Advice, strangely enough, is never one size fits all. We’ve asked participants to share the best writing advice they never listened to. Today, Hannah Lincoln, NaNoWriMo participant, encourages you to break all the writing rules:
I think that anyone who writes—be it strictly for fun or with the intent of publishing—has felt the pressures of the notorious “writing rulebook” at least once.
Or, if you’re like me, maybe you’ve found yourself running through an imaginary (or literal) checklist of things not to include in your novel every time you sit down with your pen. Rules are made for a reason, and it’s no different when it comes to literature. But what happens when they begin to restrict your stories from reaching their greatest potential?
I find this particularly interesting given my recent experience re-reading one of my favorite books, from an award winning author, for the first time since becoming a writer myself. I enjoyed it all the same, but looking at the writing from a technical point of view, I realized that the author often broke “the rules.” Rules I’ve been forcing myself to follow for the past five years.
The one that bothered me the most was not starting a new paragraph sometimes when a new person spoke. As a rule follower in general, I found it really got under my skin, even if it technically did not cause any confusion about who was speaking.
The one I found most interesting was the third person limited point of view switching rapidly between characters, sometimes within the same paragraph. I’ve read that if you’re going to switch POV like that, and your narrator isn’t omniscient, then you should allow yourself at least 1000 words before switching again. But. this story at times would frequently switch back and forth, sometimes with only one sentence told in a new POV before switching back, all in one paragraph. It really bugged me at first, but after a while, I found it just served the purpose of the story. We didn’t need a whole 1000 words in that character’s head to still make it interesting to see what he was thinking about the other’s actions. The rule follower in me was still slightly annoyed, but the reader in me was delighted to have that little insight into the character in just that moment.
Anyway, it was a really interesting exercise to think about which rules I might consider breaking next, just to tell the story I want to tell. And, we’ll see if my inner rule follower will allow it. ^_^
