popular writing advice

Does anyone else feel that popular writing advice is really limiting, strict, or makes you come up with something "amazing" that turns out to be stupidly forced at the end? The worst of all is that people call it "advice" but treat it more like a rule.

Some examples include "show, don't tell," "said is dead," or "if your conversation can take in a hot air balloon, it should."

First one... That's the job. Telling the story is literally our entire thing as writers. This rule is so vague, it makes no sense in my opinion. Of course, the meaning is "don't say the character ate a burger, say that the burger majestically entered their mouth as they squirmed in delight," or something like that, but in my opinion, it's really limiting to treat it as a rule. Simple writing has its charm, too. I personally enjoy reading stories with simple writing; it's easy to understand. Not every single piece of writing has to be convoluted.

The second one is basically the first one. It's the fear of repetition that our literature teachers instilled in us. Of course, repeating 'said' in every dialogue section is tiring, and repetition can be annoying, but some people take this advice to the heart so much that they treat the word 'said' like a disease. Sometimes people just say things. They don't scream them, don't whisper them, they don't sing them or say them in any weird tone, they just straightforwardly say it. And that's okay.

The third one I never understood. I think this can be good advice for only certain stories, maybe ones where you value action and tension, but simple stories don't need that. Again, sometimes people just have normal talks while on a break or going back home. Maybe it's me who doesn't get it, but I suppose it means the conversation has to be specific to the place the characters are in, or the characters must interact with their surroundings in some way. As I said, sometimes people don't have any specific conversation that's about their current situation or position.

There's more advice like this, but I chose the first popular ones I could think of and decided to elaborate so you would get my point. As I said previously, if you use these as rules for your writing, it's not bad. Writing is subjective, and everyone has their different styles of writing specific to them, their personality, their preferences, and more. But the problem is people using these as high rules for all of writing. Rules and pieces of advice are two different things.

That's all, peace :3