Beginners can break rules too?
I came across several disciplines of writing which one must know while writing (especially beginners), concerning narrative conventions and the rules of story logic.
Some of the sources for this include On Writing, some internet articles and precious advice from Writers SE answers. I noticed that these focus on giving advice to beginners. Answers explained the exceptions (made by the expert writers) of what they had really asked and at the same time advised that they should go with the traditional rules only. Some include:
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The "Rules" of writing
experienced writers will respond by saying "there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to writing", or "rules are made to be broken"
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When is it okay to tell?
If you look at the great authors, they break the rules all the time
Why does one really need rules of logic and narrative convention? If there is a discipline that is often broken by the experts themselves, then why should a beginner follow it?
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I don't think this is in any way specific to writing. For example in physics, there are many wannabe-Einsteins who think that if you just claim the previous physicists were wrong and dream up your own theory, you can revolutionize physics. The result are crackpot theories, because unlike Einstein, those people didn't really know the physical theories which they tried to replace, nor did they have a clear idea of where those theories have their shortcomings, and where the new theory has to reproduce the old theories instead of completely replacing them.
Similarly, modern music has violated many principles which have been considered essential before. Yet you'll make no good music by just putting one note after the other while completely ignoring all the rules.
Maybe a good metaphor is a swamp, where some safe ways have been marked. If you just go astray in the swamp, you're likely to sink in and die. Slavishly following the known safe ways will make you survive, but restricts yourself to the same ways lots of others have gone before. But initially, it is certainly a good idea to keep on the same ways, but at the same time observe the swamp, figuring out why those ways are safe, observing others who leave the way and yet cross the swamp without problems, and learn also from those who left the way and didn't succeed. Over time, you'll learn to understand the swamp, to recognize how to determine safe ways even if they are not marked, and how to pass less safe ways without sinking in the swamp. Eventually you'll be experienced enough that you don't care any more about the marked ways, because you know quite well how to survive in the swamp without them. But if you had not cared about those marked ways in the very beginning, you'd at least have had a much harder time learning how to safely cross the swamp on your own, if you ever managed it at all.
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When to break the rules? When you know what you're doing.
Breaking the rules "the good way" always serves some purpose. It's never done "just because". Writing is all about eliciting certain moods and feelings in the reader, and the rules prevent jarring, unpleasant surprises, breaking of immersion, and countless other errors that simply take away from the experience.
But sometimes you want to shake the reader out of the comfort zone. Sometimes you want to convey some message on subliminal level without ever alliterating it in the text. Sometimes you want to surprise the reader. If a rule stands in your way to do so, break it.
For example, there's the rule about giving good, detailed descriptions of locations when they are new scenes of the story. You're writing in first person perspective. Your protagonist steps out onto balcony overlooking the street, to take the city in. You should follow the rule to the dot. Dynamics, sounds, colors, people and their clothes, smell, lighting, little scenes of slice of life playing out down in the streets. The scene serves presenting the city and the protagonist takes time to observe it. Your description is equivalent of a detailed oil painting of the scene.
Now, your protagonist is wounded, exhausted, possibly concussed, and on the run, escaping onto a balcony. It would be entirely silly to describe it in such deep detail. Yes, there's assault of color, people milling many floors below, maybe downpour - but the protagonist is definitely in no condition to pay attention to details. Your description will be skeletal, a stick figure sketch. It would be completely unacceptable in general storytelling contexts, but here you break the rule to emphasize the urgency, the bad condition of the protagonist, and how the scene below simply doesn't matter right now.
Now a beginner will likely present such a stick figure sketch regardless of context; they want to go on with the story and just lack patience to write out what is so vivid and obvious in their imagination they deem it doesn't require detailed description. As result, the world lacks depth, the reader grasps for detail trying to imagine the scene, often misguided into believing it to be something entirely different. It's a beginner's error resulting from negligent violation of the rule resulting from laziness or ignorance. As opposed to the above - purposeful violation of the rule for specific effect.
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This is what I learned the hard way.
The rules are there to support you in getting from A to B and do a decent job regardless of skill level. Following a set of tried and trusted rules allows you as the author room to concentrate on the aspects of a story that you find interesting. Following rules is like a less restrictive form of re-telling an established story, re-tellings give even more support as you already know who the characters are and the events that happen in the story. Sometimes this is a big help if the story itself is weird, obscure or unhelpful, for example I recently completed a project to retell the story of Taliesin and was surprised how much challenge was left despite having full knowledge of the shape of the story's events. Retelling Snow White may not give you so much latitude (although lord knows Hollywood's had a good old go at it over and over recently).
People moan constantly about formula plots, tired characters and obvious plot points. What this tells you is that even writing a story that follows the rules is hard. Hollywood films almost exclusively follow formula and genre approaches but rarely do we get a Star Wars, a Back to the Future, a Matrix or an Iron Man out of the sausage factory. Stories that deliberately flout the rules or work hard against them tend to take a long while to find an audience, if they do at all.
Like a lot of writers I started out by tearing up a rulebook I'd never actually read, just heard tell of as some sort of strait-jacket for creativity. This hypothetical rule book isn't any such thing. Don't get me wrong there are strait jackets for creativity, for example feeling you should, as a writer, be trying to produce a clone of the current genre-fic flavour du jour to please an audience perceived to be highly intolerant of any thing that isn't a melodrama crammed to the gills with soap operatic vampires. These scenarios are creatively restrictive and artistically questionable. Writers rules are no such thing, they are, rather, a bank of accumulated wisdom intended to add a smoothness to your working process until a time where you instinctively know all the rules and so departing from them always fulfils a specific artistic agenda of which you, the artist, are fully in control.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12609. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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