Monday
Monday Guest Blog: FF.Net Responds to "50 Things a Writer Shouldn't Do"
In a recent blog entry at Three Guys One Book, Jason Chambers, Jason Rice, Dennis Haritou, and Jonathan Evison, inspired by a NYT article on 100 tips for restaurant service, began their own list of dont's for writers. Haritou begins with this introduction to his list of ten.
Behind each of these writing "rules" is a larger, implied "Don't." That list might look like this:
A list recently published in The New York Times by a noted restaurateur gave 100 rules for what service staff should not do. I thought a list of 50 things that writers shouldn’t do would give us all a chance to vent. I’m contributing 10 items. Some of these pet peeves have pissed me off for years:Don’t use italics for more than one line.
Don’t tell me what someone looks like if it doesn’t matter.
Don’t make me draw a diagram to figure out who’s speaking.
Don’t write in a manner that’s different from your everyday speech. You should write like your best talk when you’re having a very good day.
Don’t start your story with a character alone in a room unless you’re Kafka and your character is going to turn into a bug.
I should be able to turn to any passage in your story and enjoy the craft of it. Don’t write a coy opening to draw me in. I’ll throw the book away instead.
You have five minutes to interest me, not with gimmicks but with craft.
Topicality is another word for bullshit.
If you use one awkward word in 500 pages, I’ll notice it. It counts against you.
You’re the artist. Ignore my rules.
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- Don't bore me.
- Don't confuse me.
- Don't waste my time.
- Don't be amateurish.
- Don't try to trick me.
- Don't be random.
- Don't be phony.
- Don't bullshit me.
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If I were a rapper and I were writing about writing rules, I might begin (surely not alone in a room) surrounded by my posse and sing this:
I know about rules
I've been in 27 schools
Like don't suffer fools
(pause for beat box)
Rules are like a fence
What you're up against
Like future perfect tense
(pause for Beastie Boys-like gesticulating)
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Somewhere, I had a point. Oh yeah. I love these rules! I'm 110% in favor of rules for writers! Truly. They're wonderful things, and I love how these are written as commandments. I love the fearlessness of the rules, the lack of wishy-washiness, the way they go out on that limb of commitment. I so admire their certainty. Awesomeness.
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A world without rules fills me with the (ironic) desire to create rules, while its opposite, this world of authority, makes me think of ways to break out, and it's that desire, to prove the rule-makers either right or wrong, that drives so much of my writing into existence. If anything goes, if anything can be done, then what's the fun of doing it? But doesn't a list like this make you want to begin put a character alone in a room with pages of italics? Doesn't it make you want to make that work? Don't you want someone to say, "I thought it would bore me, confuse me, trick me, drive me insane, but you did it! You freakin' did it."
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In preparing for teaching a graduate class on composition, I've been reading a lot about freshman writing composition pedagogies and theories, and in an essay entilted "On the Academic Margins: Basic Writing Pedagogy," Deborah Mutnick writes about the debate of whether "educability" is "a cognitive rather than a political issue." It got me thinking about the nature of all such "rules," about whether they ask of writers to change their thinking or to change something else, to yield something of their selves (something essential?) to the powers that be.
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For example, would the rules change as the gender, race, and/or class of the rule-makers/readers change? Do female readers want something different than male readers? Do younger readers want the same thing as older ones? And so on. One of the more interesting questions, for me, has to do with the difference between readers who are writers and readers who aren't writers. And I'm especially interested in the writers of forms, such as poetry, flash fiction, the short story, whose readers might be, for the most part, writers of those forms. How might the writer-as-reader affect the rules?
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Again, in short, I love writing rules; the more authorial certainty they have the better. They remind me of boundaries, the pressing necessity of walls; it's what drew me to flash fiction, the nearness of the confines, the way the end presses upon the beginning as early as the title. I love knowing exactly what to set my writing (and my self) against. I love knowing the rules, the following of them, the breaking of them, the debate about them, their power to define, the whole wicked mess of it all.
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posted on 18 Jan 2010, 6:05 PM
. . . you're a law and order man, RB . . .it's like the wild west out there--anything goes, but you gotta' have a few rules . . .
posted on 19 Jan 2010, 2:06 PM
Yeah, well, anyone who couldn't handle the confines of the East went West, yes? That's why California is full of crazy people. And that's exactly why we need rules, lots of them, so we can tell who the sheriffs and outlaws are.