For reasons that I’ll make clear in a future post, I recently finished reading a book published in 1904. It wasn’t the first story I’d read from the early 20th century, so I wasn’t surprised at how many writing “rules” the author broke.
I come across a lot of sites and blog posts that talk about writing rules as if they were on the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. I’m talking about rules like:
- Avoid adverbs
- Always use “said.” Any other dialogue tag is distracting
- Don’t head hop
- Don’t start consecutive paragraphs with the same word
- Etc.
But those rules don’t describe good writing. They describe what happens to be in fashion today. And frankly, if every writer followed them to the letter, we’d all sound the same and pretty bland.
Oops, I started that last sentence with a conjunction. Hack! Or maybe not. That particular rule seems to be going out of fashion. And that’s a good thing. Not that I break it much.
I’ve read plenty of stories that broke all the rules and yet resonated with me and left me wanting more. It’s the story. It’s the characters. It’s not adherence to the rules. I treat the rules as guidelines. I sometimes break them.
In 50 or 100 years, people might read books from the early 21st century and marvel at how many writing rules we broke. But that won’t stop them from enjoying our stories.
