Write Right!
How to write your way and have readers clamoring for more:
Breaking Writing Rules
As writers, we’ve been taught a plethora of rules: grammar, composition, the elements of writing our genre or field. But is breaking writing rules okay? And are there really writing rules in the first place?
Hello, Word Lovers!
Welcome to Write Right!, a gathering place for writers, authors, editors, literary agents, readers and everyone else who loves words. We’ll explore themes inspired by not only my own observations and experiences as an author, but by YOU and what you’d like to explore. We’re so glad you’re here!
I spend a lot of time on social media and Bluesky talking with writing groups about the topics important to us all. All kinds of issues are covered, but by far the one that comes up most often is whether or not there are “writing rules” and whether or not writers have to follow them. And when they do, when can they break them? Great subject, and one dear to my old English teacher’s heart. Let’s give it a whirl.
Before We Begin
Editors, literary agents, acquisition editors, and writing teachers like everyone else, have their own ideas about what constitutes good writing, what’s creative and what’s not, what’s literary prose and what’s purple prose, and what they do and don’t want to see. That’s good! There’s room for everyone. Well, almost everyone…
But if there’s anything they all agree on, it’s that the one thing they DON’T want to see is:
English grammar and composition errors and sloppy, unedited writing.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen my husband Terry put his book down, saying, “You’d think some editor would have caught that mistake. This book is full of them!” I agree. Perhaps the book was published without editing or after incompetent or slapdash editing. Sadly, this happens far too often.
So before I go on to the tropes of the writing world, let me state emphatically that there is no room for lazy, sloppy writing for anyone who wants to get published and be taken seriously as a writer. If you’re not confident in your ability to write in your language well and correctly, please do take the time to take a course in basic grammar and composition at your local community college or find a good online webinar or some good, fun books at your local library. Do whatever you have to do. And then, if you need to, be ready to hire a good copy editor when your work is ready. Enough said!
Are There Really Writing Rules?
Writing Rules vs Guidelines and Best Practices
I’m not crazy about the term “writing rules.” I like to think of them as writing guidelines and best practices and successful, established processes. They’re the industry standard because they work, not because some law mandates them and the Grammar Police will come and take and take you away if you break them. “Rules” also implies they have to be used all the time. More on that later. But since so many people in the writing community call them “rules,” we’ll do that here for now. Whatever we call them, let’s talk about why we want to learn them so we can make choices about when and how to use them.
“Rules were made to be broken.“
We’ve all heard it. Most of us have done it. We’ve broken rules. But it’s…well…complicated.
To begin with, that cliché isn’t true. The overwhelming majority of rules were not made to be broken. They weren’t designed as a challenge. They were meant to be followed and came into being for reasons that made sense to their creators.
As writers, we’ve been taught a plethora of rules: grammar, spelling, punctuation, composition, the elements of writing the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of our chosen genres and literary categories. There are dozens of them. Show, don’t tell. Write what you know. Kill your darlings. Avoid adverbs. All these rules can seem overwhelming and even pointless. Like impatient teenagers ready to leave home and school, we might want to lash out and rebel.
Someone on a recent writers’ forum asked, “What is the most important thing you’ve learned as a writer?” Several responders said, “That there are no rules.” They went on to ask, in effect, “Why should we follow the rules? Shouldn’t we be able to write in all lower case, without punctuation, in a creative font? Use phonetic spelling, ignore grammar and the rules of structure? Why can’t we give all our characters names that begin with A, head hop, and write page length run-on sentences with misplaced modifiers and puzzling subjunctive clauses? Isn’t it poetic to deluge readers with beautiful purple rain and, in short, do whatever comes into our creative genius pointy little heads?”
Communication
The answer is, Yes, you can. You can do anything you want. If you’re writing for yourself, you don’t have to learn or follow any rules. Go for it! But the minute you decide you want someone to read and hopefully buy or publish what you’ve written, you’ve got a problem. Why? Because the Rules Police will put you in the stocks and then shame and humiliate you? No. You can choose to ignore that.
The purpose of sharing your work with others is to communicate with them.
Communication happens best with mutually agreed upon ground rules or agreements everyone understands. From that point, readers can become immersed in your story and not have to slog through a muck of errors, confusion and restarts.
Research shows many readers abandon books early on when they have to backtrack and reread sections of text that confused them or were too difficult to follow. Readers have intrinsic expectations, whether they realize it or not. They quickly become impatient when those expectations aren’t met. They expect the author to follow the rules of good writing and the story’s category or genre because that’s what they understand. That’s playing fair.
Break What You Know
Another reason to learn and internalize the rules is so you can break them. You want to be able to decide to do it for a reason and succeed in doing it because you understand what you’re doing.
We writers break rules all the time when we write dialogue. Most people don’t speak in perfect, grammatically correct, complete sentences. They use idioms, colloquialisms, sentence fragments, poor grammar, and informal or colorful language. So writers use these things, too to make our dialogue realistic. We can do this effectively because we still play by the rules when we structure dialogue on the page, following a universally accepted format readers understand, so we can get out of the way and let them hear the characters speaking, not us.
We need to know the rules, so we know when and how to break them.
Here’s a simple example. Most of the time, we stop our cars at stop signs or red lights. Why? Usually to avoid getting a traffic ticket or creamed in a collision. The rule makes sense. Could we break that rule? Sure. What if there’s an emergency? We might break the rule for a reason. The situation calls for it.
“The baby’s coming!” “My husband is holding the finger he cut off with the hedge trimmer.” “This steep street has become an ice rink, and if I stop at the intersection I’ll spin out and hit someone when I start up again.”
But most of the time, we’re going to stop. Why? Because that’s what works best for everyone on the road, and we don’t have to think about it or worry about negative consequences. That’s why we stay in our lane and follow the rules.
Before breaking writing rules, are you sure you understand them?
“Forget about Show, Don’t Tell. Tell whatever you want. Famous writers do.” “People who write about serial killers don’t write what they know. Write What You Know is a stupid rule.” “What do you mean, Kill Your Darlings? It’s my story. Why should I kill the best parts?” “What’s wrong with adverbs?” A favorite meme is “Said is Dead,” usually accompanied by a tombstone and skull.
On and on, the protesters march. When I read these types of comments, I feel confident that one or more of the following is in play. The writer is:
- Very young, perhaps in high school, or an inexperienced writer.
- Frustrated and tired of being nagged at about rules.
- Aware of the name of the rule but doesn’t understand what it means and why it exists.
- Afraid that adhering to a bunch of rules will stifle his or her creativity.
- Mistaking flowery purple prose for good writing.
I get it. We don’t like forcing ourselves to learn about something that doesn’t seem to make sense, feels old-fashioned, or is imposed by a bunch of stuffed shirts who just want to make creative people miserable because they aren’t creative themselves.
Rejoice! I’ve got good news.
First, these rules aren’t hard to understand and learn. Second, they do make sense once you get them. And finally, they’re not set in stone. You’ll choose not to use them plenty of times. That’s okay as long as you know why you’re doing it. That means you need to know why they are rules in the first place and what they mean.
Because here’s the thing. It’s why we like to call them writing guidelines, best practices and successful processes rather than rules. So let’s do that.
Writing Rules and Guidelines are Situational
They were never meant to be used all the time, in every situation. That’s why they’re not really rules. They’re meant to be used to help you communicate what you want to say in the way you want to say it, getting the understanding and emotional response you want. Once writers learn them, they become a part of how we write and we don’t have to worry about them.
But when we get into trouble, they’re pure gold. We can return to them and use them to help us figure out why our sentence or scene or chapter or description or whatever doesn’t seem to be working. Then we can apply the appropriate guideline to see if that fixes it. It’s simply magical how often that works!
Let’s take a very elementary peek at one of the writing guidelines above.
Show, Don’t Tell
The most misunderstood of all writing guidelines. No, you don’t always have to show everything. If you did, you’d end up with a 300K word novel that would bore people to tears. When do we want to show, not tell?
When we want to:
- Make readers feel first, not think first.
- Evoke the five senses so readers will experience them directly.
- Create word pictures instead of conveying data and information.
I can tell you John is angry, or it’s a dark and stormy night, or Mary spent a happy weekend at the beach. It’s not wrong to do that.
But what if I had John pick up a chair and hurl it against the wall as he screamed and cussed? What if I had the wind howl, the rain pound against the tin roof, the thunder roll, the lightning crack and our heroine stumble along the path, falling because she can’t see a thing? Can I make you see what Mary saw as she crested the rise and the ocean fell away below her, blue and sparkling in the sun, while the seagulls cried overhead and fishing trawlers with colorful sails headed for shore? That’s showing, not telling.
What’s the Difference?
When writers show, we evoke feelings, emotions and sensory perceptions readers experience because they’ve had them before. They experience them immediately because they’re instinctive.
Telling creates a little distance barrier that rises as our readers’ brains first process what they’ve read and then translate it into second-hand feelings, emotions and sensory perceptions. That’s because the writer had them first and then had the book’s narrator tell readers about them, often by using the passive rather than the active voice, or weak adverbs after the verbs, or explanatory phrases like “he felt” or “she thought.” When we show readers how he felt or what she thought instead of telling them, they feel it or think it right along with the characters. We don’t have to insert our writer selves into the passage to explain it.
Got it? Of course we can tell if we want to convey data or information and just get on with it. Or we can create a hybrid description or narrative that both shows and tells. We could say, “Mark was 18. He was able to get into bars with his older friends because he was older-looking.” That’s telling. Or we could say, “Mark was 18, but he always swaggered into bars with his older friends. He got away with it because he looked their age.” That’s telling and showing. Or “At 18, Mark swaggered into bars with his older friends, looking like he belonged there, and never got carded.” That’s showing.
Of Knowing, Darlings, Adverbs and Said
We can do the same exercise with the other guidelines we questioned. Ask yourself why each is a guideline and why it works.
Write What You Know
Could it be that there are lots of ways to “know” something besides learning through actual experience? That if we learn it well, we can still know it well? We can research, apprentice, travel, create a focus group of experts, ask an expert out to lunch and interview him, etc. We might look into what we’ve learned from our own hearts and internal experiences. That’s knowing, too.
If you’ve seen or read Little Women, you may remember when Professor Bhaer tells Jo her swashbuckler stories aren’t selling because they aren’t coming from her heart. She’s writing about something she hasn’t experienced and isn’t connecting with emotionally. When she writes a heartfelt tribute to her sister Beth, she finds success. She wrote about something she knew well, internally and externally.
Kill Your Darlings
In the best stories, everything either advances the plot, develops the characters, or establishes the setting, mood and theme. Everything else is a distraction. Sometimes something just doesn’t fit. It’s fun and well-written and we love it, but it’s kind of hanging out there. Or we have to cut a draft that’s too long. At a gut level, we know this bit probably has to go. We resist. But more good news! We don’t have to kill it. How about putting this darling in a file and keeping it for later writings. We could even build a short story or scene around it in our next book. Good writing never needs to die.
Adverbs
Of course we can use adverbs, and we should. But if that adverb is sitting there, helping us get around showing and not telling, we’ve lost an opportunity. Remember John? “You idiot!” said John angrily. Meh. Now, when he picks up that chair…
Dialogue Tags
Why do we use dialogue tags? You know, like “he said,” “she asked,” etc. Isn’t it to let the reader know who’s speaking? Which means we want to use them as seldom and unobtrusively as possible. That’s because they’re writer speak, not character speak, and we want to get out of the way so the characters can get back to their dialogue.
People skim right over “said” and “asked.” They’re boring. And that’s the point! They’ve done their job of letting us know who’s speaking — every once in awhile, when it’s not clear or we’re lost in the back and forth. It’s more interesting and appropriate if we save “she screamed” for when she’s drowning and calling for help. We’ll talk more about this in a future blog about dialogue.
Take the time to learn them before breaking the “rules”
Some writers believe their first draft is the “real” story, the one they put their heart and soul into, and if they adhere to the rules of writing as they revise and edit, they’re eating into their creativity. Not so. The first draft is an outline, the foundation for our stories. We can put even more heart and soul into our work as we edit, revise and make it better.
What’s the Plan?
As we discussed earlier, if you’re not confident about it, take the time to learn basic English (or whatever language you’re writing in) grammar and composition. Learn the expectations of your genre, things like word counts, pacing, style, avoiding genre cliches and tropes. And learn the rules/guidelines/best practices of good writing. You’ll probably need an editor later, but your own skill as a writer will dramatically improve once you learn the tools of your trade. Would you hire a construction worker who didn’t know how to use his or her tools and didn’t understand the fundamentals of construction? Our tools are our words, and we can learn how to maximize our effective use of them.
As writers, we learn and follow the guidelines because clarity, consistency and simplicity help our readers understand and enjoy our story right away and keep them immersed in our story world.
We get out of the way and let them do that. Anything we can do to help them along the path leads to success for all of us.
Share your thoughts, word lovers. And DON’T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE. See you next time.
May the Words Be with You.
