rules-of-the-road-piggy-backing

. . . on what I wrote last week, I have still been thinking: Rules. Are they neccessary? Needed? Important?

I think they are to a degree. Sure you can break them. But the thing is, you still have to know the rules in order to break them.

Driving home the other night, some SOB shot out in front of me and I had to lay on the brakes and the horn because the dumb f*&#*er apparently didn’t know what the red octagonal sign in front of him meant. My mind flashed to my 13-y-o and all the talks about “when you take driver’s ed” and how he would understand some of the road nuances once he learned the rules. If he then chooses to ignore them he has to face the consequences that come with it–like say the red and blue flashy lights that raced after the SOB . . .  hehehe.

If you don’t take driver’s ed, you may follow some rules, but you will also break rules, even if by accident. You will see other drivers doing certain things and you will follow their lead, so to speak, and use your common sense as to how and where the appropriate roadways, directions or even parking spaces are. But you may not neccessarily know why these things are important–like turning your tires the correct direction when parking on a hill–trees are not very forgiving to bumpers once that baby picks up speed!

Same goes for writing. You may happen to do some things correctly–common sense is a wonderful thing, but some of the “rules” per se, are particular nuances of writing such a POV/head-hopping, show don’t tell, even something as simple as “filter” words (knew, thought, saw, figured). But you have to know what is what BEFORE you can actually break it. Shoot even something as simple as formatting can be a nightmare if someone doesn’t know to double-space and to use fonts that are readable–my first typed WIP was single spaced and I found the “funnest” font I could–OMG!

Then I learned the rules.

Side note: POV is truly my biggest pet-peeve, mainly because when I joined a critique group years ago, it was the very first thing I was called out on. I was all over the place w/ my POV. Once I understood how dizzying it could be to jump from one person to the other and back and back, I learned how to write scenes from one person, do a page break and go to the next character.

Writing rules are a good jumping off point I think. Many, many people when they hear you’re a writer say, “I want to write a books some day.” (because we all know it is SOOOOO easy) I often tell them, that’s great, read up in the genre you’re interested in and make sure to get really craft books to learn what’s what.

But at the end of the day, the only true, steadfast rule for writers is: The story must be good. If you have a good story/stroy telling ability the other things are easy to fix.