Da Rulez

Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer’s success and/or fame and that writer’s ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once an author has published or won some awards, they can disregard the rules of writing and still be considered a great writer, vs. 2) writers can’t follow the writing rules in order to become famous and expect to then be able to disregard those rules and still be considered a great writer. “So, Ms. Wrede,” my correspondent asked, “what do you think? How important to the success of a work are the rules of writing, compared to the fame of the writer?”

I bet at least half of you can guess what I said, but I’m going to repeat it anyway.

The rules of writing are not important because there are no real rules of writing. There are rules for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax, and all of them are quite important (though if the writer is working in dialect or with a strong narrative voice that requires otherwise, they can be disregarded). But in thirty years in this business, I have found only two “rules” for writing that actually apply, and that I’ve never seen broken.

1) The writer must write. This is really more of a definitional thing in my opinion, but given the number of “writers” I meet who seem to want to talk about writing without ever actually writing anything, I always include it as number one. If you don’t write, none of the other rules matter. Not even the ones about spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax.

2) What the writer writes must work on the page. “What works” varies from story to story, and often from reader to reader. It’s a subjective judgment, and it gets applied one story at a time. The fact that one writer has used a trick or technique or twist successfully in their story doesn’t automatically mean that every writer can use the same trick, technique, or twist in any other story. If whatever-it-is doesn’t work in a particular story, that writer needs to not use it. By the same token, the fact that something doesn’t work in a majority of other people’s stories doesn’t prohibit anyone from using that technique in their story, so long as it works.

The problem is that English professors, creative writing teachers, critics, students, and would-be writers have been trying to come up with a set of rules for “good writing” pretty much ever since writing was invented…and every time, they run smack into the incontrovertible fact that for each and every “rule” they come up with, there are a whole lot of famous/successful/much-admired/much-loved books that break it.

Now, my background is in science (I was a biology major in college), and in science, if you find that your data does not support your theory, you are supposed to throw out your theory and come up with something else. Finding a bunch of famous/admired literary works that “break the rules” looks to me a whole lot like data that contradicts the theory. My conclusion is that there is something very wrong with all these “rules” … and if the “rules” only apply to mediocre-to-bad fiction, and one wants to write famous/successful/much-admired fiction, why would anyone ever pay any attention to them at all?

There is no One True Way. There is no One Size Fits All. There is no guaranteed no-fail recipe.

There are plenty of guidelines, certainly. There are a lot of things that will work in many, if not most, cases. There are things that one should generally consider doing or avoiding. But guidelines are not absolute rules; “most cases” is not “all cases;” and “generally do or avoid” does not mean “always/never do this.”

Ignoring “da rulez” will not automatically make a writer’s work great and the writer famous; neither will following them. Famous writers who appear to ignore “the rules of writing” are famous because their stories work on the page, rules or no rules. Famous writers who appear to be following “the rules of writing” are famous for the same reason; they just happen to write stories that work when viewed through the lens of “the rules.” Most of the latter, if they are around long enough, eventually confound the rules-proponents by writing something that doesn’t follow the rules, because their backbrain finally handed them a story that need to be written some other way, so they did.

A lot of writing “rules” are worth looking at and thinking about, because the reason they’ve been made into “rules” is that they address something that a majority of successful writers do or don’t do – things that get done in a lot of stories that seem to appeal to or irritate a lot of readers. But all those things appeal to or irritate readers because they work (or don’t work) in those specific stories. Consequently, it is often a good idea to check to see whether X also works (or doesn’t) in one’s own story. It is nearly always a bad idea to simply “fix” X in order to follow the rules, without first checking to see if it works. Because oddly enough, when one does that, it usually doesn’t work (generally because the diagnosis was wrong…but that’s a different post).

It’s not about rules. It’s about the story, and what works for the story.