The Secret Writing Rule Book…and Why to Ignore It
From Anne R. Allen’s Blog:
Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”
But pretty much everybody you meet in this business will tell you there are a whole bunch. (One is “never start a sentence with ‘there are’” —so watch yourself, Mr. Maugham.)
I recently read a great post by editor Jamie Chavez about what she calls the Secret Fiction Rule book. She points out that nobody knows where these “rules” come from, or why so many great books have become classics without following a single one. But that doesn’t seem to matter. You will hear this stuff repeated over and over again at conferences, critique groups and forums.
Take them all with several shakers of salt. Most are true some of the time, but if you follow them rigidly, you’ll end up with wooden, formulaic prose that nobody is going to want to read.
Here are ten of my unfavorites.
. . . .
2. Eliminate all adverbs. Seriously? Even when you’re writing in the voice of someone who is, um, rather vague?
3. No prologues. Yeah, I know I’ve preached the no-prologue gospel because so many beginning authors use them for unreadable info-dumping, but my readers keep pointing out that George R. R. Martin seems to do OK and he loves them. I think it depends on your genre and what your readers expect. Personally, I’ll skip it, but I’m probably not your target audience.
. . . .
6. Cut the last paragraph of every chapter. This annoys me no end. I write great last paragraphs.
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog
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The only writing rules I follow are Heinlein’s rules. The rest are up for grabs.
I have always felt most of this advice was stupid. If you look carefully, most of the people giving this advice are:
1. Agents & Editors
2. New writers
3. Social Media “experts”
Basically, people who don’t make a living writing. It is sad really, like a bunch of virgins giving sex advice.
As someone said here (passiveVoice), if you say X author broke these rules all the time, you are told “You are not X. Don’t try to copy him. Besides, X is successful, s/he can do what they want”, ignoring the fact that X was once an unknown, and if X’s books are successful despite not following these made up rules, then maybe the rules are stupid.
The only rule I follow is: Write a good book, the sort I would enjoy writing and reading.
Couldn’t agree more. Are the “rules” good to follow as general guidelines? Sure. However, there are times when it makes lots of sense to go your own way.
Given what the folks you’ve listed have rejected that has gone on to be great, as well as what they’ve bought that has been crap, I don’t take their advice too seriously anyway.
The only rule is, Never Bore the Reader.
Agreed. The rest are more like guidelines, which you get to ignore if you’re sufficiently talented or sufficiently famous. They’re probably good if you’re a relatively unknown author, writing commercial fiction that you want to have published by a major publisher, but beyond that, who knows? It’s like telling an aspiring musician, “Stick to 4/4 time, major keys for happy songs, minor keys for sad ones, no more than five chords, and keep each song less than four minutes.”
Rule #11 – Zombies aren’t allowed to have sex.
I break that one ALL the time!
These are great!
I totally agree with every one, but especially the one about adverbs. I LOVE adverbs. The right adverb at the right time is Golden.
I think Golden is an adjective in this case…
Abeth, you’re right! Sorry!
I meant, goldenly, of course.
An exercise I sometimes engage in is to find an example in the writings of great authors where one or more of these rules is broken, & sometimes following that up by trying to rewrite the passage without breaking that rule. (An example would be Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “Killdozer”, which begins with a prologue & ends with an instance of deus ex machina: try rewriting that story without using either to solve important issues they address.)
Another exercise is to read a great author who breaks a common rule & consider whether said author *should* have followed the rules. (An example of this is Cormac McCarthy’s allergy to apostrophes & quotation marks.)
Too bad the rule makers never attempt these exercises before they explain so-&-so is allowed to break the rules because he or she “is a great writer”. :-/
Thanks much for the shout-out, PG! And Suzan, I’m so upset to hear that rule. What am I going to do about my WIP, 50 Shades of Zombies?
You’re welcome, Anne. Good post.
Anne, editor Mitzi Szereto is currently taking submissions for her zombie erotica anthology.
http://mitziszereto.com/call-for-submissions/
What’s wrong is right again. LOL
OK, so I cut the last paragraph. Now, I still have a last paragraph. So I cut it. And – surprise – I still have a last paragraph. And I cut it. And… Hang on, that was my first paragraph…
Blame the Xmas Eve glass of champagne…