There’s no shortage of advice for creative people, I mean isn’t that part of what I do here!?! Us well-meaning, so called mentors, queue up to tell you how to write, compose, create, and think. Most of it is offered with genuine goodwill. Some of it is genuinely useful. But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re starting out: a lot of the advice floating around the creative world isn’t really advice at all: it’s one person’s process, dressed up as a universal truth. If you follow it blindly, it doesn’t just fail to help you. It can quietly hold you back, chip away at your confidence, and make you feel like you’re doing creativity wrong when actually you’re just doing it differently. Over my copious amount of years, I’ve followed advice that helped and advice that didn’t. The difference, I’ve learned, wasn’t in the advice itself — it was in knowing when to listen and when to politely ignore it.

The Same Advice Can Be Precious or Poison

Context is everything, and creative advice almost never comes with a label telling you who it’s actually for. “Write every day” is perhaps the most repeated piece of writing advice in existence. For some people, that daily discipline is transformative. For those who work in bursts, who need space between ideas, and who do their best thinking away from the desk, it can lead to guilt and mediocre output. The advice isn’t wrong. It’s just not universal. The same applies across every creative discipline. What works for a prolific genre novelist has no business being applied to an emotional songwriter wrestling with a single poetic lyric. Before you take any advice on board, ask, who is this actually designed for?

Popular Doesn’t Mean Proven

If a lie gets repeated often enough, it must be true, is ’t it? Likewise advice. Popularity is just a measure of how widely something gets shared, not how widely it gets tested. A lot of creative advice spreads because it sounds good, it’s quotable, it confirms what we already half-believe. “Kill your darlings.” “Show don’t tell.” “Inspiration is for amateurs.” These ideas have their place, but they’ve also been applied so broadly and so bluntly that they’ve become a kind of creative folklore, repeated automatically, rarely examined. The next time a piece of advice lands in front of you with the weight of obvious truth, ask, has this actually been proven, or has it just been said a lot?

You Had to Fail With It First

One thing that took me a long time to understand, and I still struggle with, is that some advice isn’t bad, it just found me at the wrong time. I’ve returned to ideas I once dismissed and found them suddenly useful. I’ve also seen processes that used to work bring me to a grinding halt. Experience doesn’t just teach you new things, it teaches you to read advice differently. You start to recognise when something is useful and when it’s a rule that’s quietly stopping you from developing your own instincts. Don’t dismiss advice wholesale., but keep revisiting it as you grow. Any single piece of wisdom is not fixed and permanent.

Your Creative Wiring Is Not Theirs

The person offering advice, however experienced and successful, is working from their own brain, their own temperament, their own way of seeing the world: and that includes me, here and now. That’s not a flaw, it’s just reality. It means you are always, to some degree, receiving advice filtered through someone else’s creative personality. If your process is slower, messier, more intuitive, more structured, more solitary, or more chaotic than theirs, some of what they tell you simply won’t translate. This is especially true of advice that’s framed as a cure for procrastination, perfectionism, or creative block! As I have found out to my own detriment… because those experiences are deeply personal, and the solutions are rarely one-size-fits-all.

The Skill Is in the Filter, Not the Following

Ultimately, the most important creative skill you can develop isn’t the ability to follow advice. It’s the ability to filter it. To take what fits, adapt what almost fits, and quietly set aside what doesn’t. And do this without feeling like you’ve failed or cheated. Every piece of advice you receive is an idea, not a directive. Try it, notice what happens, and trust your own results over someone else’s theory. The creatives I most admire aren’t the ones who found the right advice and followed it faithfully. They’re the ones who figured out which advice was actually meant for them, and had the confidence to leave the rest behind and walk their own creative path.

So the next time someone tells you there’s only one way to write, to compose, to create, remember they’re describing their way. Your creative journey might look completely different. That’s not a problem to fix. That’s your creative identity doing exactly what it should.

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