By Josh David Bellin
The best writing breaks rules.
Name a great book. Rule-breakers all.
Slaughterhouse-Five. Moby-Dick.
Ulysses. To the Lighthouse. Beloved.
On the Road. All of them,
rule-breakers.
But okay, maybe I’m talking about
classics of literary fiction, and I should be talking about popular fiction.
Most of us aspire to write the latter, not the former. Isn’t popular fiction
more rule-bound than literary fiction?
Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it’s so
rule-bound as to be rule-hobbled.
There are thousands of writing “rules”
floating around out there, and there are just as many aspiring writers being, I
fear, misled by them. Whenever I encounter one of those rules on some agent or
other authority’s blog--whether the rule be, “never start your novel with a
character waking up” or “never have a character describe herself in a mirror”
or “never delay the inciting incident to chapter two” or “never insert a scene
with a dancing pink hippo into your novel”--I find hosts of grateful comments
from aspiring writers: “Thank you so much, Divine Agent! You have shown me the
error of my ways and likely saved me from a lifetime of public humiliation! I
will certainly never insert a scene with a dancing pink hippo into my novel ever
again!”
But you know, maybe your novel needs a
scene with a dancing pink hippo. Maybe your novel needs to begin with a dancing
pink hippo waking up, looking at itself in a mirror, and then having a philosophical
conversation with the ghost of Albert Einstein, thereby delaying the inciting
incident until the second chapter. Maybe those are the particular rules your
novel needs to break.
There is no rule in writing so ironclad
that it can’t be broken for the right reasons. Just as it’s ridiculous to insist
that all novels begin with dancing
pink hippos, so is it ridiculous to insist that no novel can begin that way.
What’s the test? How do you know which
rules to break?
The test is the story itself. Each story
creates its own needs, its own form, its own rules. It’s the writer’s job to
know her or his story well enough to know which rules to obey, which to bend,
which to ignore. If you don’t know that, then really, what do you know?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to
return to writing my big dancing-pink-hippo scene. Trust me. It’s killer.
Josh
has been writing novels since he was eight years old (though admittedly, the
first few were very, very short). He taught college for twenty years, wrote a
bunch of books for college students, then decided to return to writing fiction.
SURVIVAL COLONY NINE is his first book, but the sequel's already in the works!
He
loves to read (mostly YA fantasy and science fiction), watch movies (again,
mostly fantasy and sci-fi), and spend time in Nature (mostly catching frogs and
toads). He claims to be the world's worst singer, but plays a pretty mean air
guitar. He also like to draw, and will be putting up some of his artwork
on his website as soon as he can.
Oh,
yeah, and he like monsters. Really scary monsters.
