“Write what you know.”
“Show don’t tell.”
“Kill your darlings.”
If you’ve spent any time around writing advice, you’ve heard all three. You’ve probably also noticed that published writers seem to break them constantly. That’s because most writing rules are shortcuts for something more complicated, and the shortcut version is almost useless on its own.
Write What You Know
This one gets taken too literally. If writers only wrote what they knew from direct experience, we’d have no science fiction, no historical fiction, no fantasy, and significantly fewer murder mysteries given that most crime writers have never actually committed one.
What it really means is: write with emotional truth. You don’t need to have lived through a war to write about fear. You don’t need to have lost someone to write about grief. You need to have felt something real and be willing to put it on the page honestly. The research fills in the facts. The emotional knowledge is what makes it believable.
Write what you know how to feel. Then research everything else.
Show Don’t Tell
The most quoted rule in writing workshops, and the most misapplied. Taken literally it suggests you should never just tell the reader anything, that everything must be dramatised and rendered in scene. Follow that advice rigidly and you’ll end up with very long books and a lot of exhausted readers.
Telling isn’t lazy. Sometimes it’s efficient. “Three years passed” is telling. It’s also exactly right in certain moments. What the rule is actually getting at is this: don’t tell the reader how to feel. Don’t write “she was devastated.” Write the thing that devastated her and let the reader feel it themselves. The emotion should arrive in the reader, not be handed to them pre-labelled.
Show the thing. Tell the time. Know the difference.
Kill Your Darlings
This one means cut the bits you love most if they’re not serving the work. It’s good advice. It’s also the advice most likely to be misused by people who enjoy suffering.
Your darlings are not automatically wrong. Sometimes the sentence you’re most attached to is the best sentence in the piece. The question isn’t whether you love it. The question is whether it belongs. If it does, keep it. If it’s slowing things down, changing the tone, or only there because you’re proud of it, it goes.
Killing your darlings doesn’t mean punishing yourself for writing well. It means being honest about what the work actually needs.
Paper Tales 
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