Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/12609
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 8