4 Bizarre Rules in Writing that You can Ignore

This has never made any sense to me whatsoever. A creative platform that has guidelines you have to follow and for what? Because they don’t like it, because of taste. The people that usually establish these rules are usually writers recognised for their talents — whether by themselves, or others. By saying ‘the rules of writing’, they are actually saying ‘if you want to write like me and experience the same success as me then…’. It’s all just glorified way to talk about style while feeling important at the same time

Now, I’m not saying forsake all rules because you are living your own life and therefore you need to be entirely unique. Not only is that impossible because of the influence of what you read and your subconscious but also rules help set guidelines but instead of forcing them down every other writer’s throat just set up rules for yourself. Do you want to write more like Hemingway? Make it part of your style to eliminate all adjectives from your work.

“Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change.”

Therese Anne Fowler

Here are some of the ‘rules’ that you can break:

1. Get to the Point

In our day and age, people often want things to be fast and more convenient to increase productivity. That is why most editors follow this rule. The rule is in place to eliminate redundancies but what it shouldn’t be eliminating is descriptions.

Tolkien often wrote pages describing one scene and that is completely fine. If you feel like you want to give the detail of your imagination then it is good, even encouraged. That is after all why we have things like descriptive writing. The secret in it lies to describing relevant objects/people/scenes and doing it in an interesting way.

That being said, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to write an essay just to describe something. If you like leaving it to the reader’s imagination then that’s fine too

2. To Write, One Must Turn Off their Internal Editor

Well, no. You see that’s not how it works. Too many times I have done this, let my writing sit only to come back to it and feel completely dejected because what I found in my pages weren’t what I had in mind. You need to think carefully about what you want to say because your words and how you present them matter. You need to put things down to try and if they work then great and you can come back and edit them but don’t turn off the voice that is trying to help you. What you shouldn’t do is go back over your work if you haven’t finished.

I think people sometimes take this advice too seriously, myself included. Putting down words that you think are the best, help you choose the next ones. It’s alright to dwell on paragraphs and sentences, it doesn’t matter if you take long to choose your words carefully, but choosing them carefully was what you did. Anyone can tell your story but how do you want to tell it?

3. Don’t use passive voice

If you’ve ever followed this advice then you realise that you tend to run into a little problem. While I do agree that I personally wouldn’t use passive voice through the entirety of my novel, it does have its uses (unless you have something interesting in mind then go on, break those rules).

The main purpose of passive voice is to place emphasis on the action and not the subject. Which means it’s great for you don’t know who did it or don’t want people to know who did it.

4. Show don’t tell

This one makes me especially angry. Everyone is always throwing this around like it should be worshipped. The truth is that this is rarely ever relevant, the exception being mostly personality and feelings. Rather than saying ‘He was furious’, give the physiological signs of anger: increased heart rate, clenching of jaws and other muscles, headaches and stomach pains, dizziness, sweating, feeling of hot in the cheeks and neck and shaking.

But where this rule doesn’t work is with character motives and goals, which is what drives the story. If you don’t tell your audience what your character wants to do and why then you are going to get questions like: But why is he doing that? What does he want?

Often times this advice is so aggressively infused into our subconscious that we think that it applies to everything and it doesn’t and it shouldn’t, so don’t.

The rules that have been ‘set in stone’ can often make writers feel like they are missing something or their writing doesn’t seem as good. This is a thing that you make, with your time and often your money, do what you want with it and don’t take advice to seriously; write what you would like to read, even if it means creating your own rules.

Happy New years! I hope that you can look back on the previous year with joy and if not (I think most of us), let’s take it into our hands to make 2017 our year.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section. Even if you completely disagree, I would love to hear it. If you have anything you want me to talk about please feel free to suggest it.