The rules of writing, or "why the classics suck"
I stumbled across a blog post yesterday where Australian writer Graham Storrs suggests that over-adherence to the common Rules of Writing is a bad idea. I think he’s wrong, but not for the reasons he cites.
This whole business of the Rules of Writing can be confusing for new writers, especially for those who aren’t quite sure what they’re doing yet and are still working to find their voice. Should they slavishly follow such prescriptions as “don’t use too many adverbs,” “avoid dialogue tags,” “avoid passive voice,” and the like?
In a word, yes.
I can certainly see Storrs’s point. The rules can be confining. They can certainly constrain your freedom to arrange words however you see fit. Mr. Storrs argues that Isaac Asimov, one of the true greats of twentieth century fiction, probably wouldn’t get published today because he breaks too many of the rules.
He’s probably right, but he misses a larger issue. Things were different in Asimov’s day.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s the thing. The art of writing novels has evolved quite a lot since Asimov was writing. Even in his day, the art had already evolved considerably from the modern novel’s nineteenth century roots. Whenever you think the “modern novel” was really born, one can hardly dispute that today’s writers start with an incredible advantage over their historical peers: We have the collected experience of more than a century’s worth of what works and what doesn’t.
There just weren’t that many novels around in the 1800s. Not only was it damned hard to write one—the very idea meant a practically Sisyphean eternity of quill-and-ink work—but having written, there weren’t agents to help you get published, nor the vast plethora of publishing houses who might take your work. Today’s maxim that “good writers read a lot” just wasn’t possible a hundred and fifty years ago to the extent it is today.
Sure, the occasional Jane Austin came along and penned something really timeless and beautiful. But we can hardly blame most writers of that era for fumbling in the dark through unfamiliar territory, with nothing to guide them and no ready access to a community of other writers who could skillfully critique their work.
Because of this, most nineteenth century novelists are—rightly so, in my opinion—forgotten in the dustbin of history. Even some works that have survived to become “Classics” are unreadable to the modern eye. This is hardly surprising; writers back then weren’t less intelligent than us, they weren’t less creative, they just they hadn’t figured out the rules yet.
Dickens never learned how to use a period. Melville didn’t understand that you don’t have to tell the reader the same thing five times. I mean, I’ve tried more than once, but I still can’t get through Moby Dick; Ishmael just won’t get on with it in that first chapter. Classics? Sure. Good by modern standards? Hardly.
The rules exist because they work. As time has passed and novels have multiplied to fill all the shelves of all the libraries of the world, writers have had ever more access to the printed word. We have more exposure to what works and what doesn’t. In all those decades since Austin and Asimov, the tribe of writers has read a lot—and learned a lot. It never stops. I would argue that novels of today are even head-and-shoulders above most material published as recently as the 1970s.
Today, here in the twenty-first century, we have it easy. We really do stand on the shoulders of Giants like Austen, Hemmingway, Salinger, Leonard, and yes, Asimov. We have, collectively, distilled 150 years’ worth of literal “book learning” into a kind of tribal wisdom that we pass among ourselves. “Don’t use too many adverbs.” “Avoid the passive voice.” “Don’t use dialogue tags.” We repeat these pithy lessons like totems, we whisper them as shibboleths to see if our fellows stare blankly back or nod in agreement.
Ultimately, we have these Rules of Writing because they work. Time and experience has shown this body of lore to be effective guidance for creating a great reading experience. Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? If your goal is to give your readers a great experience, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, those rules will help you get there.
When you know what you’re doing, you should break the rules. But then there’s that one other Rule of Writing: you can add “except when it works” to any of those other rules. Don’t use adverbs—except when it works. Avoid the passive voice—except when it works. The last bit of our tribal wisdom is “Know when to break the rules.”
Break them, if you know what you’re doing. Break them, because you should do your part to advance the art of the novel. Break them, because you should strike out along a dark and previously unexplored path. Break them, because maybe you’ll discover something wonderful. More likely you’ll find yet another thing that doesn’t work, but either way you will have contributed to the lore of our tribe.
But when you’re still working to find your voice? When the wisdom behind using backstory wisely isn’t yet clear to you? Follow the lore. Respect the rules. They work. They’ll help you find your voice, if you have the good sense to let them.
September 29, 2009 21:37 UTC
10 Comments:
Posted by Jason Black on November 28, 2009 22:18 UTC
I think it’s both. Obviously these days, with TV, movies, video games, and other forms of fast-paced entertainment, people’s tastes for writing have changed somewhat to match.
But the deeper point I’m trying to make is that as writers today, we operate from a place of much greater knowledge. We understand (or we should) why those rules are good ideas. We understand why we have them. And with that knowledge comes the attendent sensibility about when (and why) it’s appropriate to break those rules sometimes.
Posted by Kat on November 29, 2009 22:57 UTC
“...as writers today, we operate from a place of much greater knowledge. We understand (or we should) why those rules are good ideas.”
Most of the (fiction) writers I work with don’t have any trouble accepting the rules. Usually, they religiously observe the rules about writing tactics (adverbs, passive voice, etc), but they don’t think nearly enough of the strategy — good story and character-building.
When I tell them that I think their outline has fundamental issues that no “good writing” will fix, they are sometimes thrown. “But I cut out all the adverbs...”
Writing is a rough racket.
Posted by Pelle Mårtenson on May 07, 2011 14:14 UTC
One more thing why classics should suck. We have much better tools. I can´t imagine writing anything with some structure more than a couple of pages with just pen and pencil. Now we have tools that supports the tasks and also tools for collaborating.
Posted by John Cowan on May 26, 2011 06:21 UTC
These “rules” about POV are nothing but shifts of fashion. In the 1970s, “the rules” said “Never say what anyone thinks or feels, always be a fly on the wall.” Readers today would find that too cold and repellent, but the “third person objective” POV seemed like the only possibility to people who grew up on a diet of nothing but movies and TV, where no other POV is possible.
Le Guin’s Steering the Craft has a chapter on POV that explains when to use each of the five or six usable cases and why. Deciding in advance to restrict yourself to just one or two is taking most of your writer’s toolkit and flushing it down the toilet.
Posted by Jason Black on May 26, 2011 17:30 UTC
@John—
I’m not sure why you’re bringing up POV, as I didn’t mention it in the post, but since you did: “Rules about POV are nothing but shifts in fashion?” You’re welcome to your opinion, but I disagree.
These aren’t merely shifts in fashion. They are shifts based on growing understanding of how various writing techinques affect a reader’s experience of the story.
I don’t, for instance, see head-hopping 3rd person omniscient coming back into vogue any time soon because too much head-hopping creates a lousy, dissonant, difficult experience for the reader. It doesn’t help the reader stay in the story. All head hopping does is increase the reader’s cognitive load of keeping a whole bunch of viewpoints straight. Sure, it may make the writer’s job easier (because the writer doesn’t have to do the potentially difficult work of figuring out how best to sequence and present the information through fewer, more carefully managed viewpoints), but it doesn’t make for a better reading experience.
Even some unarguably great writers, not that long ago, were doing this. Elmore Leonard’s Western novel Valdez is Coming jumps to mind. It was published, if I remember right, in the late 60s, and it’s got some head-hopping in it. Not even head-hopping between major characters; I remember one spot where he head-hops to the point of view of some random washer-woman on the street for a couple of paragraphs. WTF? And that’s Elmore Frickin’ Leonard!
But somewhere between then and now, somebody put their finger on it. Somebody in the tribe of writers figured out that POV switches create work for the reader. That’s not necessarily an obvious thing; writers already have to track the POVs of everyone in the story, all the time, so for us it’s no big deal to switch back and forth. But for readers, it is. They are discovering a world we have already fully imagined. That’s totally different. So somewhere between Valdez is Coming and now, sombody figured this out and was able to articulate it for the rest of the tribe. And we’ve now kicked that idea around, refined it, and assimilated it into a new rule: Don’t switch POV character in the middle of a scene. Switch at scene breaks or chapter breaks, that’s fine, but not in the middle of a scene. It degrades the reader’s experience.
Why do we have this new rule? Because it works. As a tribe, we know that now. So now, if you submit your manuscript to agents or literary contests, you’ll get dinged for head-hopping. And rightly so.
Might there be a time when head-hopping was appropriate? Sure. It’s always possible to break the rules. When you know what the rule is for, you can see the limits of it and thus know when you are intentionally writing something that is outside of those limits. You can break the rule when to do so supports the reader’s experience rather than degrades it.
When might that be? I don’t know. Perhaps in some kind of paranormal or sci-fi type novel in which one character was telepathically connected to others, in some kind of haphazard and uncontrolled way? When the protagonist is, himself, experiencing head-hopping? Then, the jarring, dissonant experience created by literary head-hopping would reflect the jarring, dissonant telepathic experience created by the protagonist’s telepathic abilities. That would support the reader’s experience, and used judiciously, I would applaud such a device.
You can probably think of other times when head-hopping would be ok, but I’ll make you this bet: if you can, what they will have in common is that in them, head-hopping would support the reader’s experience.
It is all, and always, about the reader’s experience.
Posted by John Cowan on May 26, 2011 19:15 UTC
First I must confess that I posted my comment to the wrong place, but I’m glad that even though you don’t mention POV specifically, you’re willing to discuss it as an instance of something you see as an improvement and that I see as a limitation.
Now of course some switches of POV are nothing but annoying. “Sarah’s annoyance grew as she paced back and forth in front of the bus shelter, waiting for the 8:15 to arrive. She narrowed her green eyes until she was squinting, trying with the mild pain to distract herself from her thoughts of the emotional scene that would begin the moment Brad stepped off the bus.” That “green” is unwarranted head-hopping, and it should come out. (If you think “green” is okay, change it to “beautiful".)
On the other hand, this is competently done prose — not award-winning, but competent — using an involved narrator:
Jovan noticed the shiver, and wondered, not for the first time, how strong Kit’s spirit was. He often thought that a cleric of Wee Jas should be tougher, but Kit had always possessed a little-girl vulnerability about her. He whispered, “Kit, are you going to be alright?” She tossed her head. “I’m fine.” Inside the house, Lavasja moved silently down the stairs. Outside the clouds hid the moon, but Lavasja saw nothing but the dark shadows of the house around her. Her mind was filled with images of blood, of the dead girl upstairs. That silent little room housing only the corpse of another dead woman, her blood cooled and congealed on the floor. Blood had dripped through the floorboards and stained the rafters underneath. She opened the door, her heart heavy in her chest, and wished that this was over. But no one else would help these women, so it fell to her and her companions. “It’s clear,” she whispered, and let the others in. “Le Guin’s summary: “The voice of the narrator who knows the whole story, tells it because it is important, and is profoundly involved with all the characters, cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned or uncool. It’s not only the oldest and the most widely used storytelling voice, it’s also the most verstatile, flexible, and complex of the points of view — and probably, at this point, the most difficult for the writer.” I admit, and so would she, that you’re not likely to get on the best-seller list with an involved-narrator novel right now, but I should hope a writer would have more ambition than that.
Posted by Jason Black on May 26, 2011 20:21 UTC
@John—
Your comment “Now of course some switches of POV are nothing but annoying” hits the nail exactly on the head of my point. Some such switches are merely annoying. The rule exists because we now understand why some shifts create a poor reader experience, and consequently have a guideline for avoiding poor reader experience.
What irks me is that the way these communal rules are typically discussed within the tribe short-cuts the “why” portion of the discussion, and jumps straight to the guideline. The rules are often presented as fiat, as “do this or you’re a bad writer!” Which as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is bullshit.
Yes, blind following of these rules does often result in an improvement in someone’s writing. But usually that’s because the writer is just starting out, still has a lot to learn, and hasn’t yet discovered the “why” behind the rule for themselves. For those kinds of writers (which, let’s face it, comprise the vast majority of the writing population), blanket over-application of the rule is still an improvement over not knowing about it at all.
But knowing why the rule exists matters. It matters a great deal. Because it is only the why portion which guides one from blanket over-application to careful, considered application. Knowing the “why” is your key to knowing when to break the rules.
Your example passage is an interesting one. I note that, in a certain sense, it too confirms what I’m saying. There isn’t true head-hopping in that passage, so much as there is a weakly signaled scene transition. Down to the “I’m fine” portion, the passage is in a consistent POV. Jovan’s.
The next three words, however, “in the house,” constitute a scene break. It’s not indicated by extra whitespace or a horizontal-rule of any kind, but it’s a scene break. “In the house” tells us that we have shifted to a new scene. We weren’t in the house before, but now in this paragraph, we are. Those three words trigger the reader to drop whatever context they had assembled up to that point, and to begin fresh.
It’s the act of causing the reader to begin fresh which enables a smooth change of POV character. I would argue that this scene transition really ought to be visually indicated through whitespace, horizontal-rule, or some other formatting device. Just to make it absolutely clear to the reader that the change of scene was intentional. But I don’t actually see this passage as one which “gets away with head-hopping,” so much as one that simply crosses a subtle scene boundary.
Thanks for posting it, though. That was an interesting exercise, and I think I learned a little something there about where the boundaries of the “one POV character per scene” rule really are. Awesome!
Posted by John Cowan on May 26, 2011 22:14 UTC
Oops, I accidentally blew off the first paragraph. Let me try again:
Kit shivered as the cold night wind knifed through her. The redheaded girl might as well have been wearing nothing at all as far as the wind was concerned. She felt the chill down to the marrow of her bones.
Jovan noticed the shiver, and wondered, not for the first time, how strong Kit’s spirit was. He often thought that a cleric of Wee Jas should be tougher, but Kit had always possessed a little-girl vulnerability about her. He whispered, “Kit, are you going to be alright?”
She tossed her head. “I’m fine.”
Inside the house, [etc.]
So here you have a single scene of two characters, with a POV switch between them, which is even finer detail.
In any case, the whole page from which I grabbed this snippet is at http://www.dndonlinegames.com/showthread.php?t=28029 and shows the same scene from six different narrative voices, none of which is clearly superior to the rest.
here’s another example of involved narration. I’ve edited the text qheavily so as not to provoke an over-hasty reaction: the original version was commercially successful and you might well recognize it, but I don’t want it judged by that. However, I have kept as much as possible, especially the narrative voice, intact:
The evening had gone very pleasantly for the whole family. Mrs. Donald had seen that the Banner family admired her oldest daughter Karen a great deal. Steve Banner had danced with her twice, and she had had a long conversation on the patio with his sisters. Karen herself was as happy about this as her mother, though in a quieter way. Betty, the next sister, empathized strongly with Jane’s happiness. Ellen had overheard herself being described to Steve’s sister May as the best piano player in the neighborhood, and Sue and Diana had been lucky enough always to have someone to dance with, which was the only thing they cared about at their ages.
So they returned in high spirits to their house on Gill Street, the most impressive house on their block. They found Mr. Donald still awake. When he was watching TV, he never paid any attention to the time, and anyway he was very curious how the evening had gone from which his wife and daughters had expected so much.
In this example, which I chose pretty much at random from the book (though the book and author I chose carefully), you can see that without an involved narrator, the reader simply wouldn’t have any idea what the overall feeling of the group is, still less the different ways in which each character contributes to that group feeling.
Posted by Jason Black on May 26, 2011 23:26 UTC
Well, maybe. It is difficult to judge short excerpts in isolation, but I have to say, neither example does much for me. That is, they don’t give me what feels like a great reading experience. But is that from seeing them in isolation, or is it a function of the shifting POV? Hard to say.
I freely admit that the kind of reader experiences I like are ones that allow me to deeply empathize with the characters. Personal preference plays a large role, and everyone’s mileage will vary. For myself, I find it hard to do that when I’m not allowed to stick with any one character for any length of time.
The notion of a 3rd person “involved narrator” is an interesting one, however, and I’ll have to give it some further thought. I’ll take a look at Steering the Craft. Alas, there are so many writing guides out there it’s impossible to read them all, but I respect Ursula LeGuin’s writing tremendously and would be interested to know what she has to say on the subject.
Posted by Livia on November 28, 2009 21:55 UTC
Interesting thoughts. I’ve often wondered about whether the writing rules are objectively true, or are a matter of taste and the times. I may write an entry about that at some point, although I’m way behind. And I havn’t forgotten your request for a Brain entry either — just have to write a few posts before that one...