A lot of bloggers are commenting on the collections of Rules for Writing the Guardian UK posted.
My favorites are the first one by AL Kennedy:
1 Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
and the tenth by Michael Moorcock:
10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.
I think that's what it comes down to, especially with all the many "don't" rules which pepper the lists. Don't use adverbs, ever. Don't use any speaking verb but "said" and even that one sucks. Using similes or metaphors, ever, is so bad you should be embarassed. Don't this, that or the other thing, ever-ever! Obviously some successful writers subscribe to these rules, and find them useful, but if everyone followed them, everyone's work would look and sound exactly alike.
Kudos to the writers who acknowledged that there are exceptions, and that different writers are different, and that that's okay.
My first rule: Anyone who says they have an unbreakable writing rule, or a method or approach which Every Real Writer must follow for success, is full of shit.
Angie
6 comments:
What you said. The "Rules" are just rules of thumb to help those still trying to get their feet under them and to help you think about what might not work, or keep in mind what's fashionable in writing. Nothing more than that, IMO.
WW -- right, there are all these rules of thumb, or techniques which help someone, and they're all availableto try. The idea, IMO, is to try a wide variety of ideas and rules and methods so you can see what works for you. Just blindly copying every idea or opinion a favorite writer espouses might work for Joe Newbie, but then again it might not. We each have to figure out what works for us, for who we are and what we write and what we're trying to accomplish and what we have to work with.
Angie
For me there is one unbreakable rule: spelling and basic grammar.
By basic, I don't mean the odd split infinitive but stuff like subject/verb agreement.
Bernita -- just to be ornery, what if you're writing dialogue for a character who's uneducated, or speaks English as a foreign language?
Even the best rules have exceptions, although the other 99% of the time I agree that proper spelling and grammar are essential to every writer. It's one of those cases where you have to know the rule, know what it is and how it works and what it's there for and what it's trying to achieve, before you can understand when and how to break it properly.
Angie
Have heard horror stories about copy editors who "correct" dialect/slang/etc. in dialogue.
Bernita -- gads, me too! What a horror. :(
When I was working in an online game (text-based, so most of it was writing) I remember having to fight with our QA people over room descriptions on a fairly regular basis. They were all apparently going by the strict rules of formal composition-type writing, and were unfamiliar with any wide variety of fiction, particularly the classics, or anything from other traditions, etc. They kept changing things like "dim and cold and barren" to "dim, cold and barren," because it should have a comma there, or completing the occasional incomplete sentence included for the sake of mood or atmosphere. [facepalm] Luckily their supervisor was a bit better-read than most of her trenches-level staff, and an appeal generally went in the direction of sanity and good writing. It was annoying to have to fight those battles over and over, though.
Angie
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