Bad Advice
Writers get a lot of advice. Most of it is bad.
Because of basic economics, the bulk of the advice that’s available is aimed at aspirants and novices, and that turns out to be the biggest factor in why so much of it’s awful. Some of the bad advice starts off life as good advice for neophytes, which goes bad once you progress to a more advanced level. It holds you back.
Grammar pedantry accounts for a giant pile of iffy admonitions, but as we gain confidence most of us tune that stuff out. Novices do need more structure (sorry, novices) but we should all aspire to start breaking the rules someday. On that day, you will find it’s suddenly a lot harder to locate any kind of guidance (sorry, no-longer-novices).
Some bad advice is just bad advice no matter who you are, and the beginners accept it because they don’t know any better. We were all beginners once, we all heard these toxic notions over and over, and as our craft develops we tend to keep believing — and spreading — these horrible ideas anyway. So, let’s try to not do that so much anymore.
What’s the worst advice writers get?
“Write what you know.”
If you happen to know things that are fascinating, then by all means write them. Otherwise, follow along as we think this through and see how it can drag you down. Let’s say you used to work in a restaurant, so you know the details of a working kitchen. You think you should be able to render it quite vividly, so you include it in your story. The fact that you spent all those hours in that environment actually has nothing to do with your skill in portraying it, but let’s agree that the scene-setting you produce is marvelous. Is it really all that interesting? Did your story honestly need to have a line cook character, or did it bow to your urge to write about his workplace? Readers need a reason to care about it, and “it’s a thing the author knows” doesn’t qualify.
Certainly we’re allowed to write what we know. But the better advice would be to write what you don’t know. Go learn! Stretch! Take wild guesses, make stuff up. That’s what writing is. Look outward, not inward. Write what someone else knows, letting it become something you know. And then it will become something your readers know.