fraught with uncertainty

Those of us who write, I think, find it a practice fraught with uncertainty. We are almost never sure that we’ve chosen the right words and put them in the right order to say the right thing or even that what we have to say is worth the trouble of saying. We tend to approach rewriting with trepidation, not in small part because we are reminded again that our words still don’t measure up, at least in the ways we think they should or could. We submit our stories to magazines with both crossed fingers and a barely hushed certainty that we have no chance of acceptance. And if our stories are published, we ruefully admit that hardly anyone will see them. We work in doubt all of the time.

(Tell me I’m not alone in this.)

And so I can see the appeal of writing “rules” to liberate us from some of this uncertainty. Even writing books and classes* can offer a haven from this doubt, extending the bogus balm of a clear path through the forest of our anxieties. (Mixing metaphors is, of course, against the rules.)

But I think that for creative writing, such rules are dangerous and damaging, at least to the writing if not to the unsteady mind of the writer. I’m not talking about writing high school term papers or legal documents or technical manuals (all of which I have written in my storied past) but about the kind of creative writing that tries to express something new or something old in a new way. The kind of writing that evolves our language and our humanity. The kind of writing we do.

I can remember one writer who pontificated in her blog that dialog tags should only use the word “said” (or the proper variation thereof). She pointed to a successful fiction writer who had originally made this assertion, and that seemed justification enuf for her to accept it as gospel. N’er mind the thousands of successful fiction writers who didn’t follow this rule. She’d found her little rule that spared her some hard work and gave her a haughty assurance that she was right. (I don’t read her blog anymore.)

We’re supposed to avoid the passive voice; we’re supposed to write directly. Yet sometimes the correct point to make is that the race was run, not that the runners ran the race.

We’re supposed to avoid adverbs — or as one blogger called them, “-ly” words. We supposed to avoid split infinitives too. Yet one of the most memorable snippets in our culture violates both of those succintly: “to boldly go where no man has gone before!” (I think the exclamation point is now considered unacceptable too; same with the semicolon. And sentence fragments.)

My point — and yes, I do have one — is that creative writers are privileged, even required, to break the rules. It is our job to invent expression. Surrendering to rules is squandering our talent and dodging our responsibility. I’d much rather write in the wide frontier of uncertainty than in the stultifying small room of rules.

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I’ve written about this subject before.

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*In the unwinnable war between those who have opinions on this subject, I am a partisan to the belief that while creative writing can’t really be taught, it can be learned.

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Tags: rules of writing

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