Meg Chittenden Waves
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The Rules

I worry sometimes that those of you who read these tips month after month will think of them as rules that are carved in granite. They aren't. They are suggestions, ideas, hints, devices--things you can use if they work for you. If they don't, discard them and don't look back.

New writers often get too hung up on "rules." I sure did. "Never change viewpoint in the middle of a scene." "Always have 25 lines to a page." "Never start a paragraph with But,'. "End every chapter with a cliffhanger." "Make sure your characters' goals are clearly stated on the first page."

Trying to follow such arbitrary "rules" can paralyze your creativity and drive you crazy.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean we should just write whatever comes into our heads and never rewrite or revise or try to discipline our prose in any way.

Some "rules" make sense. "Don't change viewpoint every sentence." "Don't have characters whose names sound the same." "Don't let a character go into a flashback that covers a long period of time, when s/he's in the middle of a conversation, climbing a staircase, or making love."

In other words, don't confuse the reader.

Some writers feel it will stifle their artistic creativity to make any changes whatsoever in their "marvelous" work. And there are some few (very few) who can write that well. But for most of us, our work is greatly improved by some judicious pruning, weeding, and general tidying up.

If we are writing popular novels, we have certain traditional elements to consider. You may not want your romance novel to end happily. But if you want it to sell as a romance novel, it had better end happily. If it's meant to be a traditional mystery, a whodunit, then it needs to offer a satisfying denouement to the mystery reader. The reader wants to know who dunit!

If you want to write a mainstream novel that happens to have a mystery in it, however, or a mainstream with a romance in it, or a mainstream with romance and mystery in it, you can pretty well decide for yourself how it all comes out and you don't have to wrap it all up tight at the end. I ended one mainstream novel with these sentences. "It was almost a promise. It was at least a beginning."

It takes some time and some seasoning for the writer to learn which "rules" can safely be broken and which will help smooth the path to publication. I learned by studying what worked and what didn't in the novels I read.

So what am I saying here? If you want to sell your novels, you may have to make some adjustments in how you think your material should be treated. But you don't need to get so rulebound that you overbalance into formula.

I'm now going to bring in another "guest columnist" who has written a short, but excellent commentary on this topic of rules. Dale Furutani, whose work I admire, is the author of the multiple award-winning Ken Tanaka Mystery Series (Death in Little Tokyo and The Toyotomi Blades) and the upcoming Samurai Trilogy (Death at the Crossroads.)

Here's what Dale has to say:

My favorite writing teacher (who also had slightly more famous students, like Truman Capote) used to always say, "You can do it if you can do it." Those are words to live by. Rules are set up to help the average book. It's hard to accept, but most writers (by definition) will write average books.

If you have the talent and ability, you can make your own rules. But writers' egos are such that we all think we're so good that we can do anything we want. That's true. The problem comes when we take what we've done and try to sell it. The editors who buy our stuff like predictable patterns, for the same reason the people who buy TV shows like predictable patterns: It's easier to get an audience and make a buck.

In addition, sometimes we overreach and don't have the skill or talent to actually accomplish what we attempt in our writing. That's great from a growth standpoint, but it results in a manuscript that really shouldn't be paraded before the public.

There is nothing wrong with rules like "have the body in the first three chapters" or similar bromides. Shakespeare wrote over 120 very original and different sonnets without violating the rules of the sonnet. Bach wrote a fugue in every major and minor key without violating the restrictive rules of the fugue.

As with breaking the rules, following the rules really depends on talent and ability to write. You can follow all the rules and still end up with a bad book. As my teacher said, "You can do it if you can do it."

Copyright Dale Furutani 1997. Used with permission of the author.