Three Writing Rule Observations About Why Writing Rules Cannot Be Trusted.

Writer: Tom Stewart

Writing Rule Observation #1:

There are too many rules attempting to govern the craft of writing. But most of the rules are arbitrary, specious, and don’t stand up to critical examination.

Rules of Writing are not to be trusted. So trust me as much as the Cretan who said all Cretans are liars.

A few dubious rules:

Show don’t tell.

McCarthy’s The Road won the Pulitzer. “The boy was terrified.” “The boy was so cold.” McCarthy could have described the boy’s shaking hands or blue lips. Sometimes he does; many times he and other great writers do not. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea won the Nobel Prize. Opening line, “He was an old man who fished alone…” Hemingway didn’t start the story, “The fisherman’s hands were leathery and cracked from years of working the lines. He looked to the stern of the boat but nobody was there.” Fact is, sometimes the directness and simplicity of “telling” not “showing” works fine. It’s misleading to tell new writers it does not.

Kill your darlings.

Never. Don’t do that. If something is truly out of place it never was a darling to begin with. Let beauty and honesty trump everything else. In fact a whole story could be subservient to one beautiful scene, even one spectacular sentence. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was mostly lost on me. But I perked up when he wrote, “Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.” The rest of that book could be varieties of tomato soup recipes and I’d buy a copy.

Does the hero come away changed by the end of the novel?

That does not matter. Better question: Does the reader?

The Bechdel Test, “Asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.”

So a story about a ship-wrecked woman will necessarily be an inferior piece of writing? Cancel Winnie the Pooh? A boy and girl flee from their abusive father and set out to survive in the woods. But that story can’t be written.

Writing Rule Observation #2:

If someone tells Literature what it can and cannot say, stop listening to them.

Give Blood Meridian to any editor and the quantity of red ink it will come back with may equal the blood of that story. Yet it’s one of my favourite novels and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. There is so much subjectivity to art. People will try to objectify that subjectivity in hardened rules. Don’t trust them.

Someone may say a specific writer can break a certain rule because she is Rowling or he is King. No. That writer did it and it worked. So if you want, you can too. And you can do things others are not doing. “To not be limited by the literary theories of others, to write in my own way, and potentially, to fail.” -Hemingway. But let your conviction in your writing be proportionate to how much hard work you’ve given the craft: know deeply a few books you believe to be great; sweat over your manuscript daily for months.

I let my work be guided by the same metric I evaluate all other art: Did it move me? Did I come away harder, softer, stronger, faster, kinder, less stupid, more compassionate, fuller? Story elements like plot, whether or not there is a climax and when it comes, if the hero has a sacred lie, and all the other trumpeted techniques of reductionistic and formulaic storycraft take a back seat to the only criteria that really matters: Will the reader turn the page? Then the next?

Writing Rule Observation #3, the one that guides my efforts:

Move a reader.

Here’s how I try to do that: By moving myself. Leave the page smoking. Write the fibres out of the page. Lay something bare. Sit there and bleed. Build tension. Bait then switch. Fall tears, pierce minds, make love. Soak the page with bleeding words. Crinkle it up with laughing ones. Rip out the reader’s heart by ripping out your own.

Close the door, no phone, no internet. Commit to time blocks of Deep Work to train creativity to show up. Write like a brick layer. Care too much about your writing. Some people say don’t take yourself too seriously. Forget that. Take your work very seriously. Mostly, just make something beautiful. Just get to work.

Some books on writing that I enjoy and do revisit:

On Writing by King.

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by Saunders.

Lectures on Russian Literature  by Nabokov.

Interviews with David Foster Wallace.

Deep Work by Newport

The Elements of Style by Strunk Jr.