Writing Rules

I’m not usually the kind of writer who does a whole lot of pre-writing. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, lately I’ve been trying to reverse-engineer two plays I wrote years ago to try and figure out how they work, scrap what’s bad, keep what’s good, and form it all into some kind of novel. Turns out that there’s a lot to scrap and not a whole lot to keep. Yeah, I know that “Writer Critical of Earlier Work” isn’t exactly headline news, but it still puts me in an awkward position, because a lot of the problems that I’ve been finding have come from writing advice that I’m not entirely sure that I trust.

And man, I’ve sure heard a lot of writing advice. After one session at the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, two sessions and the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop, two creative writing classes, attending dozens of readings where the audience is entirely composed of aspiring writers trying to milk advice out of someone who’s made it, reading a ton of reviews and watching a ton of video essays, not to mention plenty of conversations about craft, I could probably rattle off a hundred tips off the top of my head. And, like the worst possible kind of student, I haven’t ever really interrogated what I learned. Instead I built it into a generalized idea of what a story should be and let it harden into dogma. Particularly tricky dogma, because most of the time it contradicts itself (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “show, don’t tell!” except by saying that I’ve heard “anyone who tells you ‘show, don’t tell’ is an idiot!” just as many times).

So instead of just plotting out the kind of story I want to write with this novel, I keep getting side-tracked worrying if I’m meeting all the expectations for a good story. Even if I stop worrying for a moment about whether or not I’m fulfilling the expectations, worries about whether I’m sticking too strictly to the expectations come along and fill whatever space I emptied out. Because, with so many formulas for what makes good writing, it’s hard not to expect that the writing will become formulaic after a while. If you set out writing a story where characters go through linear arcs, every character contributes to a central theme, every action has a clearly telegraphed motivation, and the plot conforms to one of a limited sets of archetypes, then it seems like that only leaves you with so many stories that you can tell. Or, at the very least, it means that the best you can do is imitate a style that someone else had already perfected and described with mathematical accuracy. 

But what’s the other option, then? Some surreal, experimental piece where the only subject matter is whatever happens to flit across my mind at the moment and the only point is to convince everyone that I do some kind of hallucinogenic drugs? That’s an extreme example, but at least it would be an intentional subversion of the rules. Subverting rules is at least a step up from ignoring them, just plugging away for an hour a night with no direction until I pile up a manuscript that I’ll never have the courage to look at again. It’s better than being a lazy writer, and this month-long planning phase has been an extended attempt to prove to myself that I’m not a lazy writer anymore.

But, when you look at it too far in the abstract, writing stops really being writing anymore. At first it feels fun and professional to map out the plot of a story, but look at it long enough and you’ll realize that you’ve killed whatever authentic joy the story had in its dissection. I’m not saying that the rules are useless, but they’re only helpful to a point. The logical intelligence that comes from following plot maps ultimately has to yield to the imagination that the story comes from in the first place. It’s a balance, I think, and the reason why I’m having these worries is because I’ve tipped too far into the rational side of the scale and need to pull back. Odds are I won’t ever find a way to reconcile the helpful bits of writing rules with the way they seem to cast every story into the same mold, but that’s okay. Because once the writing kicks in, there’s no formula to explain the story anymore than there’s a formula to explains everything in the universe. It’s a world into itself, and that’s the real thrill of it anyway.