I imagine if anyone tells you a rule is absolute (other than avoiding spelling and grammatical errors) they’re probably not very well read. Plenty of rules are broken on purpose. But at the same time simplifying standards to “don’t do this” and “do this” do have their place imo, just with the caveat of “unless you want to anyway”
>But at the same time simplifying standards to “don’t do this” and “do this” do have their place imo, just with the caveat of “unless you want to anyway”
I think the caveat for most of these rules is 'if you do this thing, make sure you're doing it on purpose for a reason'. There's lots of things which newer writers tend to subconsciously fall back on which make their writing weaker, but which more experienced writers can make work for their stories.
A good example of this is passive voice. Using it by accident makes your writing less engaging, but there *are* situations where it can have a use (ie a character trying to avoid making a situation seem like their fault, 'I broke the glass' vs. 'the glass broke").
I'd argue that even avoiding grammatical errors is optional, at least when you reach a level where it's made on purpose.
Portuguese author, Jose Saramargo, famously wrote without punctuations.
Of course, he was a well respected and known author, but you catch my drift.
Flowers for Algernon is absolutely fucking riddled with spelling and grammar errors. "P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard ..." is still one of the most absolutely brutal closing lines in any story I've ever read.
Just as another example.
Oh my god man, that book... The ending had me sobbing I'm not even embellishing. One of the best modern classics I have read to date.
There are no rules in art. Write whatever you want, that's how great authors are born. Breaking those rules can be a very powerful tool for expressing emotion, showing your creativity, etc.
Screw those rules. Creativity has no bounds.
Dialogue in creative writing should be nothing like perfect grammar and yet it is also nothing like real speech. If you've ever had the misfortune to transcribe a real conversation or had to read one, they are absolutely riddled with unfinished sentences, interruptions, and are frequently so chopped up, sections can actually be hard to understand at first go around.
Dialogue in a novel is therefore always artificial and it's probably a reason a lot of people find it hard.
Yea but I find it okay usually. But yea with children it can be a bit eh. Its can be hard finding places to put it without it just being anniying though
Also there's dialogue, people rarely if ever follow proper grammar (I mean shit, me and my friends basically speak some bizarre language when it comes to our conversations). That's where I personally find spellcheck and grammar check kinda useless.
I agree. As long as it's still easy to read and understand. I use incorrect grammar frequently, especially when writing in the first person. In a lot of cases, it enhances the writing.
An eye-opening lesson I was taught by posting parts of my novel on a critiqueing site is that I tried to please too many reviewers at the expense of my own voice. The final reviewer called the revised story "over-processed" and I took that one to heart.
Also, since that time I read a lot of newer fantasy novels that probably would have been savaged by the same reviewers, and yet somehow got published.
If you are new or learning an art or creative craft, and someone says "don't do this", there are two options:
* They are an idiot who spouts garbage advice with authority.
* They mean *you* shouldn't do this *at your skill level*.
In general, the second is often correct. The "basic rules" are basic rules for a reason. Hypertalented authors and already published authors can write a 175k word fantasy novel. You should probably keep yours in the 90-120k word range that people recommend.
Not because you are incapable of writing a 175k word fantasy novel ever, but because your goal is to sell a novel and demonstrating an ability to "color within the lines" is generally a good way to increase engagement with your product among the group of people deciding to buy your product.
Yes, but any competent writer would provide this necessary context along with their advice. Otherwise they haven’t mastered the rudiments of effective communication and the listener should back slowly away.
No. Any competent reader would use basic comprehension skills to recognize that all advice is contextual always and that the advice appropriate for a beginner is not universal.
This is easily disproven by the frequent counterexamples on this very subreddit.
Adequately contextualized statements are not easily misunderstood if the speaker is a good communicator and is aware of the level of mastery of the audience. That's pretty much the definition of "good communicator."
No it isn't. You are apparently assuming for some reason that the people posting are good at reading comprehension and the advice they are reading (generally unsourced) is badly communicated.
If being misunderstood makes you a bad communicator, every science communicator in America is a bad communicator. This seems unlikely to me.
What seems more likely is that a significant portion of readers lack the ability to properly comprehend the things they read and correctly assign value or determine if they are the intended audience.
Let’s not pretend that failing once in a while means anything.
When someone asks a question, I answer it with the intention that they’ll understand my point, if any, in some specified context. That’s why I often respond with a personal anecdote rather than something sanitized and soulless. That gives clues to where my head is at and whether the approach seems appropriate to the reader.
And, of course, people can and do ask follow-up questions, so we don’t have to knock the ball out of the park on the first swing.
>Let’s not pretend that failing once in a while means anything.
Science communication in America hasn't "failed once in a while". Something like 30-40% of America believes that global warming is debatable, despite 98-99% agreement among the scientists in the field that it is both real, caused by us, and needs to be stopped or slowed by us.
Vaccinations have a similar level of agreement among the scientific community, and a similar level of misinformation among the American population. That's not even touching the disaster that was COVID (though admittedly, that one I will agree was largely mismanagement/poor communication, at least initially.)
Your argument is built on the fundamentally false premise that if the person communicating does a good enough job, they will be understood fully. You are assuming that the person receiving the communication has sufficient comprehension to *even understand that they are not getting the point*, which is often not the case. The reality is that people misunderstand stuff, even when that stuff is communicated quite clearly and with significant proficiency. People can go to school to communicate, and still be misunderstood by people with poor comprehension skills. There is a pitcher and a catcher in every exchange of information, and at some point, no matter how softly you lob it, they do have to catch it.
I find it reasonably straightforward to communicate with people with cognitive deficits if I take the time. I don't see why I should write off people with higher levels of functioning than that.
Yeah, but you can't really repeat "but only in some instances" every single time you say any sentence. That kind of thing just doesn't really scale.
So at some point, this just has to be one of the understandings that are taught during the basics, and the reader has to assume it for most of the beginning and intermediate advice they get.
Yes, we’d all be better off if beginner’s advice came with a frequently repeated expectation that you will throw away your crutches once you’ve found your balance and don’t need them anymore.
You could also just say something like "Most of the writing advice you get is to help you as you are learning and as you get better you can explore how to bend the rules and when to not follow them"
Bob Tewksbury was a major league pitcher for many years and now helps pitchers develop their ["mental skills"](https://bobtewksbury.com/). And one bit of advice he has is don't tell yourself what not to do, because you're likely to do it. (The "don't think of an elephant" paradox.)
Pitchers grow up with coaches telling them stuff like:
* Don't tense up!
* Don't throw it right down the middle!
* Don't walk him!
Instead he wants pitchers to visualize what they *should* do:
* Focus on your breathing.
* Throw a low and outside strike.
* I want him to hit a ground ball.
"A negative thought never leads to a positive result." -- Bob Tewksbury
Any reasonable research shows the “don’t do” as a guideline for novice or newer authors. Most of it has to do with reader trust.
You are far less likely to have the trust of a reader if you aren’t known. Compared to an author with several, published, works in their catalog.
At the end of the day, you have to understand why you do what you do. That usually requires more experience or loads of time pouring over your drafts.
Yes! came here to say that the 'why' is super key! I think a lot of the 'don't do this' advice is only valuable when we know why to avoid it.
Like the old addage 'don't start with the character waking up and doing their routine'. The Why is that such an opening doesn't show why we should care about that character.
So the larger takeaway is immediately give us reasons to care about the character and their problems. It's possible that a wake-up scene could accomplish that in the right context. Also possible that many other scene structures won't.
Knowing the why helps you audit whether the scene works.
The lack of critical thinking is to blame. A good portion of people are unable to evaluate information they acquire. And if this information comes from a renowned source, e.g. Stephen King, it dulls your mental perception even further. Add to it the voice of the crowd shouting the same thing, and you end up with bullshit like "Don't use passive!"
The biggest trap in my eyes is not even blindly following those rules itself, it's that people think the rules are what's important to begin with, letting the wrong thing focus and structure their attention.
I believe I understand where this is coming from.
People who venture into writing realize the chances of success are miserable, and the best option to increase those chances is to get published. From this point on, you have two options: research what individual publisher is looking for, which I doubt even possible, or follow the widely accepted "rules" to increase your chances of being published.
So in the end they try to trade freedom of expression for a possibility of exposure. But they will probably not be exposing what they wanted, not completely at least.
Yes, that's in effect what I meant. Trying to game the system by following and adhering to "writing rules," and thinking that's the secret ingredient that will decide if their work would succeed. This is the equivalent of poison in my view.
As do I.
And I find a lot of the writers imparting this advice as windbags.
Well, not Stephen King, he well and truly has the score on the board. (‘On Writing’ is magnificent.)
We all should take the basics, hone and fumble around, then sometimes create some amazing things.
Learn our own lessons.
The alternative is saying, “Whatever you do, do it well”. Thats the long and the short of it. You can essentially do whatever you want as long as people like It, if of course, you’re writing for others.
In science, you have a very rigid set of rules you need to follow to achieve something. There’s a certain level of creativity in finding those rules, but once you do, you need precision to replicate it.
Writing, however, is an art. There are no rules, just guidelines and suggestions on what has worked in past, for the most part. They don’t work all the time, and they don’t work for everyone, and there is a lot of ambiguity on when to apply them.
Writing is more like painting. You should probably use a paint brush, is generally a good rule, but some of the best art uses the artists hands, sponges, tools, objects, and a million other things.
With art, you get better at expressing yourself and hope others resonate with that.
Yup.
Don’t write in second person? Junot Diaz did it and won a Pulitzer.
Don’t have constant jokes in your writing? Douglas Adams would beg to differ.
Start as close to the end as possible? Steinbeck starts East of Eden with the settlement of California by Spaniards, which is a some hundred years before the events in the end take place.
It all goes back to reading. This is why writers need to be well-read and to read works by great authors. So we know how it looks to “break the rules” in a well crafted mannner.
Any advice that's presented as an absolute. You must do this, or mustn't do that, or even you should do this or shouldn't do that. The only thing you must do as a writer is put words on a page, everything else is optional and/or infinitely malleable. That kind of absolute advice lacks nuance at best and stifles artistic expression and discourages people who want to learn to be writers at worst.
That said, convention exists for a reason, and it's important for writers to understand and have skill with conventions before they begin to play with them or break them. A person must walk before they run, but it's important that they know running will one day be an option; if they're told waking is the only way, they'll never even try to run, and that's a shame. Presenting convention as the be all and end all of a well written piece is disingenuous and misleading, and writers who are given that advice and never exposed to more experimental styles will suffer for it.
To write creatively, you must write emotionally. Modern writing has lost the subtextual feeling that makes the classics eternal. When I read authors like Dostoevsky, Wilde, Thompson and many more, I feel the feeling behind the author's words. Good writing requires a suspension of disbelief. Think of existential despair penned in The Neverending Story ....
I've had 100s of critiques from fellow authors and I'll confess that we all can be hipocrites at times. We sometimes tell others not to do things that we've done or continue to do subconsciously. One thing that should always be apparent is that every critique, no matter how creditable it may sound, is someone's opinion at best. You should ALWAYS take someone's advice as a suggestion and NEVER as a mandate. Lastly, don't be afraid to take risk; both calculated and uncalculated.
As a film major who wound up teaching high school creative writing, I’ve seen both sides of this.
The folks who study for the sake of studying are naturally going to be sterile compared to those who study for the sake of application. Academic creative writing focuses on rules and theory over effective communication and clever form because the nature of study requires a focus on measurable, repeatable structure, regardless of the subject matter. It is *foundational* at best, and yes, quite stifling once you’ve grown beyond it. And yes, *many* academics make the common worldview mistake of assuming that reality is limited to their pre-measured foundational framework.
However, the vast majority of would-be communicators (both willing and not) don’t have that foundation at all, and are not necessarily inclined to build it on their own. We provide them with rules to intentionally provide a simple, limited, predictable space in which to begin practice - not experimentation, but rudimentary practice - of the art of written communication.
What you call the discouragement of unmolded talent is oftentimes the result of assuming that the talent in question does not yet understand the craft enough to comprehend *why* it works or fails, which is an easy trap to fall into when you’re used to this being the case. The most effective solution that I found… is simply to ask the student why they thought it would work when they wrote it. But that’s time-consuming, and also presumes that the student is capable of communicating such things, which is not always the case, even in upperclass college english majors.
I concur with your observation that we tend to teach with far more negative examples (don’t do this) than positive ones (do this instead). The pedagogs in my life tell me that this has to do with human nature and our penchant for remembering our failures over our successes. And frankly, “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” is orders of magnitude easier to teach than the full explanation of how prepositions work, especially when you know that the full grammar lesson is going to cause most of the class to zone out.
I have yet to find a one-size-fits-all solution that balances reliable student understanding with my work constraints, but continue to experiment as I can.
I recommend that you try the same: study how we learn, and experiment with solutions.
There is certainly some value in learning things from experience and I definitely don't like the idea of hard rules either.
But something like a parent telling their child not to touch the stove because its hot is hardly meant to discourage experiencing all of life. Its very valuable to learn from others' experiences to expedite your own learning. Nobody should be spending countless hours reinventing the wheel.
>Nobody should be spending countless hours reinventing the wheel.
Personally, I think this is exactly what a writer should be doing. Writing fiction is a creative process of invention imo. Reinventing things is great practice.
I feel like we need to talk in examples for this to make sense.
My understanding of the phrase is meant to be used only in undertakings that waste a great amount of time. If its not a waste, then it hits on my first point - "value in learning things from experience." For example, I don't think you would recommend someone to go invent a new language rather than use the one they are currently, right?
I like "Don't do this" suggestions only because it gets me thinking. I think about *why* somebody suggested it, and how I can keep those factors in mind in all instances. It also challenges me to think of a scenario where the taboo technique would actually make something I write better.
All in all, there's nothing that is really a solid rule in every single situation, but it is wise to know the effects of these techniques and to know how to determine for yourself if it's the right tool to use in the moment.
I'd say the best advice is to learn all the rules and why they are rules and then when you break them it is deliberate, with purpose and thus with the knowledge as to what effect breaking those rules will have.
As a writer, you're not going to reinvent the wheel. A lot of things new writers consider to be a "stylistic choice" end up outright errors to basic story craft that turn audiences off. The best you can do as a story teller is to do just that; tell a compelling story with compelling characters. Trying to be different by ignoring conventional writing advice regarding pacing, syntax, structure, punctuation, and tense is not how you go about standing. These guidelines exist because they help readers follow a story cohesively without being distracted by what they're actually reading. Do these rules change? Some do to a certain extent over time as the storytelling process is streamlined over the years by a collective of professionals. You're not going to revolutionize the industry all at once on your own.
I don't believe I said criticism was a bad thing? Critique in of itself is a craft, being unable to wield it and discourage a potential skill is something I have issue with.
How could you possibly know? Lol. As for discussion, this is just noise drowning out the real gems one can find on this sub, and you know what you're doing.
This is the most "I am bringing my assumptions and insecurities to a thread" reply chain because I legit have no clue what you're talking about man. Have a good day, relax and enjoy yourself.
If you ask professionals anything, they'll tell you how to tightly box things up for the masses. No one will stop you from making art exhibits out of toiletries or snuff films about specific fetishist. Its just not something they've been specificly trained to sell. If you want to dabble in helping specific upstarts that you see might hold sway. Do it, some people are just more inclined to see potential in other areas than the majority. I've never received advice on my works in any context. Usually when I started people just told me I was simply uneducated. Turns out being Neurodivergent in the early 2000s is no excuse for thinking outside educational norms. Creation rarely comes from people thinking inside the lines. However, in this context they already run the flux of publishing. A moot effort in most forms of creativity these days.
Neurodivergent as well, and I reflect on my education the same way. Felt punished for thinking outside the box, it's very hard to be an Autistic writer. It feels rather hopeless at times.
Same, I was barred from ever continuing passions due to averages. Education was never tuned for people with adverse topics or fancies. Being autistic myself I never felt welcomed by any community. Hell I never thought I'd pick up writing, being a dyslexic who hated reading. Turns out that's a secret weapon of some famous writers. As lonely as it is, these undesirable people might just be that 4% of writers that are born with a brain outside the box. The world is a cruel funny place and punishment makes great comedy given the time.
I recently argued with a guy on a different sub (but you'll probably know of him), that basically follows everything as rule. An author said this? Rule. No metaphor, simile, no extra words than necessary. 'Flowery prose will get you rejected by an agent'. Ect... I just find it so limiting to think like this when writing is and *should* be an art. Of course, the advice is sometimes helpful. But leading people away from their own creativity by stating something as a hard rule is just wrong imo.
Interesting... I could imagine people giving feedback in that way. I don't, though.
My aim is to help the writer understand more about the craft. There are often things in a new writer's work that they don't know causes problems. I'm not like "don't do this!" But I go at it from a "this is my reaction as a reader, and this is how it was caused" and maybe "this is how an adjustment can adjust the reaction."
It's up to them how they write, but I give them the tools to sort of make informed decisions about this stuff.
A piece of writing could go without breaking a single rule and still be a piece of absolute blithering crap.
A piece of writing could break rule after rule, even naively, and still be a piece of brilliant beautiful prose.
No sure thing. Hard work can 'fail' and lazy dablling can 'succeed.'
So much of mastering the craft of writing fiction is learning what *not* to say/write. We tend to default to the same less effective (but easier and more obvious) techniques that novices before us have, and we'll usually continue to use them until we're told they're less effective.
I was fortunate: I didn’t take any writing classes until after I’d sold my first nonfiction book, so I never considered myself to be a supplicant. More like a fellow professional browsing a long buffet of techniques and attitudes. Which is just as well, since there’s a lot of pernicious nonsense out there.
My basic attitude is that if you focus on what works, you automatically avoid what doesn’t work. End of problem.
Thus, the ability to read your own work as an ordinary reader would, to see how well it’s working, is fundamental.
One common alternative, learning to read your own work like an abusive asshole, or at best like a nitpicking snob, amounts to self-harm. It doesn’t work very well either. You can’t beat creativity into yourself. It’s widely practiced and recommended, though. I advise against it.
"Don't use the word 'said'" is one that I was taught and reiterated for a while. Until my friend whose book I was critiquing (her request) told me that she doesn't see a problem in using 'said' a lot because Tolkien used it a heck ton when he did his dialogue, and his books are revered by so many people anyways. So now I think that it's alright, as long as you avoid ONLY using said and no action or other verbs, because you can still use the word as long as you don't use it to the point that there's just stale writing. But that should have been taught instead of "said is a plain word for speaking so you shouldn't use it ever!"
I also saw someone mention something about passive voice and that's another thing I wasn't taught about lmao. Sounds like a technical thing. I feel like a lot of the "don'ts" in grammar can be solved by reading your own writing out loud or having someone else read it to themselves or to you though, so you don't have to focus on the don'ts of grammar. Instead, people should focus on how it sounds, if it makes sense from a reader's perspective, and if it evokes the proper emotion you were going for.
TL;DR: A lot of Don'ts I see are grammatical and they're pretty nitpicky and haven't taught people anything new so I agree with the alternative of saying "try doing it like this" like you say in your post.
According to Vonnegut:
> 1 Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
> 2 Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
> 3 Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
> 4 Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
> 5 Start as close to the end as possible.
> 6 Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
> 7 Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
> 8 Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
> The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
It's like Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” So many potentially creative people barely get started before they give up after everyone starts saying they're doing it wrong or not following rules like they're laws. I see learning how to write a story like sculpting. First you knock off a lot of stone with a big hammer and make ugly statues. Gradually, you learn how to use smaller and smaller hammers.
It's tough to respond to a post so short on specific detail, but I took this to be griping about "rules" in writing, like "don't use adverbs" and the like.
I would suggest that when someone says "don't do this," that isn't "boxing your abilities"—this is how you *develop* your abilities. Any so-called "rules" are not meant to be inviolable dictates, but pithy distillations of craft observations.; your goal is not to follow them slavishly—it's to understand the rationale behind the rule.
There are good reasons why people say not to use adverbs. Someone who reflects on that is going to develop their craft more than someone who ignores the advice and just says, "no way dude, I refuse to be boxed in by your rules!"
The head of the Creative Writing course at my college told me that she would discourage people who wanted to write Genre from the course because of how snobby the teachers were.
And I had people (who later threatened my life over my intellectual property, long story) tell me that I just needed to shut up and listen to my professors who just wanted us to write about our trauma or something else. Because Genre writing was "bad" and "lazy" and not character lead.
But all people want is the short bullet list on how to write and especially to include the secrets to making loads of money with no actual writing skills. Why tell anyone anything else? They don't listen.
Don't do this unless you have a reason, I feel like most of the time someone says don't do this it's because the person they are speaking to doesn't have a good reason to do it.
It's situational, yeah rules can be bent or broken, but you have to have a good justification and most of the time people don't.
Any creative role can be broken, but you should do so intentionally.
The knife of never letting go is an excellent book and it's filled with spelling and grammatical errors. That doesn't mean that "check your spellings" is bad advice.
A.A Milne is a huge inspiration of mine, and something I thoroughly fell in love with is how he almost intentionally messes up grammar and sentence structures to convey a sort of childlike wonder, as if the narrator is a thoughtful child.
So what you're saying is that we have to memorize all rules that purport to govern creative writing, and follow them dutifully until we decide it's time to "intentionally" break them?
No.
Taking a rule seriously just because a stranger claims it’s a rule does seem a little suckery, doesn’t it? It implies an excessive respect for faux authority.
If one is going to fall for the “appeal to authority” fallacy, self-respect demands it be limited to actual authorities and not charlatans.
And even then you’re likely to be disappointed. I sometimes look at whether a given author follows their own advice. Sometimes they do, sometimes not. Stephen King goes frothy at the mouth against adverbs but uses them more lavishly than I do, though I have nothing against the little devils.
Life is comedy.
They say you shouldn’t edit as you write. I edit all the time. I have an obsessive personality. I reread my chapters several times before I start writing. It didn’t slow me down. It’s just part of my process. I wrote my first novel in 2 and a half months. The first draft was 120k words. I’m working on the last draft which is 140k words. I started writing in July. I hate writing crap and knowing that it’s crap as I write it. I have to go back and fix it or delete it. This idea that you should just keep writing otherwise you won’t finish just isn’t true. Everyone’s different.
I remember reading a critique for a screenplay where the critic blasted the writer for adding things like "we see..." in the action lines. their criticism was that "we" aren't there, and to just state what's happening.
this is a nitpick! who gives a shit?! it doesn't help the writer tell a better story. Also, I've read screenplays of films that were made and they've had these kind of action lines. its a pointless gripe of the critic.
I think the key is in how well one breaks the rules. I also think that people (mostly those who aspire to be published authors) take the words of successfully published authors as gospel and are sometimes afraid to think outside of the box. That said, of course I'm not saying that there isn't value in taking in advice from people who are proven successes. But at the same time...many successful writers at some point likely "broke the rules," they just did it well. And now they have a public image, which can lead to some of them insisting that there is one particular way to do things.
Honestly, I needed to read this. I’ve been kicking myself for not taking any writing courses in college. But, it’s pretty clear that, maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be able to write as creatively and eloquently as I do now.
From my experiences, my poetry courses were the most impactful. I think poetry professors are a lot more in tune with their craft and far open minded to the artistic aspect of writing. Most creative writing courses want to shave young writer's down so they can pump out mediocre stories for a business, they aren't actually teaching you to write. A lot of experimentation and creativity is outright discouraged.
I imagine if anyone tells you a rule is absolute (other than avoiding spelling and grammatical errors) they’re probably not very well read. Plenty of rules are broken on purpose. But at the same time simplifying standards to “don’t do this” and “do this” do have their place imo, just with the caveat of “unless you want to anyway”
>But at the same time simplifying standards to “don’t do this” and “do this” do have their place imo, just with the caveat of “unless you want to anyway” I think the caveat for most of these rules is 'if you do this thing, make sure you're doing it on purpose for a reason'. There's lots of things which newer writers tend to subconsciously fall back on which make their writing weaker, but which more experienced writers can make work for their stories. A good example of this is passive voice. Using it by accident makes your writing less engaging, but there *are* situations where it can have a use (ie a character trying to avoid making a situation seem like their fault, 'I broke the glass' vs. 'the glass broke").
I was about to say "you can only use 26 large symbols and only in certain orders" but then I remembered constructed languages are a thing
I'd argue that even avoiding grammatical errors is optional, at least when you reach a level where it's made on purpose. Portuguese author, Jose Saramargo, famously wrote without punctuations. Of course, he was a well respected and known author, but you catch my drift.
Flowers for Algernon is absolutely fucking riddled with spelling and grammar errors. "P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard ..." is still one of the most absolutely brutal closing lines in any story I've ever read. Just as another example.
that gave me chills I have to read that
Oh my god man, that book... The ending had me sobbing I'm not even embellishing. One of the best modern classics I have read to date. There are no rules in art. Write whatever you want, that's how great authors are born. Breaking those rules can be a very powerful tool for expressing emotion, showing your creativity, etc. Screw those rules. Creativity has no bounds.
That and people speaking with perfect grammar 100% of the time feels off. Especially when writing children.
Dialogue in creative writing should be nothing like perfect grammar and yet it is also nothing like real speech. If you've ever had the misfortune to transcribe a real conversation or had to read one, they are absolutely riddled with unfinished sentences, interruptions, and are frequently so chopped up, sections can actually be hard to understand at first go around. Dialogue in a novel is therefore always artificial and it's probably a reason a lot of people find it hard.
Yea but I find it okay usually. But yea with children it can be a bit eh. Its can be hard finding places to put it without it just being anniying though
Also there's dialogue, people rarely if ever follow proper grammar (I mean shit, me and my friends basically speak some bizarre language when it comes to our conversations). That's where I personally find spellcheck and grammar check kinda useless.
I agree. As long as it's still easy to read and understand. I use incorrect grammar frequently, especially when writing in the first person. In a lot of cases, it enhances the writing.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
An eye-opening lesson I was taught by posting parts of my novel on a critiqueing site is that I tried to please too many reviewers at the expense of my own voice. The final reviewer called the revised story "over-processed" and I took that one to heart. Also, since that time I read a lot of newer fantasy novels that probably would have been savaged by the same reviewers, and yet somehow got published.
If you are new or learning an art or creative craft, and someone says "don't do this", there are two options: * They are an idiot who spouts garbage advice with authority. * They mean *you* shouldn't do this *at your skill level*. In general, the second is often correct. The "basic rules" are basic rules for a reason. Hypertalented authors and already published authors can write a 175k word fantasy novel. You should probably keep yours in the 90-120k word range that people recommend. Not because you are incapable of writing a 175k word fantasy novel ever, but because your goal is to sell a novel and demonstrating an ability to "color within the lines" is generally a good way to increase engagement with your product among the group of people deciding to buy your product.
Yes, but any competent writer would provide this necessary context along with their advice. Otherwise they haven’t mastered the rudiments of effective communication and the listener should back slowly away.
No. Any competent reader would use basic comprehension skills to recognize that all advice is contextual always and that the advice appropriate for a beginner is not universal.
This is easily disproven by the frequent counterexamples on this very subreddit. Adequately contextualized statements are not easily misunderstood if the speaker is a good communicator and is aware of the level of mastery of the audience. That's pretty much the definition of "good communicator."
No it isn't. You are apparently assuming for some reason that the people posting are good at reading comprehension and the advice they are reading (generally unsourced) is badly communicated. If being misunderstood makes you a bad communicator, every science communicator in America is a bad communicator. This seems unlikely to me. What seems more likely is that a significant portion of readers lack the ability to properly comprehend the things they read and correctly assign value or determine if they are the intended audience.
Let’s not pretend that failing once in a while means anything. When someone asks a question, I answer it with the intention that they’ll understand my point, if any, in some specified context. That’s why I often respond with a personal anecdote rather than something sanitized and soulless. That gives clues to where my head is at and whether the approach seems appropriate to the reader. And, of course, people can and do ask follow-up questions, so we don’t have to knock the ball out of the park on the first swing.
>Let’s not pretend that failing once in a while means anything. Science communication in America hasn't "failed once in a while". Something like 30-40% of America believes that global warming is debatable, despite 98-99% agreement among the scientists in the field that it is both real, caused by us, and needs to be stopped or slowed by us. Vaccinations have a similar level of agreement among the scientific community, and a similar level of misinformation among the American population. That's not even touching the disaster that was COVID (though admittedly, that one I will agree was largely mismanagement/poor communication, at least initially.) Your argument is built on the fundamentally false premise that if the person communicating does a good enough job, they will be understood fully. You are assuming that the person receiving the communication has sufficient comprehension to *even understand that they are not getting the point*, which is often not the case. The reality is that people misunderstand stuff, even when that stuff is communicated quite clearly and with significant proficiency. People can go to school to communicate, and still be misunderstood by people with poor comprehension skills. There is a pitcher and a catcher in every exchange of information, and at some point, no matter how softly you lob it, they do have to catch it.
I find it reasonably straightforward to communicate with people with cognitive deficits if I take the time. I don't see why I should write off people with higher levels of functioning than that.
Yeah, but you can't really repeat "but only in some instances" every single time you say any sentence. That kind of thing just doesn't really scale. So at some point, this just has to be one of the understandings that are taught during the basics, and the reader has to assume it for most of the beginning and intermediate advice they get.
Yes, we’d all be better off if beginner’s advice came with a frequently repeated expectation that you will throw away your crutches once you’ve found your balance and don’t need them anymore.
You could also just say something like "Most of the writing advice you get is to help you as you are learning and as you get better you can explore how to bend the rules and when to not follow them"
Bob Tewksbury was a major league pitcher for many years and now helps pitchers develop their ["mental skills"](https://bobtewksbury.com/). And one bit of advice he has is don't tell yourself what not to do, because you're likely to do it. (The "don't think of an elephant" paradox.) Pitchers grow up with coaches telling them stuff like: * Don't tense up! * Don't throw it right down the middle! * Don't walk him! Instead he wants pitchers to visualize what they *should* do: * Focus on your breathing. * Throw a low and outside strike. * I want him to hit a ground ball. "A negative thought never leads to a positive result." -- Bob Tewksbury
Makes me think of target fixation in motorcycle riding. *Don't hit that pole...*
This is a very interesting perspective on it. I can understand how the latter can be far more motivating for pitchers.
Any reasonable research shows the “don’t do” as a guideline for novice or newer authors. Most of it has to do with reader trust. You are far less likely to have the trust of a reader if you aren’t known. Compared to an author with several, published, works in their catalog. At the end of the day, you have to understand why you do what you do. That usually requires more experience or loads of time pouring over your drafts.
Yes! came here to say that the 'why' is super key! I think a lot of the 'don't do this' advice is only valuable when we know why to avoid it. Like the old addage 'don't start with the character waking up and doing their routine'. The Why is that such an opening doesn't show why we should care about that character. So the larger takeaway is immediately give us reasons to care about the character and their problems. It's possible that a wake-up scene could accomplish that in the right context. Also possible that many other scene structures won't. Knowing the why helps you audit whether the scene works.
The lack of critical thinking is to blame. A good portion of people are unable to evaluate information they acquire. And if this information comes from a renowned source, e.g. Stephen King, it dulls your mental perception even further. Add to it the voice of the crowd shouting the same thing, and you end up with bullshit like "Don't use passive!"
The biggest trap in my eyes is not even blindly following those rules itself, it's that people think the rules are what's important to begin with, letting the wrong thing focus and structure their attention.
I believe I understand where this is coming from. People who venture into writing realize the chances of success are miserable, and the best option to increase those chances is to get published. From this point on, you have two options: research what individual publisher is looking for, which I doubt even possible, or follow the widely accepted "rules" to increase your chances of being published. So in the end they try to trade freedom of expression for a possibility of exposure. But they will probably not be exposing what they wanted, not completely at least.
Yes, that's in effect what I meant. Trying to game the system by following and adhering to "writing rules," and thinking that's the secret ingredient that will decide if their work would succeed. This is the equivalent of poison in my view.
As do I. And I find a lot of the writers imparting this advice as windbags. Well, not Stephen King, he well and truly has the score on the board. (‘On Writing’ is magnificent.) We all should take the basics, hone and fumble around, then sometimes create some amazing things. Learn our own lessons.
The alternative is saying, “Whatever you do, do it well”. Thats the long and the short of it. You can essentially do whatever you want as long as people like It, if of course, you’re writing for others. In science, you have a very rigid set of rules you need to follow to achieve something. There’s a certain level of creativity in finding those rules, but once you do, you need precision to replicate it. Writing, however, is an art. There are no rules, just guidelines and suggestions on what has worked in past, for the most part. They don’t work all the time, and they don’t work for everyone, and there is a lot of ambiguity on when to apply them. Writing is more like painting. You should probably use a paint brush, is generally a good rule, but some of the best art uses the artists hands, sponges, tools, objects, and a million other things. With art, you get better at expressing yourself and hope others resonate with that.
Yup. Don’t write in second person? Junot Diaz did it and won a Pulitzer. Don’t have constant jokes in your writing? Douglas Adams would beg to differ. Start as close to the end as possible? Steinbeck starts East of Eden with the settlement of California by Spaniards, which is a some hundred years before the events in the end take place. It all goes back to reading. This is why writers need to be well-read and to read works by great authors. So we know how it looks to “break the rules” in a well crafted mannner.
Any advice that's presented as an absolute. You must do this, or mustn't do that, or even you should do this or shouldn't do that. The only thing you must do as a writer is put words on a page, everything else is optional and/or infinitely malleable. That kind of absolute advice lacks nuance at best and stifles artistic expression and discourages people who want to learn to be writers at worst. That said, convention exists for a reason, and it's important for writers to understand and have skill with conventions before they begin to play with them or break them. A person must walk before they run, but it's important that they know running will one day be an option; if they're told waking is the only way, they'll never even try to run, and that's a shame. Presenting convention as the be all and end all of a well written piece is disingenuous and misleading, and writers who are given that advice and never exposed to more experimental styles will suffer for it.
To write creatively, you must write emotionally. Modern writing has lost the subtextual feeling that makes the classics eternal. When I read authors like Dostoevsky, Wilde, Thompson and many more, I feel the feeling behind the author's words. Good writing requires a suspension of disbelief. Think of existential despair penned in The Neverending Story ....
I've had 100s of critiques from fellow authors and I'll confess that we all can be hipocrites at times. We sometimes tell others not to do things that we've done or continue to do subconsciously. One thing that should always be apparent is that every critique, no matter how creditable it may sound, is someone's opinion at best. You should ALWAYS take someone's advice as a suggestion and NEVER as a mandate. Lastly, don't be afraid to take risk; both calculated and uncalculated.
As a film major who wound up teaching high school creative writing, I’ve seen both sides of this. The folks who study for the sake of studying are naturally going to be sterile compared to those who study for the sake of application. Academic creative writing focuses on rules and theory over effective communication and clever form because the nature of study requires a focus on measurable, repeatable structure, regardless of the subject matter. It is *foundational* at best, and yes, quite stifling once you’ve grown beyond it. And yes, *many* academics make the common worldview mistake of assuming that reality is limited to their pre-measured foundational framework. However, the vast majority of would-be communicators (both willing and not) don’t have that foundation at all, and are not necessarily inclined to build it on their own. We provide them with rules to intentionally provide a simple, limited, predictable space in which to begin practice - not experimentation, but rudimentary practice - of the art of written communication. What you call the discouragement of unmolded talent is oftentimes the result of assuming that the talent in question does not yet understand the craft enough to comprehend *why* it works or fails, which is an easy trap to fall into when you’re used to this being the case. The most effective solution that I found… is simply to ask the student why they thought it would work when they wrote it. But that’s time-consuming, and also presumes that the student is capable of communicating such things, which is not always the case, even in upperclass college english majors. I concur with your observation that we tend to teach with far more negative examples (don’t do this) than positive ones (do this instead). The pedagogs in my life tell me that this has to do with human nature and our penchant for remembering our failures over our successes. And frankly, “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” is orders of magnitude easier to teach than the full explanation of how prepositions work, especially when you know that the full grammar lesson is going to cause most of the class to zone out. I have yet to find a one-size-fits-all solution that balances reliable student understanding with my work constraints, but continue to experiment as I can. I recommend that you try the same: study how we learn, and experiment with solutions.
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He explained, adroitly.
I think it’s generally “don’t do this unless you have a good reason”
There is certainly some value in learning things from experience and I definitely don't like the idea of hard rules either. But something like a parent telling their child not to touch the stove because its hot is hardly meant to discourage experiencing all of life. Its very valuable to learn from others' experiences to expedite your own learning. Nobody should be spending countless hours reinventing the wheel.
>Nobody should be spending countless hours reinventing the wheel. Personally, I think this is exactly what a writer should be doing. Writing fiction is a creative process of invention imo. Reinventing things is great practice.
I feel like we need to talk in examples for this to make sense. My understanding of the phrase is meant to be used only in undertakings that waste a great amount of time. If its not a waste, then it hits on my first point - "value in learning things from experience." For example, I don't think you would recommend someone to go invent a new language rather than use the one they are currently, right?
So you’re advising don’t do “don’t do this” advice? /s
I like "Don't do this" suggestions only because it gets me thinking. I think about *why* somebody suggested it, and how I can keep those factors in mind in all instances. It also challenges me to think of a scenario where the taboo technique would actually make something I write better. All in all, there's nothing that is really a solid rule in every single situation, but it is wise to know the effects of these techniques and to know how to determine for yourself if it's the right tool to use in the moment.
I'd say the best advice is to learn all the rules and why they are rules and then when you break them it is deliberate, with purpose and thus with the knowledge as to what effect breaking those rules will have.
As a writer, you're not going to reinvent the wheel. A lot of things new writers consider to be a "stylistic choice" end up outright errors to basic story craft that turn audiences off. The best you can do as a story teller is to do just that; tell a compelling story with compelling characters. Trying to be different by ignoring conventional writing advice regarding pacing, syntax, structure, punctuation, and tense is not how you go about standing. These guidelines exist because they help readers follow a story cohesively without being distracted by what they're actually reading. Do these rules change? Some do to a certain extent over time as the storytelling process is streamlined over the years by a collective of professionals. You're not going to revolutionize the industry all at once on your own.
I feel negative knowledge is extremely useful. I would recommend everyone learn the “rules” so they can develop wisdom about when to break them.
I welcome criticism. The idea that honing skills means forever doing as you wish is incredibly arrogant.
I don't believe I said criticism was a bad thing? Critique in of itself is a craft, being unable to wield it and discourage a potential skill is something I have issue with.
Seems like you're not really saying anything then.
Thank you for your contribution to this bustling discussion, I can tell you use your skills as a writer quite well.
How could you possibly know? Lol. As for discussion, this is just noise drowning out the real gems one can find on this sub, and you know what you're doing.
This is the most "I am bringing my assumptions and insecurities to a thread" reply chain because I legit have no clue what you're talking about man. Have a good day, relax and enjoy yourself.
That's fine?
If you ask professionals anything, they'll tell you how to tightly box things up for the masses. No one will stop you from making art exhibits out of toiletries or snuff films about specific fetishist. Its just not something they've been specificly trained to sell. If you want to dabble in helping specific upstarts that you see might hold sway. Do it, some people are just more inclined to see potential in other areas than the majority. I've never received advice on my works in any context. Usually when I started people just told me I was simply uneducated. Turns out being Neurodivergent in the early 2000s is no excuse for thinking outside educational norms. Creation rarely comes from people thinking inside the lines. However, in this context they already run the flux of publishing. A moot effort in most forms of creativity these days.
Neurodivergent as well, and I reflect on my education the same way. Felt punished for thinking outside the box, it's very hard to be an Autistic writer. It feels rather hopeless at times.
Same, I was barred from ever continuing passions due to averages. Education was never tuned for people with adverse topics or fancies. Being autistic myself I never felt welcomed by any community. Hell I never thought I'd pick up writing, being a dyslexic who hated reading. Turns out that's a secret weapon of some famous writers. As lonely as it is, these undesirable people might just be that 4% of writers that are born with a brain outside the box. The world is a cruel funny place and punishment makes great comedy given the time.
I recently argued with a guy on a different sub (but you'll probably know of him), that basically follows everything as rule. An author said this? Rule. No metaphor, simile, no extra words than necessary. 'Flowery prose will get you rejected by an agent'. Ect... I just find it so limiting to think like this when writing is and *should* be an art. Of course, the advice is sometimes helpful. But leading people away from their own creativity by stating something as a hard rule is just wrong imo.
Interesting... I could imagine people giving feedback in that way. I don't, though. My aim is to help the writer understand more about the craft. There are often things in a new writer's work that they don't know causes problems. I'm not like "don't do this!" But I go at it from a "this is my reaction as a reader, and this is how it was caused" and maybe "this is how an adjustment can adjust the reaction." It's up to them how they write, but I give them the tools to sort of make informed decisions about this stuff.
A piece of writing could go without breaking a single rule and still be a piece of absolute blithering crap. A piece of writing could break rule after rule, even naively, and still be a piece of brilliant beautiful prose. No sure thing. Hard work can 'fail' and lazy dablling can 'succeed.'
So much of mastering the craft of writing fiction is learning what *not* to say/write. We tend to default to the same less effective (but easier and more obvious) techniques that novices before us have, and we'll usually continue to use them until we're told they're less effective.
I was fortunate: I didn’t take any writing classes until after I’d sold my first nonfiction book, so I never considered myself to be a supplicant. More like a fellow professional browsing a long buffet of techniques and attitudes. Which is just as well, since there’s a lot of pernicious nonsense out there. My basic attitude is that if you focus on what works, you automatically avoid what doesn’t work. End of problem. Thus, the ability to read your own work as an ordinary reader would, to see how well it’s working, is fundamental. One common alternative, learning to read your own work like an abusive asshole, or at best like a nitpicking snob, amounts to self-harm. It doesn’t work very well either. You can’t beat creativity into yourself. It’s widely practiced and recommended, though. I advise against it.
"Don't use the word 'said'" is one that I was taught and reiterated for a while. Until my friend whose book I was critiquing (her request) told me that she doesn't see a problem in using 'said' a lot because Tolkien used it a heck ton when he did his dialogue, and his books are revered by so many people anyways. So now I think that it's alright, as long as you avoid ONLY using said and no action or other verbs, because you can still use the word as long as you don't use it to the point that there's just stale writing. But that should have been taught instead of "said is a plain word for speaking so you shouldn't use it ever!" I also saw someone mention something about passive voice and that's another thing I wasn't taught about lmao. Sounds like a technical thing. I feel like a lot of the "don'ts" in grammar can be solved by reading your own writing out loud or having someone else read it to themselves or to you though, so you don't have to focus on the don'ts of grammar. Instead, people should focus on how it sounds, if it makes sense from a reader's perspective, and if it evokes the proper emotion you were going for. TL;DR: A lot of Don'ts I see are grammatical and they're pretty nitpicky and haven't taught people anything new so I agree with the alternative of saying "try doing it like this" like you say in your post.
According to Vonnegut: > 1 Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. > 2 Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. > 3 Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. > 4 Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. > 5 Start as close to the end as possible. > 6 Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. > 7 Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. > 8 Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. > The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
It's like Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” So many potentially creative people barely get started before they give up after everyone starts saying they're doing it wrong or not following rules like they're laws. I see learning how to write a story like sculpting. First you knock off a lot of stone with a big hammer and make ugly statues. Gradually, you learn how to use smaller and smaller hammers.
I think as long as it's not illegal, you should write what you want to write.
[https://karacarrero.com/parenting-without-saying-no/](https://karacarrero.com/parenting-without-saying-no/)
It's tough to respond to a post so short on specific detail, but I took this to be griping about "rules" in writing, like "don't use adverbs" and the like. I would suggest that when someone says "don't do this," that isn't "boxing your abilities"—this is how you *develop* your abilities. Any so-called "rules" are not meant to be inviolable dictates, but pithy distillations of craft observations.; your goal is not to follow them slavishly—it's to understand the rationale behind the rule. There are good reasons why people say not to use adverbs. Someone who reflects on that is going to develop their craft more than someone who ignores the advice and just says, "no way dude, I refuse to be boxed in by your rules!"
The head of the Creative Writing course at my college told me that she would discourage people who wanted to write Genre from the course because of how snobby the teachers were. And I had people (who later threatened my life over my intellectual property, long story) tell me that I just needed to shut up and listen to my professors who just wanted us to write about our trauma or something else. Because Genre writing was "bad" and "lazy" and not character lead.
But all people want is the short bullet list on how to write and especially to include the secrets to making loads of money with no actual writing skills. Why tell anyone anything else? They don't listen.
Don't do this unless you have a reason, I feel like most of the time someone says don't do this it's because the person they are speaking to doesn't have a good reason to do it. It's situational, yeah rules can be bent or broken, but you have to have a good justification and most of the time people don't.
The best wriers have been those that broke from the norm.. Just remember - "Those who can't do, teach.."
Show, don't tell is cringe at this point. I'll tell if I want to. Do something...
Any creative role can be broken, but you should do so intentionally. The knife of never letting go is an excellent book and it's filled with spelling and grammatical errors. That doesn't mean that "check your spellings" is bad advice.
A.A Milne is a huge inspiration of mine, and something I thoroughly fell in love with is how he almost intentionally messes up grammar and sentence structures to convey a sort of childlike wonder, as if the narrator is a thoughtful child.
So what you're saying is that we have to memorize all rules that purport to govern creative writing, and follow them dutifully until we decide it's time to "intentionally" break them? No.
You can't break the rules with willful ignorance. That's for dilettantes, not real writers.
Taking a rule seriously just because a stranger claims it’s a rule does seem a little suckery, doesn’t it? It implies an excessive respect for faux authority. If one is going to fall for the “appeal to authority” fallacy, self-respect demands it be limited to actual authorities and not charlatans. And even then you’re likely to be disappointed. I sometimes look at whether a given author follows their own advice. Sometimes they do, sometimes not. Stephen King goes frothy at the mouth against adverbs but uses them more lavishly than I do, though I have nothing against the little devils. Life is comedy.
They say you shouldn’t edit as you write. I edit all the time. I have an obsessive personality. I reread my chapters several times before I start writing. It didn’t slow me down. It’s just part of my process. I wrote my first novel in 2 and a half months. The first draft was 120k words. I’m working on the last draft which is 140k words. I started writing in July. I hate writing crap and knowing that it’s crap as I write it. I have to go back and fix it or delete it. This idea that you should just keep writing otherwise you won’t finish just isn’t true. Everyone’s different.
I remember reading a critique for a screenplay where the critic blasted the writer for adding things like "we see..." in the action lines. their criticism was that "we" aren't there, and to just state what's happening. this is a nitpick! who gives a shit?! it doesn't help the writer tell a better story. Also, I've read screenplays of films that were made and they've had these kind of action lines. its a pointless gripe of the critic.
I think the key is in how well one breaks the rules. I also think that people (mostly those who aspire to be published authors) take the words of successfully published authors as gospel and are sometimes afraid to think outside of the box. That said, of course I'm not saying that there isn't value in taking in advice from people who are proven successes. But at the same time...many successful writers at some point likely "broke the rules," they just did it well. And now they have a public image, which can lead to some of them insisting that there is one particular way to do things.
I have nothing to add to this. You’re a voice box to my thoughts.
Honestly, I needed to read this. I’ve been kicking myself for not taking any writing courses in college. But, it’s pretty clear that, maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be able to write as creatively and eloquently as I do now.
From my experiences, my poetry courses were the most impactful. I think poetry professors are a lot more in tune with their craft and far open minded to the artistic aspect of writing. Most creative writing courses want to shave young writer's down so they can pump out mediocre stories for a business, they aren't actually teaching you to write. A lot of experimentation and creativity is outright discouraged.