I'm not picking on you Nao, I just want to address the idea you presented here, because it's the source of a lot of misunderstanding. They're not that kind of rule (well, some are—the SPAG rules Moose pointed out just above are more like that kind). There's the kind where if you break the rule you get punished by some authority. Those technically are laws, but they get called rules a lot, and some people think the rules about writing and art in general are like that. But they're not—they're guidelines. This is why when you want to draw straight lines you grab something called a ruler. The kind of rules you get for writing (unless you ran across a bad book or website) are more like "People who have done this before (many of them for a very long time) have figured out certain things that work really well, and you would benefit from learning what they are." that's exactly what Aristotle was doing when he wrote the Poetics (on which all future writing advice has been based)— he studied the plays of his time and analyzed them for what worked well and what didn't. He was really good at analyzing things, in fact the categories he came up with to classify living things are still used today, somewhat modified, in the Taxonomy system of Species, Genus, Family, Phylum etc. Dude understood how to study something and figure it out. Learn the rules or not, it all depends on what your goal is. If you want to be a professional, it would probably be best to learn about them. Though some people have a great knack for writing compelling stories without studying anything.
I think this idea is more developed in the popular consciousness in the area of music, at least the styles I'm most familiar with. There are no "rules" in music, and I think most people recognize that. If it sounds good, it is good, but some things sound better than others. There's far less emphasis on rules, whereas it seems that the amateur writing world (at least) is much more hung up on whether something is "right."
Hey, if it's good it's good. If it ain't, it ain't. All comes down to what people are willing to pay money for. Like everything else in life. They call it "It" in show business. This actor has "It," or this artist has "It." We don't know what It is exactly, but we know It when we see It. Don't matter what it is or is not, which rules were followed and which rules weren't. It's It. And that is It.
The rules don't bother me as trying to juggle everything I need to say in a scene and then some. I'm almost done my book and I literally just remembered I gave my mc a broken foot at one point and totally forgot about it. His cast never gets removed. Makes me wonder what else I've forgotten.
Most "rules" are more like guidelines. Here's another way to look at writing and maybe this will help you out. Instead of looking for rules, look for perspective. Why are things done a certain way. Why do we write? We're write to communicate an idea. Depending on what the idea is and who we are talking to, will depend entirely on how we write, what words we use, and how we structure our sentences. Take this scientist explaining Quantum computing to people of different levels of understanding. Note how differently she's explaining this technology depending on whose she's talking to and what they already know. Yet, she's explaining the same concept and idea. So, before you start jumping head first into whether you should follow a rule or not, you might want to consider who you're talking to. Check the author who writes them! You could find that writer is writing for a completely different genre and audience! So consider that for a second. They maybe really good at writing biographies, but not so good at writing fiction. So their perspective on why they think a rule is important may be different. How we relate to our audience will largely depend on how well we can understand their experiences and perspectives. Even if your goal is to challenge their perspective, you still need to understand it. This idea of the reclusive writer who dislikes people and doesn't like to go to parties and interact, is not a beneficial way to be a writer. Get out there. Experience the world. Get to know what matters to people around you. This is actually one of the problems we're seeing in fiction, particularly pop art such as comics, movies and to a lesser extent, video games (though gamers didn't take the attempts of a well meaning, though ultimately disconnected creator's attempts at trying to create games too well). The writers didn't understand their audience very well. There was one particular comic I was reading where the writer decided to take all the Asian characters from the Marvel Universe and put them on a team. Which is a pretty cool idea. But then the first scene is them arguing about what a particular fruit is called???? Why? Well, because that particular writer assumed her audience was caucasians who just thought Asians were all the same and her role was to educate them. The truth was, many of the audience were Asian, or they had Asian friends, or they just didn't care. They wanted a good adventure! And she failed to deliver that and insulted their intelligence all in one stroke. So rules to writing: 1. Know who is writing said "rule" and what they were successful at. 2. Know your audience. Know what they want. Know what they need. Know how to talk to them. These two things will help you understand which of the rules is actually benefiting the story you're writing and the audience you're writing to.
There are certain branches where rules are a fixed situations that warrants very little dispute. For example mathematics where nobody in the world can dispute that 1+1=2 or πr2 for the area of a circle. But then there are more creative branches that are more or less artistic and there is not one single rule and branches that are more flexible. When you’re in school you’ll study English, you’ll get asked abstract questions, come up with different interpretations and there’s no right and wrong. Sometimes the facts are skewed and what they teach you to be “facts” in school are no longer “facts” when you learn about how they teach the same subject in other countries. History might be a good example of this where different countries teach you the arguments in different ways from each other and where the “facts” themselves can be put to disrepute and where school systems in other countries will teach you things that you would not have heard about in yours. Writing stories and poetry is another where other countries have another consensus on the rules that don’t necessarily follow what is taught in other continents and areas of the world. Hence styles differ depending on the part of the world you’re taught in. For instance you don’t expect an American education system to be the same as a Greek education system or the Italian or French education system. Except for some subject such as mathematics or science, the laws are universal and understood despite what area of the world you’re coming from. Art and creative writing are more flexible and when it comes to owning your own style in fashion as well there’s is no “you must wear this” or “you must wear that”. It’s more like OWN your look. If you like wearing flowery clothing and someone insulted your style you have a choice of doing one of two things. Either you ditch the look and not be true to yourself or you turn your back to the world and wear what you like because that’s who you are and THAT’S what makes you happy. Either you let them set the trend for you or you wear what you like and you don’t listen to them. Then before you know it, YOU’RE the one who’ll be setting the trends. You do what YOU want. You don’t listen to them. You don’t change you style. This is who you are and they damn well better accept it. You are unique. Don’t let them tell you what to do.
I see then as guiding lines in stead of rules. "Never open with a character looking in a mirror". - Doesn't Divergent do that? Never open with a character waking up - there's lists of successful books that open this way. Sometimes I feel like those 'how to' articles have their own agenda for the individual writing them. They are trying to put themselves out there and will usually plug their own books somewhere in the article after they've given us their writing life story. I come came to read about foreshadowing, I don't want an essay about some random persons writing journey. I think they create these 'rules' to give them something to write about. No much can be written in: "these are guide lines not rules". Reading about writing tends to hurt my head and causes me to over-think and scrutinize my every word and thought. Same as me reading reviews on good reads makes me hyper critical of my story, my idea and my characters.
I agree, and I think those kind of rules should be followed by the caveat "—unless you have a good reason." In the better books and websites this caveat is stated clearly, in the not-so-good ones it tends to get left off. The reason to avoid mindless use of those tropes is that they've become cliches and have been done to death, usually badly. But a writer who knows what they're doing or isn't just following the cliche but has a good reason for doing it can make it intriguing and exciting. It's also important what you're writing—short stories in general can withstand a lot more rule-breaking than novels—and what kind of story it is. A wild, highly poetic stream-of-consciousness story can be done with almost no rules at all, or deliberately breaking them (especially by a skilled writer who has probably studied the rules or by a very intuitive and talented writer). But as mentioned above, if you're working in a genre, and especially certain genres like Mystery or Romance that have very specific requirements, then understanding the requirements is very important. For my definitive take on rules see my signature. Well, I would add that some writers are able to create great stories intuitively, but that would just make it too long and then it wouldn't be a quote, would it?
In all honesty, I think the variation of rules depends entirely on what group is looking at the work. An imagist will look at a beat poet like they were crazy with their jazz infused long lines. Whatever maneuver you try, you will break some group's rules. I tend to not let it bother me, and read what I like. If I want to emanate the style and choices that one group has, and their breaking of other's "rules," then I stick with that. Following the rules in poetry or story-writing is an impossible task. Choose which ones you want to break, and run with it.
I also want to say it's important how you go about learning or trying to implement 'the rules'. This probably depends on which kinds of rules we're talking about—I'm thinking mostly about story structure and there are doubtless other kinds that fit here. Learning to walk or talk is a perfect metaphor for getting this across. In order to do either well and with any gracefulness (which amounts to the same thing) the 'rules' need to be absorbed into the subconscious, not memorized consciously. You can't walk while reciting all kinds of advice such as "now lean forward slightly because walking is actually a controlled falling-forward where you catch yourself by moving one foot ahead". You'll instantly collapse into a tangled mass of flailing limbs. And in walking, as to some extent in talking as well, you don't get told how to do it in the beginning—you just start trying, take your lumps, and gradually figure out what works through experience. You've seen people walking, and through experimentation you begin to explore how this crazy thing called a body works and what it can and can't do, and after going through the crawling stage you find you can lever yourself into a somewhat upright posture and rock gently back and forth, which seems to you like walking. Then you see the couch up ahead, where maybe mommy or daddy is holding their arms out toward you and making weird noises, and you want to go there, so you make the first attempt at a real step. It doesn't hurt to fall down when you're not much larger than a puppet and your center of gravity is about six inches off the floor, so you giggle and try it again. There's a lot of trial and error and your muscles need to grow stronger through the sustained effort, and your balance receptors need to become finely tuned and lots of other things I have no idea how to describe need to happen. Most of it is done with no idea on your part what or how. You know only the desire to get from here to there and have vague concepts of how it's done by having seen other people doing it. Of course writing is not as intuitive as walking. Writing is not a natural thing our bodies are perfectly suited for, but the mind is, though language does require a lot of learning. But the point of the metaphor is that trying to do it consciously can't give you the kind of intuitive grace you need. For that you need to have absorbed the lessons through repetition until they become written into the convolutions of the brain so they emerge without conscious thought. As I've heard it said for learning to draw and paint— Study the important principles, practice them through a lot of repetition until they become fully absorbed, and then work intuitively.
Maybe I should revisit that story where I have the MC describing the weather while looking into the mirror during a dream.
On a serious note - nothing annoys me more than a critique where somebody says something along the lines of "you should do this because Joe Bloggs says in his book you should", As a critique, that is useless. It's one thing to say you should follow a rule - it's another to say *why* you should follow it in a specific instance. And if you're unable to explain that, then it means you don't really understand the purpose of the rule in the first place.
That's interesting what you say, that breaking rules may be more acceptable in a short story than a novel. I never looked at it that way before, but you might be right. Thinking about it ...nice brain occupation for today.
If you break grammar rules, for example, it's much easier to sustain that for a short story rather than a novel. There's one story I recall in the Workshop which is full of deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes because the narrator has been shot in the head. You'd struggle to do that for a longer story. And the rule of "show, don't tell" - to some extent, you have to do some telling because you don't have the word count to show everything, although that applies more to exposition than anything else.
I also think immersion is less of an issue in most short stories as well. As you say, you can put up with all sorts of stuff if you're not going to be with it for too long. You don't have to be immersed in the story's world to enjoy what it has to say.
I feel like this is a good state to be in. I feel like knowing too many, "rules," acts as a strangler fig around a tree. They can totally smother the life from your writing and lead whatever you write to be formulaic at best or stunted and sickly at worst. I wish I could forget all the, "advice," and, "rules," I mistakenly thought would help me but have only proven to be dead weight. Write free!
I think that's only true if you choose to follow those rules mindlessly. Most rules have some useful application, and if you can figure out what that is, you'll probably save yourself a lot of time.
I think it's more important and much more productive to instead focus on your writing as a study in using tools, not obeying rules. The rules paradigm is, imho, like trying to find the Higgs Boson, but you're using alchemy instead of particle physics. Some of it seems to almost make sense, but pretty much everything else falls outside of what the concept can address or describe. Wrong school of thought. You're not going to find that boson with alchemy. It just makes a million times more sense to me to ignore all the rule-giving and instead focus on learning the purpose of each tool and then using that tool for the purpose it was intended. Rules are almost always about what not to do, rather than what to do. What not to do does not inform you how to proceed. See how the Tool version is informative as to what to do?
... And can stand in quite well for ice-picking people you want to exterminate unconventionally. To be more serious, it's good to see you elaborate on this Wrey. I knew what you were saying made some sense, but now I understand exactly what you mean by tools, not rules.
