upon it. So make sure that you’re doing your due diligence. Ask, “Who is giving me this advice. Can I trust them? Why are they giving me this advice? What kind of advice is it? Is this, ‘Do what I did’ advice? Is this, ‘Do what’s best for me right now’ advice? Or is this the kind of advice that will help me get to where I want to go?”

If you have a particularly good or bad piece of writing advice that you’ve been given that you would like to share, I encourage you to share it. You can send me an email at hello@sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com. You can also visit my website, sarahwerner.com. Navigate over to the contact page and fill out that handy form that’s right there. That will send an email directly to me and I will be able to read it. Additionally, if you would prefer, you can post your thoughts as a comment on the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 39. All you do is scroll down to the bottom of the show notes and there is a handy little place where you can leave comments. So I encourage you to do that. I’d love to hear about good advice, bad advice, that has made an impact in your writing life.

I would also encourage you if you are visiting my website to sign up for my email newsletter list. I don’t spam, I promise. All I do is send out a new email whenever there is a new episode of the Write Now podcast for you to listen to, and also I use this as a way to broadcast interesting/exciting news. You can sign up for my mailing list on my homepage, sarahwarner.com. There’s a black bar at the top where you can fill in your email address. Otherwise, if you scroll down to the very bottom of any page on my website, you’ll get a little gray box that pops up and says, “Hi, I like you,” and it gives you a place where you can fill in your email address. Alternately, if you want, you can go to my contact page and I believe there is a link there that you can click and it will let you subscribe to my mailing list.

So yeah, lots of different ways to do that. I encourage you to do so. It’s just a good way to keep on top of all the happidy haps. I just said happidy haps. It’s been a really long day. Full disclosure, this is the second time I have recorded this episode. The very first time, I was at the thank yous and my computer crashed when I was almost done recording and I lost everything. We’ve all had that happened and you just kind of continue on with this numb feeling around your heart, half hopeful that like, “Oh, maybe it’s recovered somewhere.” Except it’s not and you have to re-record or rewrite or whatever project it was that you lost. So I really hope that I didn’t miss any important points that I had the first time around.

Whenever you listen to an episode of the Write Now podcast, it’s just my voice that you hear, but there are so many other people who are responsible for its success. And that is my family and friends who love and support every single thing I do, my co-workers at Click Rain who are just one of the brightest spots in my life, my mentors, you know who you are, you the people, the wonderful, wonderful people who listen to Write Now, those of you who have engaged with me on Twitter or Facebook, those of you who have sent me emails and comments, and those of you who support me on Patreon. You are all just amazing. Special thanks today to my Patreon supporters, including official cool cat Sean Locke, official bookworms Matt Paulson and Rebecca Warner, official rad dude Andrew Coons, and several other folks who have asked to remain anonymous.

You are all wonderful and I appreciate you so much. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform where you essentially just give $1 an episode, $90 an episode, whatever you feel like giving to just support the work here that I do at the Write Now podcast. It covers hosting costs, it covers other costs associated with podcasting, and I am just truly grateful for all these wonderful people. So thank you so much. If you’re interested in supporting my show Patreon, you can go to patreon.com. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com, and searching for the Write Now podcast. Or you can follow the link in the show notes for today’s episode and give that way. I think I’m going to get to the end of this episode without my computer crashing again. I keep eyeing nervously like it’s going to betray me at any moment.

Well, my friends, this has been episode 39 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner and my advice to you is to keep on being awesome.