Daily writing prompt

Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

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A short article about understanding the rules of writing, and how and when to break them.

When I think about writing a new piece, I always remember this quote. There are distinct rules when writing fiction. Spelling and grammar are obviously well established, alongside sentence construction, not forgetting all the rules that publishers set out in terms of the layout and format of your work. There is a a clear view about how things should be done and in order to have any success, you need to be somewhat of a master of all of these. Stephen King in his book On Writing uses the analogy of a toolbox. You have to have all the tools in your box with you, because you never know which tool you might need.

And yet, (you see what I did there, starting a sentence with ‘And’, controversial!) the literary canon is littered with bold examples of writers who have bent the rules to suit their purpose, some you might argue have even broken the rules, burned them, then thrown the ashes in the sea. But not before they understood what the rules were and how to use them. Cormac McCarthy rarely uses any punctuation in his work, Irvine Welsh invented a way to convey Scottish accents in Trainspotting and in other texts so that the reader could feel the way his characters spoke. I doubt it’s impact would have been the same if he had used conventional text.

Other writers have broken the format conventions even further. Some books have chapters that can be read in any order, and the story still makes sense. Writers are still brave enough to drive light into those dark corners at the edges of what fiction really is fills me with hope. Even old Bill Shakespeare is credited with inventing over 1700 words, sadly including the word ‘critic’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost Act 3 scene 1 if you are interested).

So, it is rarely enough, when creating any kind of art, to blindly follow the established rules. Sure, you will create something, perhaps even something great. But if you haven’t pushed the boundaries of what art and literature could be, have you missed the point?