Why “Just Start Writing” Can Be Terrible Advice for New Writers

You've got a story you want to write. Maybe you've been carrying it around for years—waiting until you had the time, the nerve, or even the faintest idea where to begin.

So when you finally decide to go for it, you do what any serious aspiring author would do: you start looking for advice. You Google. You listen to podcasts. You read blog posts. Maybe you even ask other writers how they finally got words on the page.

And the same three words come back again and again: Stuck? Just start writing. Overthinking it? Just start writing. Not sure where to begin? Just start writing.

This advice is everywhere—on every podcast, in every comment section, probably even taped above someone's desk right now. And for a certain kind of writer, on a certain day, it's exactly what they need to hear.

But if you're a brand-new writer who hasn't figured out the basic shape of your story yet—who it's about, what they want, what's standing in their way, or where the story might be headed—“just start writing” can become surprisingly unhelpful.

Here's the thing, though. "Just start writing" isn't bad advice. It's incomplete advice.

Because the missing piece isn't more motivation. It's knowing when to act on it.

The same three words can be the best advice a writer ever hears, or the reason they abandon yet another draft—depending entirely on how much clarity they have when they sit down to write.

So let's talk about what this advice gets right, where it can quietly lead new writers into trouble, and what you actually need to know about your story before you draft.

What the Advice to ‘Just Start Writing’ Gets Right

There's a reason this advice is everywhere. It's usually a reaction to a very real problem: writers getting stuck in preparation mode.

A lot of aspiring authors—especially lifelong readers who've dreamed about writing a novel for years—tend to over-prepare. They collect the craft books, listen to the podcasts, take the courses, fill notebooks with research, and somehow never actually write the book.

For that writer, "just start writing" can be helpful. Sometimes it's the sentence that gets them out of their head and writing words on the page.

And there's a deeper truth buried inside the advice, too: you learn to write by actually writing—not by reading about writing.

You can read every craft book, study structure for years, and fill notebooks with character templates—and still not really understand your story until you put it on the page. At some point, more planning stops teaching you much. Some answers just won't come from thinking harder; they come from writing. That's exactly what drafting gives you: it shows you where your idea is thin, where your character choices don't hold up yet, and where the story needs more development than you realized.

That part is completely true. So the advice itself isn't the problem.

The problem is that people hand it out like a universal cure—to every writer, at every stage, as if when you act on it doesn't matter. And it does

When the Advice to ‘Just Start Writing’ Backfires

Now I want to paint you two completely different pictures of how this advice shows up in real life—and in both scenarios writers can end up stuck for reasons they don’t fully understand.

Scenario #1: Starting Too Soon

First, imagine a new writer (we’ll call them Writer A) who takes this advice completely at face value.

They open the document and start writing. No real sense of the story yet—just a few characters, a handful of scenes, maybe a vague idea of the ending, and a lot of enthusiasm. And at first, it's magical. The first chapter pours out. They're discovering their characters, exploring the world, falling in love with the whole thing.

But a few chapters in, things start to get murky. The plot wanders somewhere they didn't intend. The protagonist feels inconsistent. The scenes start feeling repetitive or thin. And that ending they could picture so clearly? They have no idea how to get there anymore.

So they go back to Chapter One, thinking, Maybe if I just get the opening right, the rest will click into place. Six months later, they've rewritten the first chapter seventeen times and they're no closer to the end than when they started.

Eventually, they stop. And that story joins the folder of other almost-novels.

Here's what I want you to notice: the advice itself isn’t what made this writer stall out. Trying to draft a whole novel without enough clarity around the story's biggest questions did. Who is this really about? What do they want? What's standing in their way? What changes from beginning to end?

Without those answers, every scene you write (or decision you make) starts to feel like a guess. And guessing gets exhausting after a while, which is why the writer in this scenario eventually runs out of steam.

Scenario #2: Never Starting At All

But there’s another way this same advice can backfire—almost in the opposite direction.

Some writers (we’ll call this type Writer B) don’t run into the wandering-draft problem because they never actually start. They hear “just start writing,” agree with it in theory, and then immediately go looking for one more thing that will make starting feel safer.

So they redo their outline. They read one more craft book, try one more plotting method, watch one more YouTube video, and tell themselves they’re being responsible.

And sometimes, they are.

Thinking through your story before you draft is a good thing. But at some point, all that preparation is just fear wearing a productive-looking costume.

Because planning is safe. Starting is vulnerable.

As long as the story stays in their head—or in their notebook, or in their color-coded outline—it can still feel possible, and perfect. But once they start writing, it becomes real. And once it becomes real, it can be messy. It can be disappointing. It can highlight where the story still needs work. And suddenly, they’re stuck too—not because they started too soon, but because they kept waiting for starting to feel safe.

This is the part the advice gets right: eventually, you do have to start. 

When Should You Actually ‘Just Start Writing?’

The answer: when you have clarity on your story’s foundational elements.

That doesn't mean everything has to be nailed down first. You don't need a flawless, finished outline, or every scene mapped before you write a word. You just need enough clarity to know what you're writing and where it's headed, so you're not inventing the whole book from scratch every time you sit down.

At minimum, that means knowing:

• What genre you're writing in, and the kind of experience readers of that genre are expecting
• Who your protagonist is, what they want, and why it matters to them
• What's standing in their way, and what's at stake if they fail
• The major turning points that will force your protagonist to make harder and harder choices
• What the story is really about underneath the plot

This is the work of story development, and this is the level of clarity you’re aiming for. Enough to move forward with direction, even if you take detours along the way.

How you build that clarity is up to you. Some writers map out every scene in a detailed outline; others jot a few signposts and discover the rest as they draft. Both work—and if you love a detailed outline, it's a great way to get there. Just make sure that, at some point, the planning turns into writing.

So if you've spent weeks or months preparing and you're still telling yourself you're "getting ready," pause and ask: am I still discovering something useful about this story, or am I just polishing what I already know?

If you're still finding the basic shape of the story, keep going. But if you're mostly rearranging notes, refining the same ideas, or looking for one more resource to make you feel ready—that's your sign. You've got enough. It's time to start.

Once you start, you don't have to stop planning. Your outline, notes, and ideas are allowed to keep changing as the story comes into focus. As you draft, you fold what you discover back into your plan, so it grows right alongside the pages.

That's how drafting and planning work together: the plan gives your draft direction, and the draft helps you deepen the plan.

And when you have enough foundation to draft with direction, here’s the kind of thing that becomes possible:

• Poornika (a self-proclaimed perfectionist) finished her first draft in 88 days while working full-time. Shortly after revising it, she signed with a literary agent, and her book is now out on submission with publishers.
• Madi (a pantser) finished her first draft in about 6 months worth of early-morning writing sessions while raising four young kids. She’s since received multiple offers of representation, and signed with her dream agent.
• Jackie (a lifelong reader, brand-new to writing) finished her first draft in 8 months, writing in stolen pockets of time—a few sentences in the drive-thru, a paragraph here and there at swim lessons—and has since published her debut novel.

If you have a story idea but don’t know how to turn it into a novel—or if you keep starting strong, getting lost in the middle, and wondering whether the problem is you or your story—that's exactly what I help writers solve inside Notes to Novel. It’s where you build the foundation that makes drafting feel like execution instead of guesswork, using the same step-by-step process I've walked over 1,000 writers through. Click here to join the waitlist, and I'll make sure you're the first to know when doors open.

Final Thoughts

The next time someone tells you to “just start writing,” you’ll know what’s missing from the sentence.

The advice itself isn’t the enemy. The problem is trying to follow it before your story has enough clarity to draft from.

No, you don’t need to know everything before you start. You don’t need every scene planned, every question answered, or every uncertainty resolved.

But you do need a strong enough foundation to begin—enough to know who your story is about, what they want, what’s standing in their way, and where the story is headed, so every scene isn’t a brand-new guess.

Once you have that, then yes. Start writing.

Because the goal was never to choose between preparing forever and drafting blindly. The goal is to build enough clarity that you can move forward with direction—and finally finish the story you’ve been carrying for so long.