Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: What is the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

And remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

I’ve missed the last few weeks thanks to sickness, but I’m feeling much better and ready to get back into things now!

I’ve heard all kinds of advice since I started out on my journey to becoming a writer. Some has been fantastic, some less so. I’m not sure I’ve been given one standout piece of advice that is worse than anything else, but there are certainly a few that fit the bill of being “bad advice”.

One piece that I actually tried to adopt was to edit as I write. This meant I was attempting to edit and refine a passage or chapter upon completion of it. As a novice, I could kind of see the logic. Get things looking tidy as I go. In practise, this was a bad move. It meant I was constantly tweaking and tinkering and becoming massively frustrated with my lack of progress. Ultimately it ended in defeat for me.

Other advice that caused me conflict – how long a novel should be. Many people have many opinions. Hell, a “quick Google search” becomes anything but quick. Some sites have out and out hard rules for what wordcount makes a novel. Others, it depends on the genre. Then different places have different numbers for each genre to other sites. I found a simple solution – give up worrying about wordcount and just write until the story was finished naturally.

The other thing that I found was a number of people telling me I won’t find success as steampunk isn’t mainstream enough. And they weren’t wrong – I’ve not found mainstream success. But the kind of stuff that works at a mainstream level doesn’t work for me. It’s not the story I want to tell. And after all, I never came into this process to be successful, I did it because I wanted to write the sort of stories I wanted to read.