The "Right" Way

Writing students are often told that there's no wrong way to do something. Shortly after being told that, they are then given a laundry list of things to avoid doing. We have to use proper spelling and grammar (with slight exceptions in dialogue). We have to have a message. We have to make everything we mention be important and remember to mention every important thing. We have to have clear and smooth transitions from one idea to the next.

Even if there isn't a right way, there sure are a lot of wrong ways. So what gives? Personally, I think it is the struggle (both internal and external) between conformity and creativity. Let's face it, people like what they've already seen. Even if they don't particularly like it, they still like the comfort of already knowing it. The rules of writing tend to reflect that. The things you shouldn't be doing are the ones that the standard, regular writers don't do.

But writing, anything creative, has to break the rules. It has to break every single one of them. Rules are sterile and boring. Writing is all about being exciting and interesting. If you're just another iteration of the same ol' thing, why should anybody care about you specifically?

Every rule I've ever come up with, I could challenge. It's the nature of the beast. Writers have to have that "oh yeah? well screw you, I'm gonna do it" attitude about them. It's what drives them to break the rules and be interesting.

However, there is a saying that I first encountered in martial arts. "First you learn form. Then you break from form." And that is where the right way and the rules come from. You can't know how to break the rules until you know how to follow the rules. If you do whatever you want without every learning the rules, you may break them, but you will be completely shapeless and without structure.

Much like in jazz, the point is not simply to break the rules, but to break the rules and sound good doing it. The same is true for writing. I am sick of reading stories about lonely malcontents living shoddy lives and narrating how terrible their lives are, while actually doing nothing in the story itself. However, I have come across a number of stories recently that did just that, but I really enjoyed them. The difference was in the skill of the writer and the tweaks to the standard. Normally, such stories feel semiautobiographical. They're written by young adults who feel like their life is so terrible and they're going nowhere and the only salvation is at the bottom of a bottle. This premise is not entirely unworkable, but reading enough of it gets quite derivative. These other ones, though, they were shown in a different style. One of them was like a memoir of a woman thinking back to those times and reflecting on how they influenced the rest of her life following it. This slight change in portrayal made enough difference for me to be interested. And since the women is herself thinking about the past, the fact that she isn't doing anything doesn't matter at much. She is thinking. Her past self is also acting; she is changing over time, the description of which felt enough like action to keep me interested.

In short, the "right" way is training wheels for writers. "There is no right or wrong" is taking the training wheels off. Training wheels are great if you want to use a bike the way it was intended. However, you're never going to do sweet BMX tricks that way. Taking those training wheels off gives you the chance to fall on your face, but it also gives you the chance to look really cool. Do it when you're ready.