Breaking Writing Rules: Write Right! Annoyance #1

Write Right!

How to write your way and have readers clamoring for more:

#1: 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?

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.

That’s Annoying!

I want to start with a series of posts I’m calling That’s Annoying! How to Avoid Writing Irritants that Make Readers Want to Scream.

When I began writing my suspense thriller, Thunderhead Rising, I wanted to avoid doing things that irritate me when I read novels myself. I made a list of them and kept it nearby as I wrote. Along the way, I asked my husband Terry to add to the list. He was happy to oblige. Finally, I asked the question to members of writers’ forums I participate in. I wanted to be sure I included annoyances I’d heard from agents as they review submissions. As you can imagine, I found no paucity of material.

#1. Breaking Writing Rules

Topping the list is:

English grammar and composition errors and sloppy, poor writing.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Terry put his book down, saying, “You’d think some editor would have caught that mistake.” I agree. Perhaps the book was published without editing or after incompetent or slapdash editing. But as I’ve delved deeper into the world of writers, I’ve heard something else. It’s an attitude that’s rife among forum writers and students. I’d like to kick it around here.

[A quick sidebar: I’m not crazy about the term “writing rules.” I like to think of them as “writing guidelines” and “successful, established processes.” “Rules” implies they have to be used all the time and there are evil consequences for breaking them. That’s not true. But since editors, agents, writing teachers and language pundits call them “rules,” we’ll do that here. 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 hundreds 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 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.

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 to make dialogue realistic.  Writers 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?

“The baby’s coming!” “My husband is holding the finger he cut off with the hedge trimmer.” “The street has become an ice rink, and if I stop at the intersection I’ll spin out when I start up again.”

We know and understand the rule. That red warning symbol means business. But right now, we want to break the rule for a reason. We know what we have to do first, and we take the necessary precautions before we proceed. Then we might choose to run the red.

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 the 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:

1. Very young, perhaps in high school, or an inexperienced writer.
2. Frustrated and tired of being nagged at about rules.
3. Aware of the name of the rule but doesn’t understand what it means and why it exists.
4. Afraid that adhering to a bunch of rules will stifle his or her creativity.
5. 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.

Let’s take a very elementary peek at one of the writing rules above.

Show, Don’t Tell

The most misunderstood of all writing rules. 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 to feel first, not think first.
• Evoke the five senses so that 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 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 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, we feel it or think it right along with the characters. We don’t have to have the writer 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 rules we questioned. Why is this a rule?

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 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 our own hearts and experiences to write what moves us about a subject rather than just talking about it.

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 novels, 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 keep 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.

If you’re not confident about it, take the time to learn basic English (or whatever language you’re writing in) grammar and composition. Maybe take a course at the local community college. Learn the expectations of your genre, things like word counts, pacing, style, avoiding genre cliches and tropes. And learn the rules/guidelines 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 rules 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 so we can talk about all the writing annoyances that make us want to scream!

May the Words Be with You.