Dear writers, too many how-tos kill your originality

Samuel Madu
3 min readAug 28, 2023

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Photo by Judit Peter via Pexels

My sister once told me not to be a how-to writer because it is lame and shows a lack of reasoning. I never saw it that way until recently.

How-tos are the easiest thing to write about because it already gives us a footprint of what people are interested in and how we can dish those things they are interested in without thinking

Once upon a time it worked and created magic for the audience and both writers at large but now it is lame. Even when how-tos were being efficient and selling among audiences it was making the new generation of writers lazy

Headlines became boring and content became too straightforward. There is no excitement, nothing intriguing and the writer puts no effort into storytelling or adding some touch of creativity into their writing.

It is like someone choosing to eat boiled eggs every day of their life and that is how we the writers decided to feed the audience. We boiled eggs and served them that every day of their life.

It got to a point where the de la creams of society started to find that dissatisfying and distasteful. Sometimes it is nice to go on Google and type how-to and find an article that gives you just that. It is nice but there comes a time I do crave something original.

The how-to has taken that originality from the writer. If you go back to my past writing here, I am pretty sure you will find so many how-tos, but it still doesn’t remove the fact that it is the lowest of low that a refined writer can fall into.

I see it as mental degeneracy and choosing to be lazy. Sometimes you might have the story, the image, and the solution but tune down or water down this process because you want to appeal to the lazy readers of how-to

The lazy readers of how-to want the dish served without knowledge of how the meal was prepared and the master craftmanship behind the meal. They have no patience and love for the art of writing and unfortunately, these are the people that the writers have chosen to appeal to

But you have to pick your audience and of all things you have to pick those who truly appreciate the fine art of writing and telling your stories.

Gone are the days you drown your voice and kill your originality just to write a perfect how-to with bullet points to go with it. It is miserable and there are some people interested in something original and expecting you to give them that

This is a starving crowd bored as hell from all of the how-tos of the world and top of Google ranking. You are their last hope

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