My advice as a very inexperienced writer is that after you read all the advice and books that tell you how to craft a novel, take a book you like and check how often the author breaks these rules. For me it was liberating. My head was so full of does and don'ts that I stopped writing. Now I just write, but I don't expect it to be good. Making it good comes after I finish the first draft.

I always thought the advice "write what you know" was advice on how to write what you don't know. Example: Say you're writing a book where the MC is a teenage girl who is an athletic gymnast on the track for the Olympics, but you've never done gymnastics ever, nor do you have friends or family that does that you've witnessed first hand. When people then tell you to "write what you know" I don't think they mean "don't make the MC an Olympic gymnast", especially if it's core to the story, but to find the emotions you DO know and draw them out. Like you may not know gymnastics, but you can probably relate to feeling under pressure, of wanting to succeed, of being afraid of not reaching goals. And you can hone in on those feelings and things you do know to bring richness to what you don't. There is a universalism to experiences that we can find and focus on.

I also think "write what you know" advice is also just to help fill in small story parts, not necessarily big story parts. Like, say, maybe you need to give your MC's best friend a job in the story but are stuck on what to do - well let's say you've been a barista, maybe just make them a barista like you were? Like don't overthink it. Don't spend all this time finding the "perfect" job for their personality and spending hours researching it, just put them in something you're familiar with and call it a day.

I think the most important thing I've internalized is "everything in moderation." My editor has commented multiple times throughout my draft on a type of wordplay I construct that, if I did it any more than I already did, would be distracting. But since it's rare and catches the reader by surprise every so often, it has more of an impact. Following a rule religiously will make your writing repetitive, and that's the last thing you want.

Was just talking to someone about how the modern implementation of "Show Don't Tell" has kinda become a huge sign of amateur writing ironically lmaooo. My heart pounded, my palms sweated, my mind raced, the sound hit my ears, panic hit my face, my hands trembled, she smiled, he smirked, she furrowed her brow, he frowned lmaoooo. Idk I eyeroll when I see them now and they read even more generic than just telling me at this point 😂. There's just something that feels very insincere or maybe melodramatic about that writing.

Avid readers can also very quickly sense the tone shift that usually happens when an author is pouring their true narrative voice into a story then stops and starts "showing" for the sake of it because everything usually gets flat, overly dramatic and objective all of a sudden. Misery by Steven King is a book I usually call a masterclass at purely telling in a story while being extremely emersive and evocative.

At this stage my belief is that the only good writing advice is advice that feels intuitive to your flow state of writing. As in, you don't need to take a notebook out and take notes and create a backdrop of rules as you write. It's a piece of advice that just intuitively clicks in your brain and gets you super excited to write. Usually this is advice that reinforces a style you loved but didn't believe was "good" or "allowed".

Sometimes a character is just sad without us having to know their skin temperature.

I am VERY out of the loop re writing styles because I had NO IDEA that 3rd person story telling was considered "difficult" and unpopular. Crazy
I actually feel more comfortable writing that way than in 1st or 2nd person.

My biggest pet peeve is when people tell writers that they MUST fit a word limit. You MUST write a story of (put number here) words for it to be a true story.
Nah nah nah, trust yourself and whatever story it is, will feel complete by the end, no matter how many words

Instead of 'write what you know' I changed it to 'WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE.' I love vampires. So I write about them. Have done for 35 years.  :)

As an autistic person who struggles to read people in the real world, if I have to piece together what your character is feeling than what the hell am i doing here. Reading has always helped me understand humans. If it's no easier than the guessing i have to do in real life, forget it

Best writing advice that I received was don’t write what you know, write what you’re willing to discover. Currently writing my second book. 😊

Thank you!
This is the only explanation of 'kill your darlings' which makes sense to me. When you like a sentence, paragraph, or storyline, even though it doesn't fit within the rest of the narrative, you should 100% kill it. Other than in those cases, it is simply inane advice.

I'm working on my 10th novel. The first five were practice. I have always said, Writing was a lot easier before I knew how. Once I did learn how, the rules, the conventions, pacing, voice, POV, plot, characterization, etc., it took me a long time to find my groove. So, I agree with you, yes, learn the rules, listen to good writing advice, read how-to books, take classes, and when you understand the reasons for a rule, you can start breaking them and become your own writer. When you gain a little confidence and let your gut have a say, that's where creativity begins. Thank you for the great video. You have so much good advice. Love the channel!

Best advice my father gave me is to skip the first paragraph and write the second paragraph instead.  It's a bit silly, but it works, and the second paragraph turns out better than my first anyway.

A piece of advice I give others is that the thesaurus is your friend.  I don't care who you are, but I can tell very quickly when an author refuses to use a thesaurus.  Using the same descriptive phrase seven times isn't clever, it's lazy.  This is the biggest "kill your darlings" I know.  Use the poetic description once or twice, maybe three times for emphasis, then kill it and never use it again.

This is especially bad when people describe eyes.  Yes, I already know their eyes are purple, stop calling them "orbs filled with an endless ocean of amethyst lavender fields."  Starts to sound like some serial killer describing their trophies.  If you are writing a serial killer who collects eyes, have fun!

This video is super helpful! I religiously watched writing advice videos in my teens and, luckily for me, most of the advice given worked out for the sorts of things I wanted to write: Plot driven stories in an action, horror, mystery, thriller etc. genre that required quick pacing and high stakes. I've recently taken the opportunity to write a historical romance drama that's much more of a slice-of-life type of thing, and I suddenly found that most of the advice I tried to follow so closely no longer worked. I'm not a professional, I just like to upload my stories online for free for a small audience to read, but I still want to improve my craft and make sure all of my projects become enjoyable reads by the end even though they aren't on the same level as a published novel.

This was a great video, because as helpful as the YouTube videos can be, there are so many dont do this, and dont do that, and start you novel like this, and this is the outline you need to use if not you will fail and your career will be over and you will die!  The amount of restrictions really did a number on me, that while I feel some of the advices I got help improve my writing, a lot of them also made me insecure of my work, making me pause and doubt myself, negatively impacting my novel.  Thanks for sharing your wisdom!

Literally, Kurvic, Hindpere and Co's Disco Elysium breaks every single one of these rules with abandon and it's one of the best stories I've ever experienced. Kurvic as a writer on the main loves to dwell on small details because the world he and his friends made is very particular. Or Moby Dick, which is VERY excitable about whale biology and hunting, or goddamn Gravity's Rainbow, which goes on at length about bananas, or Infinite Jest, which goes on at length about everything. When a writer is very particular, you have to give their own ways of going about things the benefit of doubt, because more likely than not everything you find weird may be very deliberate and constitutive of the story's whole point. It's the whole of the thing and the intent which matters, in essence, and of course whether or not it accomplishes its goals in a meaningful and interesting way.

One thing to consider with showing versus telling, especially for an over-writer like me,  is how many words it will take, and whether it's something the reader will want shown to them. The passage of time can usually be provided in a sentence or two, sometimes even a phrase: "An hour later," for instance. In one historical novel I read, there was a long carriage ride, and we the readers were carried along for that agonizingly boring ride, when we could have simply been told it was a long and boring ride, and picked up the story at the destination.

I like to think of most writing tips as a series of tools. You learn as much as you can about the craft and stock up on tools as you go. You test them out on early work and you're never entirely done experimenting with them. Eventually, though, you figure out how to build what you want to build. You find your favourite tools and many of the rest go unused. The more you write, the more you realize that all there really is to do is to put a bunch of smartly-positioned words on the page that make people feel things. As long as you've found the tools that work for you in accomplishing that, then all that study of craft has done its job.

On the subject of "think of the worst possible thing you could do to your character," the best take I have heard on that is to make sure to keep it genre appropriate. The worst possible thing within your small town contemporary romance isn't the same as within a zombie horror novel.

For me it was "Eliminate all filter words." I took that advice in general and it's tightened up my writing considerably. But I reserve the right to use them when the act or sensation of feeling, thinking, wondering, etc., is essential to the scene.

"Get rid of all adverbs" is another. Really? Don't they understand adverbs are more than just -ly words?

I'll use them whenever they're useful, with the caveat that I won't put two or more -ly words too close together. But that's to preserve the sound of the prose, not because I think they're evil in themselves.