6 Pieces of Bad Writing Advice I Wish I'd Ignored
Write every day. Show, don't tell. Kill your darlings. A contest judge dismantles six famous rules that quietly damaged his poems, and offers a test for filtering advice.
The most damaging sentence anyone ever said to me about poetry was said kindly, by a workshop leader I admired, in a church basement that smelled of instant coffee. She read my poem, tapped the fourth line, and said, "Show, don't tell." She was wrong. The fourth line was the only honest line in the poem, and I spent the next three years converting every plain statement I wrote into a fog of images because a rule told me to.
Most bad writing advice is like this. It is not stupid. It is a reasonable correction for one kind of writer, handed out as law to every kind of writer. The advice that hurt me most was advice that genuinely helps somebody else, which is exactly why it survives. So here are the six rules I obeyed longest and regret most, with what I would say instead, and a test at the end for filtering the next rule somebody taps onto your fourth line.
1. "Write every day"
I did this for a full year. Three hundred and forty poems. I have kept four. The daily-writing rule works beautifully for novelists building stamina and for beginners establishing that writing is an act, not a mood. For a poet past the beginner stage, it can become a machine for producing competent emptiness, because a daily quota rewards finishing over noticing.
What actually filled my notebooks with usable material was the opposite discipline: attend every day, write when the attention snags. Carry the notebook everywhere, capture the overheard sentence and the wrong-colored door, and then write the poem when two captures touch. Some months that is twenty poems. Some months it is two, and the two are worth the twenty. If you need a push on the noticing side, a well-built page of poetry prompts beats a calendar streak, because prompts point your attention somewhere instead of just demanding output.
2. "Show, don't tell"
Here is the fourth line she tapped, near enough: I did not love him anymore. Under orders, I revised it into something like this:
His coffee cup sat cooling on the sill,
a ring of brown around a hollow center.
Prettier. Weaker. The cooling cup is a fine image, but the poem needed the flat confession first, the way a court needs a plea before the evidence. The strongest version, which took me three years to give myself permission to write, does both, in that order:
I did not love him anymore.
His cup went on cooling on the sill
and I watched it like weather.
Telling is a register, not a failure. The masters tell constantly: the whole engine of Dickinson is assertion, and half of the great openings in the tradition are statements a workshop would flag. The real rule is narrower and more useful: do not tell what the image has already shown, and do not show what only a sentence can say.
3. "Write what you know"
Taken straight, this rule shrinks a poet's territory to their own biography, and I obeyed it until my work was a diary with line breaks. The version that freed me came from reading persona poems by poets who had clearly never been Odysseus or a hawk or a widow in 1919, and had written all three convincingly. The workable rule reverses the original: know what you write. Research, imagine, and borrow experience through empathy, then verify the details until they stand up. Imagination with verified details beats autobiography with lazy ones, and judged blind, the persona poem often outscores the confession because the poet was forced to actually build the world instead of assuming we knew it.
4. "Kill your darlings"
The advice means: do not spare a line just because you are proud of it. Fine. But beginners hear something else. They hear that pleasure is suspicious, that any line they love must be self-indulgent, and they start executing the very lines that carry their signature. I judged a poem last spring, a strong one, where the poet had clearly sanded off every strange and living phrase; you could see the ghost outlines of better lines in what remained, like furniture marks on a carpet. Darlings are not for killing. Darlings are for interrogating. Ask the line what it does for the poem. If the answer is "nothing, but I am beautiful," then yes, it goes, into the notebook, where it will seed another poem. If the answer is "I am the reason this poem exists," the darling stays and the poem reorganizes around it.
5. "Rhyme is dead, serious poets write free verse"
Nobody said this to me in those exact words. It arrived as atmosphere: the sense, absorbed from magazines and workshops in my twenties, that rhyme was a costume and free verse was sincerity. So I abandoned sound work entirely, and my poems went gray. Free verse is not the absence of music, it is music you must compose from scratch, and the poets who write it well trained their ears somewhere. The question readers actually ask, do poems have to rhyme, has a two-part answer: no, and you should be able to rhyme anyway, the way a jazz player can walk scales. Slant rhyme, internal rhyme, and the buried couplet are doing quiet work in most contest winners I score, including the ones that look like free verse from across the room.
6. "Don't submit until it's perfect"
This one sounds like humility and functions like a locked door. Perfect is not a state a poem reaches, it is the horizon that keeps moving as your taste improves, and the poets who wait for it die with full drawers. I sat on my strongest early poem for two and a half years, polishing commas, while a friend submitted her rough, alive work everywhere and grew a publication history and, more importantly, grew from every response. A poem you believe in after a cold read and one honest reviser is ready for the world. The world's feedback is part of revision, not a reward for finishing it. Reading through a contest's past winners cured me faster than any pep talk: the winning poems were not flawless, they were vivid, and several had rough edges I would have polished into blandness.
Advice is autobiography wearing a lab coat.
How to Spot Bad Writing Advice Before It Costs You Years
Every rule above helped someone once. The trouble is dosage and fit. Before you obey the next commandment, run it through this five-question filter. It takes ten minutes and it would have saved me most of a decade.
- Who was the patient? Most advice is a prescription written for a specific ailment. "Write every day" treats avoidance. If you do not have the ailment, do not take the medicine.
- Does it describe a failure or forbid a tool? "Your abstractions are vague here" describes a failure. "Never use abstractions" forbids a tool. Accept diagnoses, refuse bans.
- Can you name three great poems that break it? If you can, the rule is a tendency, not a law. If you cannot, spend a week looking before you obey.
- Test it on one poem, not on your voice. Apply the advice fully to a single draft and compare versions cold, three days later. Adopt what survived the comparison, not the sermon.
- Watch what the adviser writes, not what they preach. My workshop leader, I later noticed, told constantly in her own best poems. The lab coat was for us.
- Advice that survives all five questions is worth a year of your obedience.
- Advice that fails two or more is worth a polite nod and nothing else.
The Rule I Kept
Out of all the commandments from those years, exactly one survived every test: read your poem aloud before anyone else sees it. It forbids nothing, fits every ailment, and the great poems all pass it. Everything else, including everything I have said here, should be tried on one poem and judged by the result.
That is also the honest way to use scored feedback. When a Writory judge marks your entry across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, the numbers are a diagnosis, not a commandment, and the useful move is to test the diagnosis against your next draft rather than swallow it whole. Enter a poem this month, read your breakdown on the 30th, and then interrogate it exactly as hard as you would interrogate me. The poets I trust most are not the ones who followed the rules or the ones who broke them. They are the ones who checked.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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