Nothing makes us more hesitant to try something than the feeling that there are rules that everyone else understands, but that we don’t know yet. It comes from fear of trying something and failing because of what we didn’t know we “should” do. Part of this is picked up from our experience in school—first you have a class that teaches you all the rules and how-to’s, then you actually do it. But this doesn’t work for everything, because there’s not always a single set of “correct” ways to do the work, especially when you are creating something expressive. In writing advice, rules are often applied too broadly, give unnecessary restrictions, or over-simplify concepts until they cease to be meaningful. This week, we’re looking at five writing rules that we have noticed hurt more than they help and need to be put to bed.
Before we get into today’s post, we wanted to ask—do you have a plan for actually finishing your memoir? If not, we know you aren’t making the progress you hoped for. That’s why we developed The Memoir Method Checklist. This free guide (and video training!) will take you through every single step you need from idea to published marketable book. Grab it now at https://pageandpodium.com/checklist
How “Rules” Happen
Before we get into which rules we want you to learn to let go of, I want to share some thoughts on a few ways these “rules” come about in the first place. We don’t want to give the impression that everyone who’s ever mentioned these “rules” has been trying to deceive you or was just making things up. Some of these rules have started out as good writing advice that was so over-simplified through repetition that it has hardened and crystallized, losing its original lesson. Some of these rules have simply outlived the time when they were more true than they are now. And some of these rules come from insights from different areas of thought and have been too-heavily applied to the creative writing process. Often these are natural evolutions, the way memes and ideas can morph and lose their nuance (and their helpfulness) over time. In the case of these rules, we’ve started to see them work against writers and actively impede their progress or even contribute to them quitting altogether, so it’s time to set them aside as things that no longer serve us (or in some cases, never really did.)
“If you don’t use the Hero’s Journey, you can’t get a book deal.”
Y’all, this one needs to go straight into the compost bin. This piece of advice falls into the category of insights from a different field of thought being applied far, far too heavily to the teaching of actual craft. I’ve even seen coaches insist that if you’re not using the Hero’s Journey, you should throw your draft in the trash because it will “never get published.” That kind of absolutism only serves the person selling the rule, not the writer trying to tell the truth of their life.
The hero’s journey was never meant to be a rulebook.
Joseph Campbell didn’t invent the Hero’s Journey as a template for writers. Campbell was a comparative mythologist. His work—especially The Hero with a Thousand Faces—was an attempt to describe patterns he noticed across global myths and folktales. He studied stories that already existed, identified recurring beats, and mapped them into a cycle as an academic analysis about culture. Yes, you can learn a lot about the nature of storytelling, enduring cultural forces, and even patterns that suggest moral truths that transcend cultural differences over the centuries. It’s a powerful set of observations.
But Campbell wasn’t writing about craft and his observations shouldn’t be understood as “Here’s how you must structure your story.”
In other words, the Hero’s Journey is descriptive, not prescriptive. It’s an observation, not a mandate. Campbell himself wasn’t trying to tell anyone how to write; he was trying to understand why certain stories resonated across cultures. So when modern writing advice treats the Hero’s Journey like a sacred checklist, it’s unhelpful and inaccurate.
Even if you love the Hero’s Journey, there’s a practical issue: most of us are not living our lives according to a 13‑step mythic cycle. Trying to force your lived experience into those beats can feel awkward, artificial, or downright impossible. And when writers struggle to make it fit, they often go hunting for “variations”—the Heroine’s Journey, the Anti‑Hero’s Journey, the Wounded Healer’s Journey, and so on.
These can be interesting lenses, but if you have to modify a structure so heavily just to make it vaguely resemble your life, it’s probably not the right structure for your memoir.
A simpler, more flexible structure—paired with actual craft tools—will give you far more control and far more freedom. You get find a strong shape for the story you want to tell.
“Wait for Inspiration”
There’s a persistent belief among memoir writers that the key to progress is waiting for inspiration—that lightning‑bolt moment when the words finally arrive. I see this most often among writers who deeply identify with the artistic side of memoir. They’re readers, learners, makers, people who love getting their hands messy in creative work. This belief leaves out something essential: memoir is both art and craft. What we are trying to create comes from the heart, it’s expressive, emotional, and deeply personal, but what actually gets words on the page in an effective way is the practice of craft.
We don’t put this expectation on other mediums. Take woodworking, painting, or fabric arts—you know that no amount of inspiration will magically allow you to produce something beautiful if you’ve never even touched those mediums before. You can’t “feel” your way into a perfectly shaped vase. What makes that art possible is mastery: practice, apprenticeship, repetition, time. The art is the result; the craft is the process that makes the result possible.
Memoir works the same way. When we read a finished memoir, we’re drawn to the artistic elements—the lyrical language, the symbolism, the elegant structure, the emotional resonance. But those elements didn’t appear because the writer was struck by inspiration. They appear because the writer had the craft to execute them. And for first‑time memoirists who don’t yet have decades of practice behind them, the closest approximation of craft is a plan. A plan gives you structure. It gives you direction. It gives you a way to evaluate your progress and understand what’s working. It doesn’t box you in; it supports you so you can actually follow through on your inspiration.
Some writers are convinced that planning will somehow suffocate their creativity, when in reality, planning is what allows creativity to flourish. A plan is scaffolding, not a cage. It helps you move from the spark of an idea to the finished work of art you want to create. So if you’re an aspiring memoirist, don’t wait for inspiration to strike. Build a process that lets you write consistently, grow your skills, and track your development. Inspiration and planning, art and craft—they’re not opposites. They’re partners. And the more you embrace both, the stronger your memoir will become.
“Show, Don’t Tell”
As a hard-and-fast rule, this falls apart. “Show, don’t tell” implies that showing is always better than telling, and in memoir, that is simply not true. Not even close.
When we talk about showing versus telling, what we’re really talking about is scene versus exposition. Showing is what happens when we paint a picture for the reader—dialogue, physical action, sensory detail, anything a camera could capture. Telling, on the other hand, is the contextual layer: the explanation, the reflection, the meaning-making. It’s the part where you step back and recount what happened, the way you would tell a story to a friend. Both modes are essential, and both serve different purposes.
This is one of those pieces of advice that started out as fairly sound writing advice, but as it got distilled into a simple three-word edict, it has lost its usefulness. If we can revisit its origins, we can take much more flexibility and understanding into our writing. Sometimes writers, in the pressure to get the facts out, will start going into a “summary” mode. This gives the sense of rushing through events, glazing things over and keeping the reader at a distance where they can’t connect emotionally to the story. If your evaluation of your own writing feels like this, then yes, the solution may be trying to show more in those sections, slowing down and developing a full scene.
The trouble is that many writers hear “show, don’t tell” and assume that telling is always inferior—that it’s lazy or weak or something to be avoided. But memoir is a genre built on interpretation. Readers want to know what happened, yes, but they also want to know what it meant to you. They want your internal world, your insights, your emotional truth. A memoir that only shows and never tells would be exhausting to read and strangely empty. You’d get all the external action with none of the internal experience, which is the entire point of memoir.
As you’re drafting, you’ll feel the natural impulse to move out of a scene and into exposition—to reflect, to contextualize, to transition, to bring in research, to articulate the meaning of what just happened. But if you’ve internalized the idea that showing is always better than telling, you’ll override that instinct and force yourself back into scene. And that’s when chapters start to feel strained or “try-hard,” not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because you’re fighting the form instead of working with it.
Throw out the absolutism. If it makes sense to show, then show. If it makes sense to tell, then tell. There is no universal ratio, no perfect formula, no moral hierarchy between the two. What matters is choosing the mode that best serves the moment. Showing is not inherently better than telling, and you should absolutely not be showing all the time. Your reader needs both the picture and the perspective. They need the lived moment and the meaning behind it.
“Follow English-Class Grammar”
We’re not suggesting you throw all grammar out the window. Readers do need clarity. They need sentences that make sense. Grammar’s job is to help your reader understand you, not to police your creativity or force your memoir into the shape of a sophomore English paper.
For example, take the so‑called rule that you should never end a sentence with a preposition. If you’ve ever tried to write that way, you know how stiff and unnatural it becomes. As the copy editor’s joke goes, “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with I shall not put.”
In the case of some grammar rules, the origins are suspect, if not fully ridiculous and prejudicial. For example, the rule against splitting infinitives (putting a word between to and a verb, ie, “to boldly go”) can be traced back to a single English editor, Henry Alford, who published The Queen’s English. He insisted that the incredibly common practice should be avoided—no matter how clearly it communicated ideas—because he believed English should imitate Latin, where the infinitive is a single word and therefore unsplittable. His reasons for why English should imitate Latin are predictably classist, racist, and frankly rather silly. English speakers and writers have continued to boldly, clearly, expertly, and artfully split infinitives with great results.
Once you step into the world of professional writing, you quickly learn that most of these so‑called rules aren’t rules at all. They’re preferences, conventions, or stylistic choices. Editors break them all the time. Award‑winning memoirists break them all the time. And they do it intentionally, in service of voice, tone, pacing, or emotional impact. Copy editors often deal with these minutiae, but generally the aim of a copyeditor is to make sure the text is clear, effective, and consistent—not that it adheres to every single “rule,” many of which have actually been put to pasture long ago.
Your reader will always appreciate language that sounds like you—your rhythms, your cadences, your natural phrasing—far more than language that sounds like you’re trying to impress a high‑school grammar teacher.
So as you write, prioritize clarity over strict adherence to those “rules” that you learned in English class, but don’t actually apply to how you innately communicate and express ideas. (And be sure to invest in a quality copy editor!)
Trad or Bust
We see so many high‑achieving women impose this on themselves: If I don’t get a traditional publishing contract, I won’t publish my book at all.
We’ve spent decades giving traditional publishers enormous cultural power, and the result has been a book landscape that reflects only a narrow slice of humanity. We saw a major reckoning around this in 2020—an acknowledgment that the industry’s gatekeeping has excluded countless voices—but that momentum has largely faded. If we want a more representative, more vibrant literary world, authors have to be an active part of the change.
No power structure has ever dismantled itself from the inside. Change happens when individuals shift their own behaviors, expectations, and goals. One of the most meaningful shifts we can make as writers is embracing the idea that we are allowed to tell our stories without waiting for permission. You do not need a traditional publisher to validate your book. You do not need their stamp of approval to claim excellence. In 2026, you have access to every resource you need to produce a book that matches traditional quality—professional editing, design, distribution, marketing, and more. The tools exist. The pathways exist. The only thing standing in the way is the belief that traditional publishing is the only legitimate option.
We also need to dismantle the myth that traditional publishers only take “the best” books. Every one of us has read a traditionally published book and wondered how it made it through acquisitions. And I would bet that you’ve read a self‑published or hybrid‑published book without even realizing it—and loved it. Quality is not determined by the logo on the spine. It’s determined by the care, craft, and intention behind the work.
If any of these rules have been holding you hostage—if you’ve been clinging to black‑and‑white thinking, perfectionism, or “shoulds”—I hope this helps you loosen that grip. The most important thing you can do for your memoir is let go of the rigid rules that keep you from your own voice. Tune back into your instincts. Every woman we’ve ever worked with has had stronger literary instincts than she realized. We just have to peel back the rules to let them breathe.
PS. Searching the internet for writing, publishing, and book marketing advice can be exhausting to say the least! If you’re ready for hands on, one-on-one support for your memoir, check out The Memoir Method. We’d love to welcome you into this nine-month group program specially designed for women writing their first memoirs. And don’t forget, if you’d like to chat with Amanda about the program (or any other services we offer), you can book a free consult any time!
