This Helpful Advice Is Sabotaging Your Story

Daniel David Wallace, writing expert and teacher, has a good point.

Earlier this week I received an email from him where he mentions that most writers hit a wall around the 25% mark, and it’s because the premise of the story doesn’t exist.

Let me explain that a little bit.

The writer gets excited about the story, they create this wonderful protagonist, and they create a good hook. But when they build up to the first hurdle, they don’t actually have anything that comes after it. Nothing that challenges the character, nothing that pushes them forward. It becomes a recounting of events rather than a story.

I feel this is so true. In my beta reading business, I found that a lot of writers I read for had that problem. It was around page 70 that I started to lose interest in the story. Where I had to push through to actually finish the novel, and when you have a document over 200 pages long, believe me it became tedious. Which is why I have pivoted from offering beta reading to offering alpha reading. I feel this is the place where I can make the biggest impact on a story. Where I can help the writer avoid that 25% slump.

And the thing is, alpha readers are under-utilized. Writers think that they only need beta readers. That beta readers will do the job of pointing out structural problems. But they can’t. Beta readers are supposed to be your target audience. They are supposed to read for engagement and impact. They are not supposed to fix something that could’ve been prevented.

I had a writer once who submitted a full-length romance that was built on the premise that the MMC was in a relationship through the first half of the story. The characters were dynamic and had great chemistry. I could actually imagine them as a couple. But the author, instead of building the tension with the MMC and his previous relationship, decided to build the new romance while still not crossing the line into cheating.

That’s great. But for the fact that it became repetitive very soon. They were in the most awkward will-they-won’t-they trope that felt endless because there was no traction at all. The scenes became repetitive because even though they seem different on the surface, they were identical underneath. That’s what happens when the writer hits that slump.

It is not lack of planning that keeps writers from pushing through, it is not lack of skill or imagination. It’s the act of following bad advice.

You see, all writers are told that for them to be called writers they need to write every day, even when they are not inspired or motivated. This advice causes a lot of grief and panic. Grief because when they can’t write every day they feel like failures. Panic because they feel their dream of being writers is never going to happen. And while I’ve written before that writing every day can work for some writers, it won’t work for everyone, and forcing it often hurts more than it helps.

So in order to not feel those things they rush the story. They push their limit of creativity, to the point that they end up hurting their story.

And here is the thing. Every writer can avoid that 25% slump. Every writer can avoid a structurally flawed first draft that will take longer to fix during revisions than it took to write it. That’s what alpha readers can do for an author.

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I want to go back to the bad advice aspect that I mentioned.

People, writers especially, love to give advice that has worked for them hoping it will work for others. But the person giving the advice, while good-intentioned, is actually hurting who they are trying to help.

Because today, with technology at our fingertips, we find advice too easily. Instead of going to the experts, we go to the forums where everyone can dole out advice that sometimes is more counter-intuitive than helpful.

I’m not saying that you don’t take advice when you feel it will work for you. What I’m saying is, don’t take every piece of advice thrown your way, because it will have a 90% chance of not working at all.

Take the self-help book industry into consideration. There are wonderful self-help books that have been written by experts. They show a clear and rigorous scientific background. These are great self-help books because they are based on proven scientific research.

With AI making it easier than ever to write books, and platforms like Kindle Unlimited making it simple to publish, what we have now is not a self-help book industry. What we have is watered-down advice that sometimes comes from scientific research, but more often than not, it comes from personal experience that only applies to the person who wrote it.

We lose objectivity for subjectivity, and we end up with advice that becomes an anchor rather than a sail.

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Let’s take some advice for a spin:

“Write every day, no matter what”

➡ Works for: People with consistent schedules, empty nesters, those who thrive on routine

➡ Doesn’t work for: New parents, people with chronic illness, shift workers, caregivers, those dealing with depression/anxiety. For them, this advice creates guilt and shame when life gets in the way.

“Kill your darlings”

➡ Works for: Over-writers who get attached to pretty but pointless prose

➡ Doesn’t work for: New writers who already doubt every word they write. They’ll cut the good stuff along with the bad and end up with flat, lifeless prose.

“Show, don’t tell” (read my Hard Truths For Writers blog on this subject here)

➡ Works for: Writers who tend to over-explain everything

➡ Doesn’t work for: Those who are already too subtle or writing in genres where some telling is necessary (like literary fiction with internal conflict, or fantasy with world-building).

“Write what you know”

➡Works for: Memoir writers, those drawing from personal experience

➡ Doesn’t work for: Fantasy/sci-fi writers, anyone wanting to explore beyond their lived experience. This advice can be especially limiting for marginalized writers.

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The Expertise vs. Experience Test

So how do you tell the difference between solid advice and someone’s personal anecdote dressed up as universal truth?

Ask yourself: Is this person telling me what worked for them, or do they understand why it works and for whom?

Experience-based advice sounds like: “I write every day at 5 AM and you should too!”

Expertise-based advice sounds like: “Daily writing works well for people with consistent schedules, but if that doesn’t fit your life, here are three other approaches that accomplish the same goal.”

One ignores you as a whole person. The other starts with you as a whole person.

When you hit that 25% wall Daniel talked about, don’t grab the nearest “push through” advice from a forum. That’s like putting a band-aid on a bullethole.

Instead, find someone who understands story structure well enough to help you diagnose what your specific story actually needs. Because the problem was never that you weren’t disciplined enough to write every day.

The problem was that you were following advice meant for someone else’s life, someone else’s brain, someone else’s story.

You deserve better than one-size-fits-all solutions.

Your story does too.