Learn the Rules, Then Break Them

  When do you obey the rules, and
when do you break them?.

As you travel through the world of literary blogs and how-to books and writing workshops, you start learning a lot of rules that you never noticed fiction had. Never introduce a gun in the first act that won’t go off in the third. Don’t use dialect that’s hard to understand when reading. You can’t make up words. You can’t start a sentence with “and” or “but.” Sentences should be grammatically correct. You have to make clear who your character’s parents were, all his past fears and loves. Never start with the weather.

All of these rules are well and good; most of them will help you if you use them with caution. But then you start thinking a little bit, and you remember:

Didn’t the classic novel The Grapes of Wrath start with the weather?

Its whole first chapter, in fact, describes the weather of the dust bowl and nothing else.

Then you start thinking a little more.

Didn’t the classic novel A Clockwork Orange invent a whole new lexicon of made up words and unusual dialects for its characters?

Why yes, it did, and it’s one of the reasons that novel was so memorable. You think a little longer and you wonder:

Didn’t Hemingway, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce all use grammatically incorrect sentences?

What begins to emerge is a little rule of thumb: these great novels and authors let you get comfortable with the skill of the writing. They make you feel you are in the hands of a masterful technician.

And then they break the rules like mad.

In creative writing, as well as in many art forms, rules are difficult to define. The things we recognize as great works are often great precisely because they break with convention and try something considered unheard of in their time. Just think of the first poets who caused scandal by refusing to rhyme or count their syllables. Think of the first novelists to capture real human speech in their works. These things were breaking the rules of their time, yet worked marvelously for the different purposes of the works. And that, I think, is where rule-breaking comes in.

Breaking the rules just to be contrary will never work. An entire novel of gibberish (Finnegan’s Wake notwithstanding) will only alienate and annoy your reader. Spoiling the escalation of suspense for no good reason will only drain your story of drama. But if the story calls for a bending of a writing rule, then by all means go for it. If you want to surprise us and pull us in, a story often demands nothing less.