There are no general answers

Most of my regular readers seem to have realized that the only “writing rules” I believe in are the ones that involve grammar, spelling, and punctuation – and that even those are flexible, if the writer needs to play with them to get a particular effect in their story (I’m thinking of things like The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad, or the dialect poetry of Robert Burns). Lately, though, I’ve been getting questions either from readers who are a bit too obviously trying to ask about “the rules” without actually saying the words, and from people who aren’t familiar with my opinions who have no such inhibitions. Obviously, it is time for another rant about Da Rulez.

In my experience, which covers forty-plus years of publication, the correct response to pretty much any technical writing question containing any form of the word “should” is “Well, what’s the story you want to tell? What are you trying to do? Which way is going to work for this story?”

Recent examples that have come my way include old standards like “Should I start with a big action scene?” and “Shouldn’t I put in more sex/violence?”, as well as new and exceedingly specific ones like “What should I do if I am twenty percent through my expected word count and I haven’t gotten to my Inciting Incident yet?” and “Should my protagonist meet his mentor before or after the first pinch point?” There have even been some that really make me go “What?” like “How much time should a book cover?” and “How many minutes/hours/days should I skip over between scenes?” and “Should I write my first draft by hand, or is it OK to use a computer?”

None of these questions have a one-size-fits-all answer. They don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer even if you add genre into the mix – “Should my action-adventure story start with a big action scene?” is no more useful a question than the general “should it start with action” version. Moby Dick is considered one of the all-time great adventure stories, and it opens with Ishmael’s chapter-long monolog on why he decided to go to sea. The first Star Wars movie opens with a space battle; Black Panther opens with the story of Wakanda’s history as told to a child. They’re all adventure stories, and there are plenty of other examples that open in every way imaginable.

To give the writers who ask these questions a useful answer, I still have to respond with “What’s this story about? Why do you think this story needs/doesn’t need the thing you’re asking about?” Every story is different. Every author is different. And given the same basic storyline, each author will focus on a slightly different aspect of the tale: different backgrounds, different characters, different twists.

Take “Cinderella.” There are dozens of retellings of the tale, from the ones that merely expand the short story into a full-length Disney movie or a more detailed/historical setting to those that tell the original story from the viewpoint of a different character (Stepmother; The Coachman Rat) to ones that set the basic plot in a modern setting (Pretty Woman). Some of the versions dig into a character’s personality (and it’s not always Cinderella’s); others use alternate viewpoint characters to provide insight into psychology or modern politics, or to comment on the traditional ending. Some reimagine the story in new places or time periods, showing how little (or how much) the familiar events change depending on the setting. And some change aspects of the plot itself, removing the magic and fairy godmother (Ever After) or making Cinderella an evil witch bent on revenging her dead mother (Tanith Lee’s “When the Clock Strikes”).

What the writer wants to do with the story changes the answer to every technical question about writing, whether they want to know about the structure or about bringing out backstory, about revealing personalities or about a particular plot twist. Often, the answers are not things the writer really wants to hear, which is one of the reasons people keep looking for one-size-fits-all rules. Figuring out how to do the new stuff is hard; it would be so much easier if there were an old recipe we could trust. Taking a chance on a new story, character, structure, plot twist is hard; it would be so much more comfortable if there were a way of being sure in advance that it would work. Facing other people’s expectations and then doing something different is hard; it would be so much less scary if there were a formula to follow that would give them exactly what they think they want.

There isn’t.

All those recipes, all the formulas, all the analyses are done after the fact. They’re not about writing, not really. They’re about reading. They tell you where you’ve gotten to, once you’ve gotten there. They don’t tell you where to go or how to get there. They’re not an airplane ticket to the destination you want to reach; they’re not even a map for how to get there. They are Instagram-worthy vacation snapshots of a place someone has already been.

To paraphrase a good friend:  Readers and editors can’t ask for what they haven’t seen yet, so they ask for something “just like that last one that we loved so much.” What they really mean is “we want you writing at the top of your game.” And nobody is at the top of their game if they are following someone else’s rules.