The Rules

Patricia Wrede on the rules of writing.

For Your Consideration or Amusement

I really dislike the whole "rules of writing" thing. Back in my AOL Writers Club message board days, a number of pro writers suggested that the only true rules were the ones governing grammar, spelling, and punctuation (which could be broken as needed) and the notion that words must somehow be committed to paper or pixels. So you can imagine that this article on some writing rules gave me a few chuckles.

This one really gave me pause, and a giggle:

"7. Smarten up your protagonist.
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering."

This could be useful for some situations, ie a tight third person narration or first person narration using the protag, but if you're writing omniscient, I don't see how this is a factor. The storyteller not being the protag can reveal whatever the author wants revealed.

And that's the problem with advice about rules, or even guidelines which are somewhat better/more useful. They're often unclear. They can be confusing or even contradictory. They often need explanations and they have exceptions. Sometimes, explaining everything that would follow would take a book. If you leave off a detail, as in the narrative style or pov affecting what #7 excerpted above says, then you'll give an eager writer looking for advice a likely wrong impression. That writer might be a newbie who doesn't know yet how to use that "rule" or "guideline" in his or her own work/writing style. And the attempt to force it to work could make things worse. And that leads to frustration. Believe me, I'm the voice of experience here, though the "rules" I'd try to slavishly follow were different than in this list, mostly. Enough so that I tried to stop writing for a decade.

Here's a link that's much more fun: 100 Best First Lines.

What Rules?

Here's a good take on supposed writing rules and what a story should do. Some good advice, too.

Kurt Vonnegut's Rules for Writing Fiction

I'd seen these before, but since his death, the list has been all over the internet. Here it is, so I can find it again, easily.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

I normally don't like "rules" of writing, but taken as suggestions, these make a lot of sense.

Ranting About Rules

Homestretch of the repostings.
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Rant ahead, proceed at own risk.

Here and there on writers' message boards and on writers' blogs, I keep seeing people discussing the same or similar things with different terms or phrases and sound like they disagree. I remember when we had to stop a discussion of pov of at least a few days on one of the AOL writers boards to establish a common set of terms. To the surprise of many of us, it turned out more of us were agreeing than disagreeing about writing third person pov. We were just using different words to describe or label the various permutations.

A few posts caught my attention today.

This on Storytelling about characters needing to change by the end of the story. Sound advice, but which characters? Protagonist? Others? I remember when I read A Confederacy of Dunces and was struck by how the main character was more catalyst than protagonist and hadn't really changed by the end of the story, while others did because they were affected by his actions. Is this an example of a writer breaking a rule? Or simply a different way to write than the norm?

Or here, where Sara comments on a comment one of her earlier posts received. She added this disclaimer:

"Rules of thumb are not graven in stone. They are guidelines. Every one of them has been broken, and broken successfully. I am just one more writer who was a teacher, with one approach. I have had some success with these rules as my point of departure."

And that's when I started to get twitchy. Especially when I see the quote at the top of her blog:

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." (W. Somerset Maugham)

Are all the writers blogging now claiming to have discovered rules that eluded Maugham?

Rules or guidelines? At work, as I've mentioned here previously, we use them very differently. Rules are well, regulations, things you must do to make sure policy is maintained. Guidelines are things you might want to do because they're good ideas. Procedures are how you implement the rules.

The dictionary isn't much help. From Merriam-Webster Online:

"Main Entry: guide·line
b : an indication or outline of policy or conduct

1 a : a prescribed guide for conduct or action b : the laws or regulations prescribed by the founder of a religious order for observance by its members c : an accepted procedure, custom, or habit d (1) : a usually written order or direction made by a court regulating court practice or the action of parties (2) : a legal precept or doctrine e : a regulation or bylaw governing procedure or controlling conduct"

The key in the above is that guideline is a mere indication while rules are prescribed laws or regs. A bit of hair splitting, but bear with me. Please.

And to me, there are no rules (other than those of grammar, punctuation, and spelling and the one about actually writing something at some point). Guidelines aren't there to be broken because they aren't required in the first place. You simply don't have to follow them. You get to choose which you use. They're tools. You don't use a screwdriver when you want to pound a nail into a piece of wood. You use a hammer. Yet both tools are in a carpenter's toolbox. And yeah, I can get very anal about this because it gets to the heart of the issue I've blogged seemingly endlessly about, the problem many of us had/have as newbies when we don't know how to differentiate guidelines from rules and perceive them all as things we should/must/need to do in order to produce publishable writing.

As for using words or terms the same way, it's not just about what we mean when we say tight third; it's about what we mean when we say rule or guideline. The worst that happens, I believe, with the former is possible confusion over pov. With the latter, it can cause a writer to get tripped up trying to do something that doesn't work for them. It can lead to frustration. And all the disclaimers in the world won't change that for many folks who are looking for that magic formula that doesn't exist and won't see anything but the rule or guideline they'll take to heart. Especially when the disclaimer uses the terms interchangeably.

End of rant.

Enough with the Rules, Already

Reposted.
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I've seen this a couple of times now, so felt compelled to post something about it, mostly because it's writerly and writerly topics have been a bit sparse on this here writing blog lately.

Elmore Leonard has some writing rules. Ten of 'em, apparently. And there is a caveat. And the folks blogging about this are giving their own experiences with these rules, many of which are nothing we haven't heard before. Leonard says (the bold italics are mine):
"These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over."

hmmmm..... We can skip the rules. But only if we have a facility for language, etc. Gee, maybe they aren't rules, then. Perhaps, they're... guidelines? Rules of thumb? Things that work for Mr. Leonard?

Here are his "rules," minus his explanations for brevity's sake. You can use the link above to read them in their entirety. I will however add my comments to each.

1. Never open a book with weather.
I'll agree it's rarely an incentive for me to keep reading, except when it's exciting, like opening in the midst of a hurricane or tornado or...

2. Avoid prologues.
I've read so many books with wonderful prologues, bearing in mind that they're prologues because they've been labeled that. The really good ones have taken place years before the start of the story, what he'd call backstory and as he suggests, would work as flashbacks. But that would violate a supposed rule I've seen elsewhere about not using flashbacks. Sometimes, backstory works in flashback, sometime in prologue. Sometimes you can feed it in bit by bit and sometimes you don't need it there at all.

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
Actually, I'd avoid any word if I can convey conversation in another way. But sometimes, you just need whisper, choked out, grumbled, mumbled, and muttered. Sometimes, it's better than coming up with elaborate ways to convey tone, etc that would be wordy and unwieldly. Sometimes, the words themselves convey all that's needed. Sometimes, not.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
Except when, you know, it works. What you might want to avoid is overuse and awkward or unintentionally funny constructions.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
Well, they do tend to lose their strength if overused. I rarely use them, but I can see their use in satire, etc. I seem to recall they came into favor with comics because they were more visible than periods. For what that's worth.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
Well, cliches and expressions that would work better being described probably aren't necessary. How did hell break loose would be more helpful for the reader to know. But to not use "suddenly"? All I can say is, huh? Seriously, I can see it being used to avoid some hard work and I can see it sounding stilted, in a "it was a dark and stormy night" sort of way.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Unless you do it well. Actually, he offered a lot of exceptions to his rules, too, which always bugged me about rules. I never got the whole "exceptions prove the rule" concept. If there are a lot of exceptions, doesn't that disprove the rule? As for dialect, etc, it bugs some readers and is almost unnoticed by others. If it's easy enough for me to read, I usually don't notice it much.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Well, I do, but not by design. I just suck at descriptions. Actually, there are physical descriptions and the non-physical ones. The non-physical ones can be worked into dialogue and behavior so aren't necessarily something that needs to be stated upfront, ie Jenny was smart, neurotic, whatever. But I know people who hate not having characters described for them because they don't visualize and like the descriptions to help them mentally distinguish the characters.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
See my comments on #8 (minus behavior and personality). I think, especially in sf and fantasy, that describing the setting, often in great detail, but not all at once, is important and can be very useful in placing your reader into your universe.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
heh. Yeah. Just try to figure out what that is and not worry much that it differs from reader to reader. heh