There were two major milestones in my young writing life.
One: my first short story, written when I was nine. It was five pages long, and ended with the most perplexing deus ex machina I’d wager has ever been written.
Two: my first attempt at a novel, when I was fourteen. I still have this painstakingly-handwritten monstrosity. It’s an ambling, rambling mish-mash of my three favourite books at the time – and not in a good way. It’s also a mess because originally I named the main male character after a boy I had a crush on, and later I had to go back and change every instance of his name with a Sharpie before I let a friend at school read it.
What do these two pieces of art have in common? They were terrible. I can’t even impart all the ways in which they sucked without letting you read them – and that’s never, ever going to happen. (I’ve left strict instructions for my family that they’re to be burned upon my death.)
But they have something else in common, something more important: my teachers at the time encouraged me to write them. These scholastic angels didn’t correct my ideas or the way in which I decided to tell the stories. They didn’t tell me the characters were unbelievable or the settings two-dimensional. They did nothing more than correct any wayward spelling, and let me find my own way through.
I’ll always be grateful to those teachers. Because if there’s one thing guaranteed to kill creativity, it’s a whole bunch of mind-numbing rules.
Why The Rules Suck
In my travels online I see articles upon articles announcing all kinds of writing rules, both for fiction and non-fiction – what words you must always use, what words you must never use, that you must never swear or use slang, how long your work must be, how short, how funny, how serious. I see people saying you should never write in the second person, or that first person is amateurish.
Basically, if it exists, someone has made a rule for it – and someone else has made one against it.
Yet, if there’s one thing I’m sure about above all else, it’s this:
There’s More Than One Way to Write
Writing isn’t scientific. It isn’t a maths problem with one single solution. Sure, you can study sentence structures that dazzle or headlines that increase open rates. Those things help. But they’re not the only pieces of the puzzle. When you read great writing – Truly Great Writing that stays with you for months or years or lifetimes after you’ve read it – there’s more going on than a well-chosen headline and an intimate understanding of the Oxford comma.
Truly Great Writing has soul. It has passion. It’s borne from a writer’s own experiences, their own pain and struggles. It’s the sum of every word the writer has scrawled down previously, just like the article you’re reading is the sum of my heinous attempts at writing when I was a child, plus everything I ever wrote after that.
This isn’t to say that you should never try to make your writing better. You should always do that, approximately as often as you take a breath in. A writer’s style develops partially from reading and learning, but also partially from experimenting – from writing terrible prose and reading back on it in disgust, vowing to do better next time.
It doesn’t develop from reading online articles from irrelevant sources who claim you should NEVER use the word very in your writing. How very closed-minded. Every word we have in the English language is beautiful and useful – provided you know how to use it, and can do it in your own style, with passion and purpose.
I Like Your Style
(Yes, You – The One Skimming and Only Reading the Sub-Headlines)
I happen to love slang words and swear words and obscure words and archaic words. I love language in all its forms and putting all the elements together in a way that pleases me, that moves me, that excites me – that’s what makes me put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, every day. It’s what keeps me going when I’m tired and spent and think I’ll never be as good as I want to be.
Rules have the opposite effect. They make you second guess yourself, make you delete what felt right in order to follow what you think you’re meant to do. And that’s the worst possible thing you can do in your writing.
What it should be about is how it feels. It should be intuitive and flow naturally to you. To YOU. Not to me. Not to your best friend. Not to Miss Never Use Very In Your Work Ever. If you like the word very, and want to write a piece where very is the first word of every sentence, then go for it. Call it “Very is the Very Very” and go to town.
I say shirk the rules. I say break the rules. I say stick your fingers in your ears and say “la la la la la” at the rules. I say give the rules the finger and insult the rules’ mother.
Because it’s only when you break out of the constraints others try to press upon you, when you decide the rules are merely suggestions you never have to follow, that you will be free to find your own style and create writing that reflects your authentic self. And that, my friends, is where you’ll find the real magic.