Rules, er, Guidelines of Writing

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham

I love that quote. I think of it whenever I’m faced with a would-be writer or critic who is waving a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style around as if they expect several large thugs to appear from nowhere and break people’s legs for violating its principles. E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction inspire similar reverence (and a similar response from me) in other circles, and occasionally I run across someone who is still quoting their high school Creative Writing teacher’s pronouncements from twenty years ago as the Ultimate Truth About What Good Writing Is.

As far as the books go, I’ve read, made use of, and recommended all three (and many others) myself; they’re all excellent and potentially useful, as long as one applies the salt liberally when they get too prescriptive. Writing rules, like the pirates’ code, are more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules…

Unfortunately, the writers who promote an expert’s rules almost always seem to be looking for one of two things: 1) a cookbook-style recipe for writing a successful novel (by which they generally mean one that sells to an editor, achieves bestseller status, and/or is critically acclaimed), or 2) an authority to back up their opinion of their own or others’ writing.

The writers looking for cookbook recipes are doomed to frustration. Cookbook recipes are designed to give edible results – not great ones – for even inexperienced cooks. They use exact measurements and temperatures: add ½ teaspoon of baking soda and ¼ teaspoon of salt, bake at 350 for 42 minutes. Even then, there are often judgement calls – sauté until soft, bake until golden brown. You have to learn those by experience, along with when and how much to change things when the weather is  more humid than usual, or one of the ingredients is larger, smaller, dryer, or wetter than average. In other words, even with a cookbook recipe, you have to learn to cook if you want good-to-spectacular results.

If there were a recipe for writing a novel, it would be more like my mother’s maldasha recipe, which starts “Boil some potatoes. How many? How big is your pan?” or my grandmother’s bread recipe, which begins “Start with enough flour, then add butter the size of an egg.” Of course, the maldasha recipe doesn’t help much with making bread (nor vice versa), but at least they both start with the recognition that different cooks will be working with slightly different ingredients and conditions, and that any recipe will need some adjusting to account for that, just as different writers working with different subject matter and toward different goals or audiences won’t be able to apply exactly the same “rules.”

And then there are the writers/readers/critics who use authorities as a club to beat up other writers. Possibly my favorites here are the people who criticize works like “Hamlet” or “The Maltese Falcon” for being “full of clichés,” when they were the very first use ever of the phrase or incident or technique that has since become a cliché. Second place goes to people who flag every use of the copulative verb (“to be”) as either “passive voice” or “weak,” totally ignoring the progressive tenses, the subjunctive, and the mimetic value of sentences like “It was nearing noon when Sam called at last.”

Worse, though, have been some of the students I’ve had over the years, who couldn’t trust their own writing instincts unless they had authoritative backup, who refused to believe a compliment because the passage in question did something that some authority had outlawed, or who could not accept that various forbidden techniques/clichés/constructions were not only permissible but entirely justifiable in some circumstances. Persuading these folks to stop hamstringing themselves is … difficult.

There are plenty of true generalities that one can make about writing, but most of them are about process, not phrasing. I’ve said a lot of them over and over on this blog. They won’t give you a recipe or a roadmap, and you can’t really use them as a club to beat people up with (whether you want to bead up yourself or someone else). They’re useful guidelines. Here are some:

The most valuable trait for a writer is discipline, because discipline is rare. Talent is common as mud.

Don’t make writing harder than it already is; play to your strengths first, and branch out from there.

Every writer’s process is different. Just because it worked (or didn’t) for someone else, it doesn’t mean it will work (or won’t) for you.

And most important of all, my take on the Three Writing Rules … er, Guidelines … that nobody actually knows:

1. You have to write.
2. What you write has to work on the page.
3. Back up everything, always.