About Rules for Writing

[pameladean]

This entry was almost entitled just "Rules for Writing," but I realized that doing so would cause people to think that I was about to list some or recommend some, whereas in fact I don't even believe in them any more. This fact is in the foreground of my thoughts because of the recent link on[Bad username or site: Making Light @ livejournal.com] to Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writing. Now, Mr. Leonard specifically says that these are rules he uses to make himself invisible, and that if one doesn't wish to do that, one needn't look them over. So I have no direct quarrel with him. But I admit to considerable puzzlement. People are always on about transparent prose (I flatly disbelieve in that as well; I have never, ever seen any transparent prose, not to my range of vision, never, not once) and effacing the writer and making the reader forget that the reader is, well, reading, making the reader forget that there is a book, is text. I do not understand it. I like books. I like text. I like books better than movies, better than television, better than comic books, better than painting, sculpture, cooking, music, or dance. I like them because they are text, because they are words. I don't want to forget that they are books. I don't want to be tricked or fooled or to have their textuality pared down to the bone so I can see through or beyond it to its reality. Nor do I want the writer to be invisible. Well, possibly the writer, though of course that is in fact an impossible thing to accomplish. But say it's possible. Maybe it's sometimes a good idea for the writer to be invisible. But I don't want the narrator to be invisible. I don't want words that aren't much like words, small pale faint weak unassuming words. What in the world is the point of that? I know a book is writing, I like knowing that, or why would I bother reading?

Pamela

Comments

My friend Hannah says that the answer to any writing question is "it depends."

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, I think Leonard's advice, like all other writing advice, is best gargled with a healthy dose of "This works for me; it may not work for you." Or, as I keep reminding myself, there are no rules. There are only guidelines, and when it works it's fine to break to break them.

However, I work with a lot of very squeaky shiny new writers, and there are a fair number who don't want to understand *why* the guidelines exist. And it does make a difference to understand why a common error can come to be seen that way, even when it's possible to break it quite effectively--

--bleh. Si I can sit down and write a first person present tense story, and not be a hypocrite when I say that most of the time, first person and present tense don't work for writers who are just learning the craft. Because they tend to go for a complicated solution because it's complicated and fancy, rather than because it's the simplest effective solution to a given story.

On the other paw, you never learn how to ride a bike if you're scared to fall on your ass.

So, you know.

It's all just words in the end, and there's only one way to get to Carnegie Hall. If I'm expressing myself coherently at all.

Re: My friend Hannah says that the answer to any writing question is "it depends."

[pameladean]

I say that too, quite frequently.

Leonard did in fact make pretty much that kind of disclaimer, which is why I said, somewhat ludicrously as it turns out, that I had no quarrel with him. It's more that his rules reminded me of a whole slew of others and an entire coherent approach to writing that I have always found both baffling and vaguely pernicious.

When I was a shiny new writer, I never paid any attention to those rules unless an editor forced me to. And even then, the rule itself simply was not helpful. A demonstration of why a particular passage did not work was helpful. A demonstration that I kept doing this kind of thing and it wasn't doing what I thought it was was helpful, but correcting one tendency with another one isn't a good idea either. Even if you make the same mistake repeatedly, the solution for each instance of it is probably not the same. I think most rules of writing, even if you call them guidelines, are such very crude attempts to generalize what really will not be generalized that they should be viewed with cackles of contempt, but possibly that is an overreaction.

Pamela

Re: My friend Hannah says that the answer to any writing question is "it depends."

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't think it's an over-reaction. I think there's conflicting things going on: the writerly desire for the Magic Get Published Button at conflict with the icky reality that there is no such thing, and that what's unequivocally *right* on one page may be spoon-gagging wrong on the next.

It's all seat of the pants when you get down to it, even if you can explain in erudite terms what that seat of the pants is about. The intersection of craftsmanship and art?

Something. I'm back to the old saw about writing not being something that can be taught, only learned.

It seems to me that the point you're making obliquely is that it's not enough *not to do things wrong.* One must do things *right.*

I find that there's a point where I realize that everything is really just fumbling ways of talking about the same thing, and if it were easy to explain, we wouldn't need the fiction in the first place.

Re: My friend Hannah says that the answer to any writing question is "it depends."

[pameladean]

We seem to be in violent agreement.

I suspect that a lot of writing rules are created from the inside out, are a kind of shorthand that a particular writer uses for what has been learned in the course of writing. But they are a very different thing when viewed from the outside in. One needs to learn one's own for oneself. This isn't to say that occasionally another writer may not hit on a truth for oneself, and in such a way that one can recognize what the shorthand stands for. But yeah, seat of the pants, entirely situational work, that's what we have to do most of the time.

I am also much taken with your formulation that it isn't enough not to do the wrong thing, one must do the right thing. And that's all particular to the work, the scene, the sentence in question as well.

Pamela

Re: My friend Hannah says that the answer to any writing question is "it depends."

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I think on some level what happens is that people badly want it to be simple and mechanistic, and it isn't. Or, worse, it is, on some levels. But it also isn't. So you can learn all the 'rules' and still not be writing well. Or you can break them with abandon, and be doing okay.