There are debut authors who sold their first novel completely breaking many so-called rules. See House of Leaves for an extreme example of this. The idea that only established bestselling authors can break the "rules" (which don't exist, by and large, to begin with) is empirically false.
This is pretty funny and almost incomprehensible at the same time. But if decided to break rules, it wouldn't have been that bad.
Go ahead, experiement, see how it turns out. If you've read e.e. cummings, Joyce, or even Cormac McCarthy, you'll notice they've deviated from the "norm." It can work, but you might at first have to know the rules before breaking them. According to Wikipedia, it's won several awards. Which makes me wonder, is it really brilliant or is it that no one really got it but everyone wants to pretend that they did. It takes a while to get used to that kind of prose, but it can be a pretty rewarding experience to read a more "difficult" book every now and then.
When I was 11 my dad tried to teach me the proper way to hold and swing a golf club. It was horrible. All of a sudden the couple of years of practice I had behind me desintigrated. I seemed to be worse than ever. I was furious with my dad. I sighed and told him to let me do it my way, the way that worked for me. But you know what? After a few months of practice I was three times the player I had been before. I found the experience of using these 'rules' to be very similar. They are techniques that people should learn to enhance themselves even if they are painful at first. When I first heard of them I found them restricting. I wanted to tell my stories freely. But again, after practice with these techniques I found that they weren't fogging the glass of my creativity at all, in fact they were cleaning that glass. They gave clarity to my ideas. Now I relish going through my raw drafts to write concretely, show don't tell in the important parts, write with the active voice, cut out redundancies, and replace adverbs and adgectives with strong nouns and verbs. Stick with the rules. Master the technique of a tried and trusted swing that has worked for the masters. When that technique breaks the surface of your cognitive memory and seaps into your automatic memory then you add your own little quirks and break the rules.
One can find a market for any type of writing if one takes the time to find that niche. It may be that one or possibly two books have made it around the jungle of rules that are required for publication and enjoyable reading. Poetry and/or books of prose fall into this category. To see how far a badly written book goes with the masses, all one has to do is read some of the self published books that are on the market; then, check the sales numbers. When the writing is not coherent and easy to read, along with easy to follow characters, the book is quickly dropped and the author is negatively noted. Basically, book selling suicide has been committed. Ninety percent of readers are knowledgeable in what written English should look like, even though they could not pass an English exams themselves. A small minority of people will take their car to a backyard mechanic to repair their car but vast majority will go to a qualified technician to do the repairs.
Problem is, people, particularly in writing forums, tend not to present them as guidelines, and not doing so is bad for new writers receiving that advice. It is quite simple, really: The so-called "rules" are techniques that have proven successful, particularly when you're writing mainstream, commercial fiction. Whether you're writing mainstream, commercial fiction or not, they're worth learning because it adds to your set of available skills. But, also, whether you're writing mainstream, commercial fiction or not they are not imperatives; any of them can be and are broken by both new and established writers. Ultimately, you have to follow your own vision and instincts about your story. You can do anything you want, the only question is whether you've done it effectively - whether you've made it work. And the only way to answer that question is to try it and see what you come up with. The answer to any "can I do X" questions is "Yes, assuming you do it well." The generic answers in the negative that you see on writing forums, by people who are answering in the abstract with no occasion to look at what the writer has done and actually see whether she has done it effectively, are bollocks.
I think you have to know the rules and guidelines. You can then make an explicit choice to break them for some reason. Broken rules can be very effective if you are using it in a way that makes the reader think, or serves a purpose to your story. But to just randomly break them in inconsistent ways? I doubt it would work. That said, break all the rules you want, as inconsistently as you want, in the first draft. All of that can be easily cleaned up on the second pass.
Notice how everyone liked your post, Link, it sorta blew your point - lol. But I get it, in sections something like this is fun and unexpected, for a complete book this would be hard. I've actually read something like this - but not so coherent - Mary Stuarts Ravishment in Time Descending. I think I quoted it here. Sections were brilliant, over all though- pretentious and incoherent. But it was her book, her experiment and someone was willing to publish it ( certainly not one of the big five - lol ) and I was willing to take a chance on buying it. So all the way around, not bad. Especially if she was happy with it. As a reader I didn't regret the money I spent - I've read worse. And I like a challenge. But it wasn't entirely satisfying. I think you have to be different-first off, and think different to pull off the kind of overt rule breaking I think the OP is talking about. Or like James Joyce you have to be so meticulous every word could be overhauled, every sentence restructured. Rule breaking, deliberate rule breaking, isn't actually for the sloppy. I think it would be harder to break the rules correctly, consistently ( enough to call yourself a rule rebel ) and pull it off, than learn the rules and break them occasionally. If you're ready to do that hey, more power to you. But you could wind up with readers who, in the end, just don't get it. Or aren't quite satisfied.
That's why, (not including grammar/punctuation and to a degree, spelling) I don't necessarily take heed of 'the rules' of writing. Maybe they should actually be called "Guidelines which I followed to become successful ..." What was it Capote said? Something about learn the rules and then rearrange them to suit yourself.
For me, the whole point of writing is communicating. One very good way to do that is to follow the rules of grammar unless there is a really good reason to break them. "Non-conformity" is not, IMHO, a really good reason. (Quite honestly, it's about as poor a reason as I can imagine.)
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride. The book was first published in 2013 by Galley Beggar Press of Norwich, England, after being rejected by numerous other publishing companies.[1] It has won several awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year,[2] the Goldsmiths Prize,[1] the Desmond Elliott Prize,[3] the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction,[4] and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.[5] The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction ... The winner of the prize receives £30,000 The Goldsmiths Prize ...has a GB£10,000 remuneration The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award ...The prize is sponsored by the food group Kerry Group, and is the largest (currently €15,000) monetary prize - @ €1.34/£1 = £11,194 The Desmond Elliott Prize ....[2] The winner receives GB£10,000. The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize...The prize is worth £1000 So that's £62,194. Bugger selling the damned thing!
Looks like Amazon needs to update the book's blurb. I would have thought they'd have listed all those awards.
While I didn't enjoy 'A girl is a half formed thing' greatly, I thought the odd style worked well for the subject. A story of a dysfunctional family and a self-destructive girl isn't what I enjoy reading and I would have tired of the style in a longer book and I presume she won't repeat it in another. However, it was good to see someone trying something different and all in all it worked. It's been a while since I read it and I wonder now if it was the style that kept my attention.
You all know I hate rules (of writing) ... But why is so much emphasis placed on 'rules of how to write' when most readers are not actually taught those rules anymore and could not, in all probability, distinguish from a story written by the rules and one, not?
I think rules are attractive because people want to get better at writing and aren't sure how to do that. I mean, absent the rules, what can anyone tell a struggling writer beyond "git gud"? And I think there are lots of people happy to spread the rules or reiterate the rules or make up their own rules partly because they genuinely want to be useful, but too often because they want the ego boost of acting like experts and/or are trying to make money by acting as an expert and/or have been told they need to blog/post/be public in order to promote their books and have no earthly idea what the hell else to blog/post/be public about. And, to be honest, I think at least some of the rules have a role to play for beginning writers. "Show, don't tell" is terrible advice except for when you read someone's first attempt at writing that's all "tell" with absolutely no heart or detail or depth, and then all of a sudden it's not the worst advice in the world. The problem is, maybe, that it's really hard to know when you've advanced from absolute beginner to apprentice to journeyman to master. Not "master," like, creating masterpieces, but "master" like you've got things figured out and have a grip on your craft. Self-publication has made this self-knowledge difficult, but so have the thousands of fly-by-night e-pubs and e-magazines and whatever else that spring up and will accept practically any writing because they're barely paying anything and are hungry for content. The writing that goes to these places could be pretty weak or it could be great, and how exactly is a writer supposed to know which of those she's producing? So beginners and apprentices, I'd say, are probably best off following at least some of the "rules". But it's really never clear when they stage ends, for most of us. So some of us cling to the rules much longer than we should, others abandon them much earlier than we should... it's messy.
I wouldn't hate the rules just to hate the rules. How can you hate all of them? I don't even think I know what they all are. The thing is, the rules work until they don't. They work until and unless something works better. And then no one in their right mind is going to care at all.
I am definitely one of those that can't tell whether something is written by the rules or not. However after reading a fair amount of a book it seems to become more apparent where it might fall and I prefer to read from authors who seem to have a good handle on the craft. I see reading even a fictional story as an opportunity to broaden my knowledge and when a story is written well I feel that secondary goal is something I have achieved.
I believe that you have to learn, know and understand the rules when you decide to seriously try your hand at a craft that has been around before you. And then you may attempt to break a few of the rules in order to create something new and different, but you should know them in your gut before you can go beyond their framework.
