Not all the writing tips you hear or read about are good for your writing. Editor and writer Stephanie Hoogstad gives you some advice on which are good to Ignore.

So many writers like to give advice about writing—myself included. After a while, all the advice seems to run together because a lot of it is the same. And you know what? Not all of it works! So, I started to wonder: what are the most common writing tips that I can break in my writing? You’d be surprised at how many of the “golden” writing tips you can ignore, but here are three of the most common that you can break to improve your writing:

Show, Don’t Tell.

Every writer has heard it a million times: be more descriptive. Show the reader what is going on, don’t just tell them. Now, this can be good advice, but it’s not always appropriate. Not every scene, setting, or object needs an in-depth description for the reader to obtain a good mental image of it. Sometimes, you just need to trust your reader’s imagination. Other times, you need to flat-out tell the reader what they need to know for the sake of clarity.

Don’t Edit as You Go.

I’ll admit that, at least for me, it’s usually most productive to follow this advice to avoid that critical voice inside my head. HOWEVER, it does not work for every writer’s style. Some writers need to look back over their own writing and, yes, edit it as they go so that they can get a good feel for the direction they should be heading. One famous writer who used this method is the late authoress Anne Rice (R.I.P.). After her first few successful works, her writing process involved her perfecting a page before she moved on to the next. You don’t need to go that far, but you don’t need to ignore editing while writing, either.

Write What You Know.

This one is particularly troublesome for speculative fiction writers (fantasy, science fiction, Gothic horror, etc.). After all, I doubt that Stephen King went mad and tried to kill his family at a hotel (though he did stay at the Stanley Hotel, a reportedly haunted hotel that helped inspire The Shining). You don’t have to write what you already know, at least not strictly in its real-life form. You can turn those experiences into fantastical new ideas. Whatever you don’t know, you can research. If you research what you don’t know, though, make sure you do your research well; that is the key to writing what you don’t know without getting heckled for not staying in your lane.

The problem with the most common writing advice is that people spew it without considering that each writer is unique; therefore, their writing styles are unique. Not all advice will work well or the same for every writer. Instead, you need to take the advice that rings true for you and run with it. The rest, well, you can either break it to fit your mold or leave it behind in the dust.

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, a town on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park in north-central Colorado, public domain image by Carol M. Highsmith Photography,