The Best and Worst Writing Advice I Ever Received
Writing advice often arrives in absolute terms. Write every day. Never use adverbs. Start with action. Kill your darlings. Read everything in your genre. Ignore your genre entirely. Each command may contain a useful idea, yet none can replace attention, patience, or a willingness to discover what a particular story needs.
The best guidance I have received has helped me listen more closely to the work. The worst has made writing feel like an examination with invisible rules and a single correct answer. Crime fiction exposes that problem especially well: suspense depends on structure, but a novel still needs uncertainty, emotional depth, and a voice that cannot be reduced to a formula.
Over time, I have learned to treat advice as a tool rather than a law. A tool can be valuable in one situation and damaging in another. The writer’s task is to know the difference.
Advice that sounds wise until you use it
“Write what you know” is among the most repeated instructions in creative writing. Taken literally, it would confine a crime novelist to familiar rooms, occupations, and experiences. Taken more generously, it means writing from emotional knowledge. Fear, grief, guilt, loyalty, shame, and longing are available to us even when the circumstances of a story are not.
The advice becomes useful when it encourages research and observation. It becomes harmful when it discourages imagination. A writer does not need to have solved a disappearance to write about one. They need to understand what it feels like to lose control, conceal something important, or wait for an answer that may change everything.
“Show, don’t tell” can cause similar trouble. A well-chosen physical detail may reveal more than a paragraph of explanation, but direct narration has its own strength. Sometimes the clearest sentence carries the greatest emotional force. The goal is not to ban telling; it is to make every mode of storytelling deliberate.
Rules are useful until they become cages
I have received advice about avoiding prologues, never beginning with dialogue, limiting description, and removing every sentence that explains what a character feels. Some of these rules can help a developing writer notice habits. None deserves permanent authority.
A rule is often a shortcut to a principle. “Avoid exposition” may really mean “do not make the reader work through information that has no dramatic purpose.” “Do not use flashbacks” may mean “do not interrupt momentum without a compelling reason.” Once the principle is understood, the form can be reconsidered.
The same applies to genre expectations. Crime novels generally need a compelling question, escalating danger, and a meaningful resolution. They do not all need the same pace, narrator, setting, or moral architecture. A quiet investigation can be as tense as a chase if the consequences are clear.
Plot first, mystery second
Another piece of bad advice is that a crime novel should begin with the body. It can, certainly, but murder is not the only source of narrative pressure. A missing person, a damaged relationship, an old secret, or an apparently minor mistake may create a stronger opening because the reader first encounters a disturbance in ordinary life.
The best mysteries are built from more than withheld information. They depend on motive, contradiction, and the gradual alteration of the reader’s understanding. If the plot is only a sequence of clues, the novel may feel clever without becoming memorable. The investigation must change someone.
This is where outlining becomes valuable. I do not believe every writer must plan every chapter, but a rough map can reveal weak motivation and convenient coincidence. The map should remain flexible. Discovery is part of writing, and an outline that cannot survive a better idea is not serving the novel.
| Advice | Useful principle | Risk when followed blindly |
|---|---|---|
| Start with action | Create immediate disturbance | The reader may lack emotional context |
| Write every day | Protect regular contact with the work | A rigid schedule can produce exhaustion |
| Know the ending | Give the plot direction | Premature certainty can suppress discovery |
| Cut anything unnecessary | Improve pace and focus | Distinctive texture may disappear |
| Raise the stakes | Make choices consequential | Constant escalation can feel artificial |
Characters make the clues matter
I once believed that a strong plot could carry a thin protagonist. It cannot, at least not for long. Readers may continue to follow a puzzle, but they invest in the person forced to live through it.
Character advice is often simplified into “give everyone a secret” or “make the detective damaged.” Secrets can create tension, and personal wounds can shape behavior, yet neither is a substitute for specificity. A character becomes convincing through habits, judgments, evasions, loyalties, and the small choices made when nobody is watching.
For crime fiction, the investigator’s relationship to truth is especially important. Do they seek justice, control, absolution, recognition, or simply an explanation? The answer should influence how they interpret evidence. It should also complicate the investigation, because a character who wants the truth for personal reasons may be least able to accept it.
Research should deepen the story
The worst research advice I received was effectively: include everything you learn. Detailed knowledge can feel precious after hours of investigation, but the reader does not need a complete report on police procedure, forensic science, geography, or professional jargon.
Research earns its place when it creates pressure or reveals character. A procedural detail can show a mistake, delay an arrest, expose institutional limits, or force an investigator to make a difficult choice. A landscape matters when it shapes movement, memory, isolation, or danger. Accuracy is important, yet dramatic relevance gives accuracy its power.
Writers of crime fiction also need to resist common assumptions about the genre. The common crime-writing myths are worth examining because they can narrow a writer’s sense of what the form allows. A novel can be suspenseful without constant violence, intelligent without being obscure, and atmospheric without sacrificing narrative drive.
The advice I would keep
The most useful instruction I ever received was simple: finish the draft before deciding whether the story works. Early judgment is often disguised fear. A difficult chapter can look like proof of failure when it is really an invitation to continue.
Finishing does not mean defending every page. It creates something concrete to revise. Once the whole shape exists, it becomes possible to see where tension fades, where a character disappears, or where the ending has been announced too clearly. Revision is where instinct becomes craft.
I would also keep the advice to read widely. Read within the crime tradition for structure and possibility, then read outside it for rhythm, interiority, and unexpected forms of knowledge. The official author website gathers information about my novels, their editions, and the wider life of the books, but no website or rulebook can replace the private education of sustained reading.
A practical filter for writing advice
Before accepting advice, I try to ask what problem it is designed to solve. That small pause separates a useful principle from a slogan. These are the questions I return to during drafting and revision:
- Does this advice serve the story, or does it merely make the prose resemble someone else’s?
- What would be lost if I followed the rule exactly?
- Is the problem structural, emotional, or simply a matter of taste?
- Can I test the advice in one scene before applying it to the whole manuscript?
- Does the choice increase curiosity, consequence, or emotional truth?
Good writing advice should make a writer more attentive, not more obedient. The strongest guidance leaves room for judgment. It helps us recognize why a scene fails, why a character feels false, or why a mystery has stopped deepening.
That is the standard I try to carry into every novel: learn the conventions, understand their purpose, and then choose consciously when to follow them. Readers can explore the books, background, and international editions through the author’s website, while writers can begin with the same durable practice that outlasts every fashionable rule: read closely, write honestly, finish the work, and revise until the story becomes itself.