Rethinking Writing Rules - Pt. 1

By Mike Duran



I'm a legalist by nature, so it's no surprise I got bogged down by writing rules. I'm not talking about the Strunk and White type of rules, the standard principles of grammar and composition. There's "other" rules for contemporary novel writing, formulas for publication which some hold to be just as binding as rules of spelling and punctuation.

Some of those rules are:

• Show Don't Tell -- Use action and dialog rather than exposition


• POV -- Maintain a consistent, realistic narrative point-of-view; don't "head hop" from one person to the next in the same scene


• Avoid Passives -- Keep tenses active; "Shirley broke the window," not "The window was broken by Shirley"


• Limit Dialogue Attribution Tags -- Avoid too many he said / she said's, and their variants: "he snorted," "she chirped," "they gurgled," etc.

Of course, there's many other rules and shifting stands (see, for instance, the recent discussion about the use of italics at super-agent Chip MacGregor's blog), but those are some of the biggies.

Being that I'm fairly new to this gig, I've learned a lot of things on the fly. For instance, once I wrote a 6K word story in Present Tense. Present tense sounds something like this:

Shirley sees a rock, bends down and picks it up. It is sharp and cold to the touch, but it'll do. She aims for the window and hurls the stone, then tears off as the glass shatters and Mrs. Mulligan emerges spouting expletives.

As you can see, present tense puts things in the here and now, rather than there and then.

Anyway, I wrote that story, was fairly pleased with my accomplishment, and submitted it to my critique group. But their response shocked me. Most publishers don't like present tense, they said. In fact, one critter stated they personally so abhorred present tense that they COULD NOT critique my piece. Huh?

My puzzlement stemmed, in part, from the fact I'd just finished reading a short story from a popular author, written in present tense. Go figger. That was my first encounter with the weird world of writing rules.

When asked what "pet peeves" she had about the industry, one CBA romance writer said this:

With so many writing rules that new authors have to follow, it’s hard for me to read writers who don’t follow the rules. I can’t hardly read one writer who was one of my favorites for years because that person tells instead of shows, head hops, and has lots of author intrusion. I never noticed those things before I became a writer, but now they jump out at me and can ruin the story.

(I'm guessing this author would loathe Cormac MacCarthy's, The Road, with its minimalist style, multitudinous fragmentary sentences, absence of quotation marks and apostrophes, and obvious disregard for many, many "writing rules." And oh, by the way, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize.)

Most intriguing about all this, and rather tertiary to the above author's comments, is the notion that new writers must follow a set of rules. However, the rules in question were not necessarily standards of grammar and composition, but adherence to certain commercial, conventional axioms -- formulas, if you will -- for publication. (Heck, for the longest time I thought Brown and King was a book in the Bible, and questioning them was blasphemy.)

So while I worked hard at following the rules, eventually I began to see a disparity between some of what I was learning and what was actually being published. This was extremely confusing. The biggest hit came when I read a very influential Christian writer... only to discover he "head-hopped' like crazy. The guy had sold a million books, but he couldn't manage POV!

Hmm. Maybe the problem was what I was learning, not what was being published.

After a season of legalism, Stephen Koch's book, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop, was revelatory. In it, he writes this about POV:

Many teachers of writing will tell you that the way to unify your story and integrate it with its characters is through something called the narrative "point of view." There are even certain purists who will insist that an "integrated point of view" is the only way a narrative can achieve unity. . .

. . .The academic emphasis on "point of view" in fiction is precisely that -- academic. The notion that "the most important thing in fiction is point of view" is a beguiling but vacuous theory that bears only a marginal relation to real practice. And it causes vast amounts of misunderstanding.

. . .Of course, a consistent point of view can indeed be a guide to unity, and of course, you will want your prose to have a coherent texture. But it is a mistake to assume that point of view itself necessarily endows any story with either unity or coherence. Too often, this rather fussy doctrine pointlessly constricts writers' options and narrows their range.

(pp. 88-90)

After my early "indoctrination," it was refreshing to hear the POV rules called, "...a beguiling but vacuous theory... [a] rather fussy doctrine [that] pointlessly constricts writers' options and narrows their range."

I've since began to wonder if, at least in Christian circles, a type of authorial inbreeding is taking place. We attend the same writers’ conferences, read the same books, visit the same blogs. Aren't we in danger of living in an echo chamber, devising a "canon" of our own making?

When one lives under the notion that success -- i.e., publication, i.e., the "Holy Grail" of aspiring authors -- means adherence to a certain set of "rules," legalism is inevitable.

Continued...