People love to give advice. Start any new venture and you’re bound to run into someone who can inundate you with well-meant words of caution or a litany of rules that must be followed. Writing is not immune to these bouts of unsolicited free advice. Whether we like it or not, writing has rules that we must adhere to.
Or do we?
Writing is an art, a craft meant to be free from the restrictions of the structured world. Indeed, it is. But there are certain rules to help us create writing that will draw a reader in. We’re all likely familiar with some of the more common ones:
“Show, don’t tell”
“Delete the adverbs”
“Avoid weak verbs”
“’Said’ is the only dialogue tag you need.”
Et cetera, et cetera.
In fact, many newer writers are nervous to share their work with others in part because they’re afraid of having broken some “rule” that will result in harsh criticism or an ugly comment. In actuality, there is no such thing as breaking a rule when it comes to creative writing. (Note that we are referring specifically to the art of writing, not the rules and science of grammar and linguistics.)
Let me illustrate by example. I always wanted to write and even got an electronic typewriter for my 16th birthday (oh, the splendid hours I spent typing away on that…) but I didn’t have the faith (or talent) to consider it anything more than a passing hobby. It wasn’t until I was forced to reevaluate the life path I had chosen (as a scientist and professor) did I seriously consider becoming a writer.
I sat down and started writing. It was a masterpiece! I was so proud of it. I wrote more. And more. At one point, I noticed that my writing was quite different to what “real” writers were putting out there. Ever erudite, I decided I needed to teach myself to write. A couple of Great Courses and several books later, I saw that I had not just broken every single golden rule in my early writing, but I did so with frightening consistency. My work was completely amateur and my eyes wept blood after rereading them from my new, educated perspective.
Like any straight A student, I went through and showed everything, slashed all adverbs and as many weak verbs as I could, and replaced every “laughed”, “joked”, “cried”, or “screamed” with “said”. I put the works away for 48-72 hours before rereading, certain that this was it. I was going to be the next Isaac Asimov!
Three days later, my eager eyes fell upon a frightening mess. The re-writes not only sucked, but they were worse than the originals! How on this mad Earth was this even feasible? I followed every rule to the letter!
Then it dawned on me.
Rules are meant to be broken.
I was shocked. I like most rules. I follow most rules. But, here I needed to be a swaying palm tree, not a rigid redwood. I don’t know why I was so shocked. It’s the very way I teach chemistry. Start with learning simple, black and white rules. Only once these fundamentals are mastered that we can allow the rules to blend into a murky river of gray.
Most who start out writing, like me, do too much telling and almost no showing. Adverbs and weak verbs are overused. Dramatic dialogue tags serve as convenient crutches. Students need to unlearn these “bad” behaviors and reinforce the “good” ones. Having accomplished this, the writer now has a rudimentary competency. The next stage of training is learning how to re-introduce the “bad” behaviors in a balanced way, to break the rules that have just been pounded into your writing. It’ll take some finesse, but the degree to which you “break the rules” will in part define our own personal style of writing.
Perhaps we shouldn’t call these “rules”. The word implies that the concept is something concrete, something that must always be adhered to. We should instead refer to them as “guidelines”. While these guidelines are solid best practices for the creative writer, they do require balance by “breaking the rules.”
Since these are more guidelines than rules, there’s no way to technically break them. But, since we often refer to them as rules, go ahead and break them as needed to balance everything out.
Doris
Loved this. Now I want to read your books!
I’m not a fan of rules myself.
Barbara Hyland
Perhaps we shouldn’t call these “rules”. <<Tsk-tsk!
A rule that should never be broken: period inside quotation mark.
Paul Iasevoli
To Barbara…not in BR English.
Judy Covarrubias
Thanks! Great article.
Richard Jeppesen
Finally! A push back from a writer. Faulkner would never be published today… editors would ruin it. I have read numerous books on writing fiction. I find sometimes I am zinging along, pounding out a chapter and my mind is thinking about the “rules.” Will my editor whack this? And I find the “creation” is gone, he said with vacant eyes… lol
Harris
Break rules, but keep your audience in mind when you’re doing it. How will the rule-breaking affect the reader? Don’t break rules just to break them, because you “want” to break rules — or don’t understand them.
Publishing is a business that strives to meet market desires and make a profit, just like any other business. Faulkner is rarely read these days outside of American Lit classes, and there isn’t a huge market for literary fiction anymore, much of it is published by small presses. People who can write at the Faulkner level are very rare, too. Writers who fancy themselves Faulkner or Hemingway and don’t listen to a good editor’s advice, we seem to have in abundance, however. Amazon is littered with books that don’t sell or have a couple of five-star reviews written by family or friends, many of these books have ignored the fundamentals of good storytelling (and engaging writing).
rj jeppesen
I pity those readers that read with a critical eye on the use of rules. Must be a nasty way to enjoy a novel. If your novel complies with “all” the rules it will be vanilla.
Daniel de Lill
Thanks for the comments!
Grammar rules should be followed, of course. I apologize for my mistake with the quotes – this is why I’m not an editor nor an English professor. 🙂
Be careful, though, as Harris mentioned. It’s OK to break the “golden” rules of writing once you’ve found the right balance. For example, I read Jules Verne’s The Time Machine when I was in high school and loved it. At this point, I had really only read “classic” literature and “older” sci-fi. I re-read the book a few years ago and found it was a bit tough to get through it. There was a lot of telling and very little showing, lots of that pre-TV age descriptive writing, making it difficult to become fully immersed in the story at times or getting bogged down by unnecessary description. It’s still a great book and has important historical context in literature, but it was tough for a modern day reader to get through it. I’ve been spoiled by the way writers write today and now struggle to read some older lit (though, I still do on occasion and do enjoy it).
So, go ahead and break those rules, but not so much that you end up with a jumbled mess. Happy writing! 🙂