Writing is all about balance. Every author needs to find their personal balance point as it relates to their specific genre and style. This is challenging, which is why it takes writers so long to debut: they need to work through the urge to go overboard in certain aspects.

For me, I wrote over 1.6 million words to get rid of purple prose, infodumps, over-interiority, extremely long sentences, overdescribing, and head hopping. Clearly I had a lot to fix, and I’m happy to say I have mostly succeeded. I think.

Anyway, adhering too strongly to writing advice leads to wooden, restricted, weird writing. The standard stuff you hear is training wheels, meant to hem in your worst habits – not dictate exactly what you should do. None of them are absolutes, but a lot of newer writers seem to think they are.

Today, we’re going to look at some common writing advice and why it isn’t always applicable. I’ll provided more nuanced, amended suggestions after I explain the special circumstances where your training wheel advice does not work.

“Show, don’t tell”

This has become the advice that most experienced writers hate the most because it’s way too simplistic. I rail against it constantly, though I do understand its purpose.

Too many new writers simply describe everything like they are writing a screenplay, or they can’t integrate necessary information into the text without just outright saying it. Then, when they hear this rule, they go all the way to the other side of the equation and show everything.

Neither of these approaches are very good. They both make for boring and flat writing.

Most of the time, you will want to lean toward showing as much as you can, even if it’s hard. (Writing is hard. That’s the point.)

Don’t tell us that a character is sad; show it to us through their demeanor. Don’t have the narrator tell us that this engine is about to give out; have the engine sputter, vomit smoke, clank. Don’t explain the political system to us; have the characters discuss it for us.

But, there are times when you cannot show something, especially if the thing you’re telling us is a character’s interpretation of events or a memory they have. In this case, it’s fine to tell us. Just be mindful of how often you do this and workshop ways to avoid telling.

Revised advice: “Tell things that cannot be shown or spoken.”

“You should never just give readers information”

This advice is usually an addendum to “show don’t tell,” and is often given by newer writers to other newer writers.

Which, by the way, if you haven’t done your practice million words, don’t give other people advice. You’re still in the early stages of learning yourself; you’re going to lead your “students” astray.

This adage melts into uselessness the instant you realize that all dialogue is just giving readers information, albeit from a character’s perspective. All your dialogue should provide important information rather than being mere pleasantries. Whether that is about a character’s emotional state, key details about the plot, relationships between characters, or something else, all dialogue has a purpose and helps readers understand what’s going on.

What this advice is actually supposed to help you avoid is infodumps, where you have paragraphs of background information, lore, or interiority (something I have previously been guilty of).

If you’ve got a full page of just background story, characters thinking to themselves, or something like that, you need to break it up with something else or readers will get bored. You can still have that information; it just needs to be woven in when appropriate.

And no, it’s unlikely that you will need to give us all this information all at once, nor will that help readers understand what you’re talking about. Now they need to retain all that information going forward, which they likely will not.

Revised advice: “Provide information when it becomes important, and break up information with other things like action.”

“Don’t use the character’s name constantly”

I got beta feedback that I was using terms like “the infantryman” and “the cavalryman” too much in my third book, Funeral of Hopes (coming out June 23, 2025). After taking a second look, I sure was. The term “the infantryman” showed up 136 times in my draft, which is pretty insane. I managed to cut this down to just 15 instances, some of which weren’t even referring to the character.

That’s just another example of why having great beta readers is so important. Thanks, Lila!

Epithets are very common in the fanfic space, which is where I did most of my practice writing. As such, I needed to restrain my urge to use them all the time in my original fiction.

People worry that using a character’s name too often will make their work repetitive, but this is rarely true. Directness doesn’t make your writing boring; it just means that you want to ensure the reader understands who you’re talking about.

Using names is especially important in my work because I have same-sex relationships. “He” or “she” isn’t always going to be clear enough unless I have already called out which character I’m talking about.

However, a few epithets can spice things up and provide further context as long as the term is relevant. You don’t need to remind us that someone is a lawyer when they’re just having an ice cream with a friend and aren’t talking about law at all. You can remind us that they are a lawyer when they’re prepping for a case or striding into the courtroom.

Revised advice: “Epithets are helpful but must be appropriate for the given context.”

“Never use adverbs”

Adverbs add context to an action, just like adjectives add context to a noun. They are useful when a certain verb does not contain enough nuance.

For example, let’s imagine you need to explain that someone is speaking in a pretty normal tone, but they’re also crying.

There’s a difference between all of these ways to do it:

“She cried out” is, surprisingly enough, not quite specific enough, because a person can “cry out” without actually having tears leaking down their face. Someone might cry out “don’t do that!” but not be crying.

“She cried” now implies that she is just straight up crying and not talking normally. It is also often used when someone isn’t speaking but just wordlessly letting tears fall.

“She sobbed” also means she is not speaking normally but is in fact crying her eyes out and barely able to hold it together.

“She blubbered” sort of implies that whatever she’s crying about is stupid or that she’s a small child.

“She said, fighting back tears” is close, but it suggests that she’s trying hard not to cry and has not done so yet.

“She said tearfully” tells us that she is crying but is still in enough of a rational state to speak. Her emotions are on full display and she’s not hiding them, but she’s also not overpowered by them.

Of course, we wouldn’t say “she sobbed tearfully” because it’s redundant. If the verb is strong enough on its own, then we don’t need an adverb. However, if a specific verb does not capture the exact emotion, or is too strong, then we can use an adverb.

Revised advice: “Use adverbs when they provide necessary context for a verb that cannot be swapped out for a stronger one.”

“Never use said” or “always use said”

“Said” has gone through a rennaissance. For a while in the 90s and 2000s, the standard advice was “never use said” because it’s boring, but now the pendulum has swung to the other side, and people believe you should only use “said.”

Again, balance is critical in writing. Removing an entire class of verbs doesn’t make sense, same as never using the standard dialogue attribution doesn’t make sense.

We have a whole arsenal of other terms to use when they are appropriate, with the keyword being “appropriate.” You do not need characters sobbing, whispering, growling, murmuring, and screaming every single sentence. Sometimes they speak in a normal, plain way.

Special dialogue attributions are for when you must emphasize that someone is speaking differently than they usually do, and that shift isn’t clear in the dialogue itself.

For example, it’s possible to say, “I love you, but you’re a horrible person” in a friendly way or a hateful way, but that may not be evident by context without a special dialogue tag.

You can also avoid this issue most of the time by using action attribution, as long as you have an action worth describing. This makes your writing more dynamic and allows you to pack in more description.

Revised advice: “Use another verb when said, or said + abverb, isn’t strong enough.”

“Fiction must be as true to life as possible”

If you’re old like me, you may remember the TV show 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland. The premise was that we got to see the full 24 hours of a day in the life of counterterrorism expert Jack Bauer, evidenced by clocks ticking down for a sense of realism.

…. But Jack Bauer never uses the bathroom during those 24 hours. Not once. This was actually noted by star Keifer Sutherland, who made a joke about it on Twitter:  “There are two things that Jack Bauer never does. Show mercy, and go to the bathroom.“

Did this damage anyone’s enjoyment of the show? Not really. People found it funny, but they weren’t pissed off (hah) that these scenes weren’t shown. They may have actually been more annoyed if 24 actually stuck so close to the “showing all 24 hours” premise that it needed us to see Jack Bauer zipping up his pants.

If a series that insists it’s giving us 24 hours in the day of a life but refuses to show the MC peeing, you can take some liberties too. It’s fine to remove some things that aren’t important.

We don’t need to see everything to appreciate what you’re telling us, nor do we want to. After all, we want a story, not a humdrum narration of someone’s every move. You are presenting us with a fictional representation of reality; all that matters is that it’s believable.

As such, characters need to act in believable ways, not necessarily the most realistic ways. We can cut out certain things that aren’t important to the plot, like opening doors, saying hellos, introducing people to each other, and so on. Just like painters don’t add every tiny blade of grass, we don’t need to either.

Revised advice: “Fiction is a representation of real life, like paintings are representations of real life. They do not be wholly accurate, just believable.”

Next week, we’ll be back with more niche critiques of writing advice. While they may not necessarily work with your specific story, I still think they’ll be helpful. Stay tuned.