The Value of Common Writing Advice for Authors: What to Heed and What to Question
Sunday, March 22, 2026
If you've spent any time in writing workshops, online forums, or leafing through craft books, you've almost certainly encountered two pieces of advice that get repeated with near-religious conviction: "Don't write anything that's been done before" and "Write for your audience." They're offered with the best of intentions, usually by people who genuinely want to help emerging writers find their footing. But here's the thing - taken at face value, these two commandments can actually contradict each other, and following either one too literally can lead a writer straight into creative paralysis.
I've been thinking about these twin pillars of writing advice for a long time, and I've come to believe that both contain a kernel of genuine wisdom - but both are also dangerously incomplete. Let me explain.
The Myth of Total Originality
"Don't write anything that's been done before" sounds empowering at first. It conjures images of the bold literary pioneer, charting unmapped territory with every sentence. But spend five minutes actually trying to follow this advice and you'll realize something uncomfortable: everything has been done before. Love stories. Revenge tales. Coming-of-age narratives. The hero's journey. Scholars like Christopher Booker have argued that there are only seven basic plots in all of storytelling. If that's even approximately true, then the advice to avoid repetition is essentially telling writers not to write at all.
And that's the limiting side of this advice. It can breed a toxic perfectionism - a constant second-guessing where every idea gets discarded because someone, somewhere, has already explored a similar theme. I've watched talented writers abandon promising manuscripts because they discovered another book with a vaguely similar premise. The fear of being "unoriginal" becomes a cage.
But here's where the advice does contain something valuable: it pushes writers to dig deeper. The real invitation isn't to invent a plot that no human being has ever conceived. It's to bring something to a familiar story that only you can bring - your voice, your lived experience, your particular way of seeing the world. Shakespeare didn't invent the star-crossed lovers trope. Toni Morrison didn't invent stories about the African American experience. What they did was pour such singular vision into familiar frameworks that the result felt utterly new.
The better version of this advice might be: "Don't write anything that's been done before in the way you would do it." That's the freeing reinterpretation - the understanding that your perspective is the original ingredient, not your plot.
The Audience Question: Who Are You Really Writing For?
Now let's turn to the second piece of advice: "Write for your audience." On the surface, this seems like practical, market-savvy counsel. Know who's going to read your book. Understand their expectations. Deliver what they want. In a publishing industry that runs on sales figures and genre categories, this advice has obvious commercial logic.
And it's not wrong, exactly. Understanding your reader matters. If you're writing a cozy mystery, your audience expects certain conventions - an amateur sleuth, a tight-knit community, a puzzle that gets solved without excessive gore. Ignoring those expectations entirely isn't brave; it's just confusing. Genre is a promise, and readers deserve to have that promise honored in some fundamental way.
But taken too far, "write for your audience" becomes a recipe for creative surrender. It can turn writing into a focus-group exercise where every decision is filtered through the question "Will they like this?" instead of "Is this true?" The writer stops listening to the story and starts listening to the market. The result is often technically competent work that feels hollow - books that satisfy expectations without ever exceeding them.
The tension here is between authenticity and marketability, and pretending that tension doesn't exist helps no one. Every working writer navigates it, whether they admit it or not.
Authors Who Broke Both Rules - And Won
Some of the most successful and beloved books in modern literature were written by authors who cheerfully ignored both pieces of advice. Consider these examples:
- Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian - a Western, one of the most "done before" genres imaginable - with prose so distinctive and a vision so uncompromising that it became one of the great American novels. He didn't avoid a familiar genre; he transfigured it.
- J.K. Rowling wrote a boarding school story about a boy wizard. Boarding school stories had been done to death. Wizard stories were a dime a dozen. But her specific combination of warmth, wit, world-building, and emotional truth created something that resonated with hundreds of millions of readers she never tried to "target."
- Donna Tartt spent over a decade writing The Goldfinch, a sprawling literary novel that defied every piece of market-driven advice about pacing and length. It won the Pulitzer Prize.
- Andy Weir self-published The Martian - a hard science fiction survival story - chapter by chapter on his blog, writing primarily for himself and a small community of space enthusiasts. It became a bestseller and a major film. He wrote for his own obsessions, and the audience found him.
What these authors share isn't a disregard for craft or audience. It's a willingness to prioritize their own vision while trusting that genuine passion and authenticity are themselves magnetic. They understood their audiences not by pandering to them but by respecting them - by assuming readers are smart enough to follow a writer who has something real to say.
Finding the Balance: Voice First, Audience Second
So where does this leave us? I'd argue for a reframing of both pieces of advice that preserves their wisdom while discarding their rigidity.
Instead of "Don't write anything that's been done before," try: "Write the story only you can tell." This acknowledges that themes are universal while insisting that execution is personal. Your job isn't to invent a new emotion - it's to express a known emotion in a way that makes someone feel it freshly.
Instead of "Write for your audience," try: "Write with honest intensity, then find the people who need what you've written." This flips the sequence. Rather than reverse-engineering a book from market data, you create something authentic and then do the hard, practical work of connecting it with the right readers. The audience isn't your starting point - it's your destination.
This doesn't mean ignoring practical realities. If you're writing genre fiction, understanding genre conventions is part of your craft. If you're querying agents, knowing market trends helps you position your work. But these are tools, not masters. They should inform your decisions, not dictate them.
The Advice Behind the Advice
Here's what I think both pieces of advice are really trying to say, stripped of their absolutism:
- Don't be lazy. Don't reach for the first cliché. Don't settle for the version of the story that requires the least from you. Push past the obvious.
- Don't be self-indulgent. Writing is communication. If you're so deep in your own head that no one else can follow, you haven't written a book - you've written a diary.
- Develop your voice. The thing that makes your work worth reading is the thing that makes it yours. Invest in that.
- Respect your reader. They're giving you their time and attention. Honor that gift by giving them something real.
Write the Book That Haunts You
If I could distill all of this into a single piece of advice - the advice I'd give to any writer wrestling with these questions - it would be this: Write the book that haunts you. Write the story you can't stop thinking about, the one that keeps you up at night, the one that feels almost too personal to share. Then revise it with your reader in mind. Then revise it again.
The writing world doesn't need more books that are "original" in some sterile, academic sense. It doesn't need more books that were engineered to hit market sweet spots. What it needs - what it has always needed - are books written by people who cared so deeply about what they were saying that the passion itself became the point.
Familiar themes told through an unfamiliar heart. That's not a contradiction of the old advice. It's the fulfillment of it.
What writing advice has helped - or hindered - your creative process? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Hi, I'm Tim Hewitt
CEO of AuthorHub.io
I won my first writing scholarship in high school by beating more than 300 other writers in a nationwide contest, and that award gave me something money couldn't buy: the belief that my words mattered. Since then I've spent decades learning what makes writing work: how to find your voice, how to keep readers turning pages, marketing that really sells books, and how to spot the small craft problems that quietly sink good stories. This blog is where I share everything I've picked up along the way.
