The thousand-voice problem

Yes, there really are too many ways to write a novel!

The internet has opinions about how to write a novel. Approximately seventeen thousand of them. All confident. All at once.

Google “how to plot a novel” and you’ll drown in options—cheerfully, persuasively, and with zero mercy. You’ll collect plotters and pantsers, beat sheets that promise salvation, story grids that look like they should come with a PhD, the Snowflake Method (inexplicably popular), hero’s journeys, anti-hero’s journeys, and diagrams that absolutely look like subway maps.

Every method is presented as helpful. Many of them are. But taken together? They’re quietly destructive.

Because at a certain point, you stop writing—and start auditing yourself.

I know this because I was the textbook case. The Novelry. Story Grid. Bookfox. Save the Cat Writes a Novel. Ann Lamott. Stephen King. Podcasts. Substack essays. YouTube videos. Writing influencers. In-person workshops. Virtual workshops. Courses through Writer’s Digest. Three different writing clubs.

You name it, I consumed it. None of it was bad. Most of it was excellent.

But collectively? They left me dizzy, then paralyzed.

Instead of trusting the story on the page, I started running an internal checklist. Instead of asking What does this scene need? I was interrogating every paragraph like it was up for audit:

• Does this scene have an inciting incident?

• Is my climax happening at the correct percentage point?

• Does every character have a clearly defined motivation?

• Am I hitting the conventions of my genre (or spectacularly missing them)?

• If the checklist isn’t fully checked, am I doing it wrong?

That’s when the real trouble starts.

Because most writing advice isn’t offered as “one way to think about this.” It’s offered as THE way. And when you stack too many lenses on top of each other, you don’t lose sight of the story—you lose sight of yourself. You start questioning whether you can actually write, or if you should just take up knitting instead. (I’m joking. Sort of.)

What no one tells you early on, though, is that most craft advice is descriptive, not prescriptive. These systems are observations about how stories often work—not rules about how they must.

But online, nuance doesn’t survive.

A tool becomes a requirement. A pattern becomes a mandate. A helpful framework quietly transforms into a source of anxiety. And anxiety is brutal for writers.

It makes you hesitate mid-paragraph. It makes you question instincts that were actually working. It convinces you that the reason you’re stuck isn’t because writing is genuinely hard—but because you haven’t found the right method yet.

So you keep searching. Another book. Another course. Another expert. Another voice telling you what your story should be doing by now.

Meanwhile, the work stalls—not because you lack discipline or talent, but because you’ve been handed too many competing definitions of “doing it right.”

Want to know what I finally learned after years of this? I learned there is no single correct way to write a novel. There are only ways that are more or less aligned with your brain, your process, and this particular book.

The real danger isn’t learning craft. The danger is letting a thousand other people—who aren’t actually working on your story—convince you they know what it needs.

IMO, we don’t need more information. We need fewer voices. Fewer systems. And most of all, we need to have more faith in what we actually know. (Trust. Your. Self.)

This doesn’t mean abandoning structure or ignoring craft. It means recognizing when advice is helping you move forward—and when it’s quietly training you to distrust yourself. When it’s derailing your progress. Stifling you. Making you question every chapter, every scene, every sentence, and every stupid verb and noun.

If this connects, I’ve been writing more about this situation—what’s actually useful, what’s optional, and what becomes dangerous when treated as law—over on my website at Literaci Books. That’s where I show up in editor mode, pulling apart the craft side of things with a calmer, more grounded lens. Head over if you’re interested.