Writing advice is often contentious. Beginners will complain that the advice they receive from experienced writers is either unhelpful or too restrictive. Older writers will pick newer writers apart for ever erring, or they’ll encourage amateurs to throw all the advice out the window and just do whatever they want.
These mentalities aren’t very helpful. In fact, a lot of writing advice is unhelpful in the first place. It’s given by amateurs to other amateurs, packaged as universal wisdom when it’s not. Essentially, that advice is the Dunning-Krueger effect on full display: these writers know enough to think they are experts, not enough to realize they know far less than they think.
There’s really only two rules in writing, which I have discussed before in my post about bad writing advice:
Writing needs to communicate something to someone.
Writing needs to be written so that others can easily understand (and enjoy) that message.
…. But, advice is helpful when given by a trusted source, with demonstrations about its application. All that advice is really about helping you follow those two simple rules: communicating clearly and in an engaging way. The application varies significantly based on your genre and niche; what works for an explicit romance won’t work for children’s books.
So let’s discuss why we should all be good little lemmings and follow the rules. Sometimes. Maybe. Or at least when first starting out.
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With any advice that I give, there may be someone who successfully did the opposite.
That’s why a lot of the time, if I can think of an author who didn’t follow my advice, I’ll call it out … but then remind you that you probably aren’t that author. Yet.
Let’s be brutally honest. You are not Hemingway (yet), nor are you Tolkien (yet), nor are you Herman Melville or Willa Cather or Terry Pratchett or Agatha Christie or any other beloved author. Yet.
I’m not either! Don’t think I’m lumping myself in with them. I know there are millions of writers who are way better than me, who I admire and aspire to be.
And that’s okay. We often don’t get to see how these authors developed their style except on rare occasions, such as the newly released lost stories of Terry Pratchett, A Stroke of the Pen. Fantastic book, especially because we can watch the evolution of Pratchett’s voicey, irreverent style.
What we see in print is the culmination of many years’ practice … and many failures. As such, younger authors believe that they, too, can pull off that style without doing the work and getting to that level. Then their writing feels like a cheap imitation of a more experienced author, and it’s uncomfortable.
They haven’t found their voice yet, nor have they learned when to apply and when to ignore general writing advice.
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Writing guides are training wheels.
We see this most contentiously in the age-old advice, “show don’t tell.”
Younger writers often like to tear down more experienced writers by pointing out one line that “tells” and go, “No! Show don’t tell! You can’t ever tell!”
That is because they have learned that this is an immutable rule when it’s not. They have come to believe that you can never tell anything, for any reason, and you must always show everything. But that is not true. In fact, that attitude can ruin your writing.
The problem is that always “showing” often means your character lacks emotional depth, especially if you have a third-person limited POV (my typical POV). We need the character to tell us some things sometimes, because that’s how we know they are thinking.
“Telling,” in this instance, is actually us just hearing the characters’ thoughts. We watch them work through problems; we get to know more about their life, their past experiences, their interpretations of everyday events, and so on.
In that way, what seems like “telling” is actually “showing” us who a character is on the inside.
Never hearing our MC’s inner voice can make them feel like plot devices rather than people. They are meant to help us contextualize things and connect to the story; if they’re not giving us anything, then we don’t know them on a deep level. They become cardboard cutouts being pulled along by plot strings.
“Telling” can also be awesome if the MC is wrong about something. Now we’ve been misled because the character has faulty thinking, and we get frustrated with them for being dumb.
I love being mad at MCs. I also love making maddening MCs. Uileac Korviridi is absolutely insufferable in 9 Years Yearning because he’s an idiot teenage boy, and I adore that for him.
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You need to know the rules to break them.
There are many times where the Literary Greats may break the “writing rules,” and they can get away with it because they know how they are breaking them. It is an intentional choice on their part to veer away from the expected order in order to surprise, delight, or confuse readers.
As usual, I return to one of my favorite authors, China Mieville. His most recent book is The Book of Elsewhere, cowritten with Keanu Reeves (yes, really).
That book melts your brain. It’s complicated and confusing, and it breaks pretty much every literary “law.”
But it’s fantastic. That’s because Mieville knows what he’s doing. He’s been writing for decades and has honed his style.
If I didn’t know Mieville already, I probably would haven’t even picked up the book, but I trust him to tell a good story. In fact, if I didn’t understand something, I figured it was just that I’m dumb – not that he’s not brilliant.
Others of my favorite books, like Cloud Atlas or The English Patient, also intentionally break conventions. The authors can get away with it because they balance rule-breaking with literary best practices.
Newer writers don’t know how to carefully exploit the rules. If they decide to throw one out of the window, they go so whole-hog that their writing is impossible to decipher.
For example, there are some people who insist on writing in all lowercase, stream-of-consciousness style, for the entire piece. This is migraine-inducing. Please do not do this.
If they had done or two paragraphs like this during a central scene, such as to show the character having a panic attack or being in so much pain that their very thoughts are rattled, it would have been fine. Cool, even. But no, they could not moderate this convention-breaking element, and thus they lost significant readership.
Learning the balance between convention and personal style takes time and practice, which some newer writers aren’t willing to do. Many want instant gratification and assume that finishing one project makes them a master, which it does not.
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Playing with formulas makes your work interesting.
Think about the Sherlock Holmes stories, beloved for over a century. I’ve read almost all of them, and they all have almost the exact same pattern.
Sherlock gets a client, usually bedraggled and frantic, at his private residence. There is often a bit of a fuss about payment, which Sherlock waves off because he doesn’t care. He and Watson listen intently to what the client says, and then they head off to do some cursory investigation.
We already know that Holmes, being a genius, figured out the mystery the instant that the client walked in, but he plays around pretending he’s stumped. Then he sets up some harebrained way to catch the culprit, usually putting himself in danger while Watson wrings his hands. Finally, the mystery is solved, and Holmes smugly explains everything while the client thanks him repeatedly for troubling himself with this stupid problem.
But there are variations. Maybe Holmes doesn’t catch the guy right away. Maybe he was actually wrong and Watson found a crucial clue he missed. Maybe he gets injured. Maybe he falls off a waterfall and everyone is mad at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (including his mom) until he surrenders to the pressure and writes another Sherlock Holmes story.
This same pattern has become the standard for nearly every mystery story now. The MC may be a bit different, but they all pretty much follow the Conan Doyle form. And people still read mysteries! They’re not put off by knowing how it’s going to end; they’re comforted by the familiarity and intrigued by the unique twists that different writers put in.
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Following the rules doesn’t make your writing boring.
Most famous authors follow the same formats because these formats work. They are adhering to basic storytelling principles, grammar, and syntax because these conventions make the story accessible to their audience.
Think about musical principles. There’s a reason that pop music is more popular (heh) than experimental, jangly, weird music. Pop music is marketable because it follows similar formats, tone progressions, beats, etc. Experimental music isn’t as marketable because it confuses people and makes them uncomfortable.
Our brains are pattern-seeking machines. Patterns are familiar, and thus they are comfortable. We can’t predict experimental music, and as such, we don’t like it.
It’s the same reason that people read the same genres over and over again. They know the themes, the storylines, the tropes, the character archetypes, and so on – but they want to see what this author does differently. Again, the author is putting their unique spin on age-old patterns in a way that people will like.
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It is the way you apply universal standards to your story that determines its success or failure.
Frankly, it’s easy to break the rules. Children break writing rules all the time because they don’t even know what they are.
Telling us the story like a synopsis, or ignoring characterization and showing everything, or writing in all lowercase, or whipping the reader around with plot twists, or changing POVs because you’re bored: these are all very easy to do. They are the path of least resistance.
Following the conventions enough to satisfy yet not stifle … that’s the hard part. It is hard to make a story people love, to apply the patterns without turning it into a boring formula.
Learning how to pull back on the rules is also difficult. You need to practice before you can understand how long to break convention, where to put it, and how experimental you can get before you turn people off.
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If you hate the rules, maybe you hate them because you see how challenging they are to apply. You want to just do whatever and still have people like it. Adhering to basic principles without making things boring will get tougher the longer you go on, and perhaps that scares you.
But writing is hard. That’s where the agonizing joy comes from. If writing were easy, then everyone would be an author. Tech bros wouldn’t be struggling to create an All-Knowing Writing Machine so they don’t have to do any work (because work is hard).
Publishing wouldn’t be a multi-billion-dollar industry capitalizing on those rare few who can produce a good product. There wouldn’t be PhDs in Creative Fiction. English departments the world over would close.
The hard work is the point, and not everyone is willing to put in that effort. If you do want to do the hard work because you love telling a story, learn the rules … and then figure out when you can bend them for maximum impact.