No sir, the fault was mine. Thanks for the word.
I think for the vast majority of people, the guidelines you’ve pointed out are correct. Of course, these are not rules, but time-tested generalizations about what works in good writing.
For any art, I believe learning the mechanics and technique, while maintaining an open mind to playful experimentation, is of utmost importance in developing your craft.
My area of expertise is photography. When I teach a class, I too, give out such rules as “fill the frame,” “don’t put your horizon in the middle of the frame,” and the “rule of thirds.” These rules are routinely broken but, to a novice or maturing photographer, absolutely essential to know. But once you learn these rules, and understand exactly why they work, then you have acquired the knowledge of knowing when to break them.
And I believe the same holds true for writing. If you learn and truly understand the rules you’ve listed, you know when and how to break them. You have centuries worth of collective wisdom at your disposal. Why not take advantage of it? Even the great modern artists (Kandinsky, Pollack, etc…) knew how to draw realistically, learned and practiced the classical methods of art instruction.
As for the passive voice, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the rule never use the passive voice. That’s simply assinine. I’ve always known it as avoid the passive voice, as it tends to weaken writing. Which is true. Many times, rephrasing the passive voice to the active adds punch to the sentence.
As for adverbs, once again, I think the rule is reasonable. Try to limit your use of adverbs. Usually, you can better express an action by picking a better verb, rather than by modifying it with an adverb. It’s a perfectly reasonable guideline.
I have yet to hear anything about adjectives being bad, but overuse of adjectives certainly is. You don’t need a modifier for every second noun. It slows down prose and waters down the impact of your sentences. Nouns and verbs are the building blocks of good prose.
I think for 99.99% of people wanting to improve their writing, these guidelines will help tremendously. Just like 99% of casual photography can be improved by filling the frame (or getting closer to the subject) and by learning to recognize good lighting. (The latter being quite a bit more complicated than the first.)
Learn your craft. Have fun experimenting. Once you understand what the rules are and why they are there, break 'em.
I don’t get the sense that you are really listening to what others have already wisely said, Aeschines. Your complaint isn’t so much against the rules as it is a refusal to acknowledge what the rules are and how they are applied.
First, when people speak of a “rule” of writing, they don’t mean rule as diktat, “An authoritative or dogmatic statement or decree,” but rule as rule of thumb, “A rough and useful principle or method, based on experience rather than precisely accurate measures,” i.e. a time-tested approach that helps the beginner to work the craft more easily and smoothly. (On preview I see pulykamell used time-tested as well. Interesting.)
Second, you are ignoring that the “rule” is merely shorthand for a principle of writing, with a reason for being, a history of application, and a method of correction. It is assumed that part of learning your craft is learning not just the names of the rules but their purpose and meaning in your writing. While a good critique will provide better ways of approaching a passage, there are times when the simple shorthand comment should be sufficient to alert the writer that a correction is needed.
Third, by not understanding the rules or their nature, you also don’t understand when they are being properly applied. E.g., historical or science fiction novels require far more setting and background than contemporary novels do. While there are better and worse ways and supplying this information, sometimes a simple paragraph of description is far simpler for the reader than ten pages of laborious dialog. If you think Fitzgerald is telling and not showing in Gatsby, you don’t understand the distinction that the rule is trying to convey.
Fourth, by not understanding these distinctions you also seem not to be able to tell when they are being properly applied. There are good critiquers and horrible ones and you need to learn who to pay attention to or not just as you need to learn whose prose you can learn from and whose you can admire but not incorporate.
Fifth, the rules are always changing because the world is always changing. Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote in vastly different styles than the pre-WWI novelists. People write in vastly different styles today. I honestly don’t understand a word of your harangue on contemporary literature, but you can no more write in an early 20th century style today than you can write in an early 19th century style, except as a deliberate eccentricity.
Nobody is born being able to create at a professional level. Order must be imposed on the craft. Jazz musicians don’t begin by improvisation: they first learn the formalities of playing their instruments and then learn how to bend and twist and adapt the rules. And if they want to play for others, they need to learn how the instrument is played today and not how it was 100 years ago.
One of the most fun versions of the rules is the Turkey City Lexicon. These are deliberately cutely named “rules” so that they can be used as easily remembered mnemonics. That’s what workshop rules are all about.
So ignore the mindless pedants, but learn to pay careful attention to the ones who truly are working to improve your writing. It’s worth the effort.
And please note that I have used adverbs ending in -ly all the way through this. If I’ve used them correctly they shouldn’t have been overly noticeable.
Maybe my writing really is poor, as my point has been missed by a long shot. My real complaint was about a social system, a group of people that that wields rules as a cudgel to bash other writers. They often apply the rules incorrectly themselves, or without understanding the history behind what they say. And now and then you’ll come across a pro that should know better but says something dogmatic (i.e., without proper caveats or perspective) him/herself. One poster mentioned the passive voice as another example (could have been #4).
This thread has turned into an argument about the rules themselves, as if I oppose each of the three examples I gave. That’s not the case. When I was talking about Fitzgerald’s show-vs.-tell, I think it is something that really weakens Gatsby in parts. But I’ve also encountered people who go nuts over show-vs.-tell, can’t understand that “tell” is appropriate in moderate doses, and are ready to invalidate any and every piece of writing whose author they don’t feel like supporting.
I’m supprised the social comentary I’ve offered here hasn’t struck a chord.
And to Expano, I think there is a mistaken overconfidence in your lecture. I’ve been defensive in this thread, surely, but if this is not a parental tone leaning toward invalidation, then please correct me. This is one thing that has turned me off certain types of Internet fora: the assumption that the other person (perhaps because the face is not visible) is an ignorant twit worthy of no respect whatsoever.
It might be illustrative if you provided some specific examples of what you’re talking about. Couching these debates in generalities always leads to confrontation, because everyone who reads is thinking in the back of their heads, “Is he talking about me? I’ll bet he is, the bastard. I don’t do crap like that, and if he thinks I do, he’s a moron.” Wheras, if you specifically say, “Check out what Joe T. Critic says! Is he an asshole or what?” people can see exactly what you’re talking about, and decide for themselves how closely your perceptions match theirs, and proceed to debate from there. When you’re not specific, people can’t tell if you’re a crank or have a legitimate complaint.
Also, if you ever wonder why adverbs are bad, this is why.
So I’m confused as to what the discussion is supposed to be here. Yes, there’s idiots on some boards who spout off rules without knowing what they’re for. Just like there’s idiots who break rules for no reason but to break them and be, oh so avante garde and non-conformist. You sound like you know what you’re doing, so why does it bother you? If the question is where do they get their dogma, well, where else? Writing classes and the typical collection of become-a-better-writer books you’ll find at Border’s or your local public library.
If pros say something dogmatic and are trying to be genuinely helpful, it’s because it’s much easier to lay down a blanket rule to begin, rather than listing every single nuance and exception behind it. It’s just not practical.
All we have to go by is your bare words. If you are getting consistent responses trying to correct you about matters you claim you already know about, then you need to assume that your knowledge is not coming across in your words.
I have participated in various writers’ workshops, writing classes, and writers’ groups on and off for over 30 years. Maybe the internet is an inherently different social environment, but I have never encountered “a social system, a group of people that that wields rules as a cudgel to bash other writers.” It doesn’t strike any chord in me at all.
I was trying to be helpful to someone who genuinely appeared not to understand the very thing he was ranting about. Maybe some of the people in your original rant are trying to be helpful as well and you’re not getting across to them either. Something to think upon.
I think I get the point now.
There are people who know the rules and use them in an argument in place of actual thought. These people either haven’t read as much as they should or, more often I’d guess, haven’t thought enough about what they’ve read. To supplement this they just use the rules, because their rules. Better critics, amateur and professional, have a wide range of knowledge and understand the rules. They say, “You’re telling us about her day when you should be showing us pieces of it.” After that they may even explain why that bit needs to be shown and not told.
Ignorance of a rule’s origin and proper context of use is a symptom of this, and an annoying one. It is like having an argument shouted down by a list of fallacies copied and pasted from a web site on logic. Nothing was gained and it just serves to potentially silence an individual. Just a little bit more though in the response and it could have been an opportunity for someone to learn rules they ought to know.
scotandrsn wrote:
It has not been claimed that the rules in question constitute a sufficient basis to judge all literature. Your insistence on characterizing it as an absolutist position only leads to a misaprehension of what these rules are about.
There is an extreme form of this kind of writing, which is called Iowa Writer’s School Fiction, which is minimalist to the point of being dryer than Kelsey’s Nuts, and people rightfully criticize it on that basis.
The point of these writer’s school mantras is to help you avoid trying the reader’s patience, deflating the impact your prose will have on the reader, and slowing your story down with needless explanation.
Aeschines wrote:
It’s more like you’ll have trouble keeping a reader’s interest and selling the work to an editor.
Evolution? Sure. But keep in mind that evolution is not a movement toward some ideal of perfection, it’s just change brought about by forces in the environment. It’s a matter of opinion whether an instance of evolution is from better to worse, but even if there were an ultimate perfection somewhere in the universe, it is not the function of evolution to move toward it.
That’s just it. These writer’s school rules are about how you tell a good, engaging story. You cut away anything that distracts the reader, tries the reader’s patience, or is just a facile substitute for a harder but much more rewarding job of writing.
The evolution of taste is a tricky question. Assuming you agree that the work of Shakespeare is masterful, I nonetheless suspect that you would have little patience for a modern writer employing the Thees and Thous of Elizabethan English.
But this is the art, the details in the way the language conveys meaning. Language is to literature as clay is to pottery. If a beginning potter is told, “You can’t extend the clay that far, because it will collapse before it is done baking” he learns. If a writer is similarly advised about careful attention to the nature of the medium he works in, he gets huffy and insists that he’s doing art and the advisor is just being pedantic. A painter doesn’t consider concern over brushstroke technique to be pedantic – only in literature do people think that art has nothing to do with the mastery of small matters of style.
As my AP English teacher used to say, “You get your poetic license when you’ve learned how to drive language.”
I spent a number of years moderating poetry boards online. I taught small classes and did one-on-one work as well as reading and commenting on thousands of new writers. And I discovered one very important rule about poetry writing:
“It’s important to know that there are rules and that poetry isn’t innate, or slapdash, or whatever you want it to be. Poetry doesn’t just flow through you because you feel something. It isn’t an emotion. It isn’t your inner essence. It is an art. It requires work.”
Once people understand that about poetry, they can understand that all rules are tools. We have hundreds of years of people experimenting that we can draw on. They’ve done the initial research. We get to reap the rewards.