When should you break the rules – In writing and in life?

April 10, 2024

I was not a rebellious child, but by third grade I’d discovered the thrill of occasionally

breaking a rule — the stupider the regulation, the better it felt. My elementary school had a decree that students should never step on the grass. The school sat on an acre of hardy, mature grass, by the way, not defenseless new growth. Like inmates in a prison yard, we were confined to the knee-skinning blacktop. Instead of a warden watching us, we had our principal; to my mind she was a wizened tyrant.

One day, I stepped off the blacktop and planted both feet in the grass. Not a millisecond passed before the principal’s second-story window flew open and I heard, “Lisa! Get in my office right this minute!” I would remain there after school as punishment. I didn’t know the expression, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” and although I paid for my infraction of the rules, I’d been fully aware of the consequences beforehand.

Back then, I was challenging the principal; today it is the principle. Some writers — and writers-turned-writing coaches — swear by certain rules for fiction that must be followed. Others soften their edicts by calling them “best practices,” which I find more helpful. Here are a few examples, in no particular order.

A story should begin at the beginning. This is an easy one to break, and I broke it on the first page of my first historical novel, Gallows Road, when my incarcerated heroine reflects on her life the night before she is destined to hang for murder. Storytellers have been breaking this rule for millennia. Just ask Homer or Shakespeare, if you could, why so many dramas or narratives begin in medias res, in the middle of things.

Your narrator should be a good, likable person who tells the truth, at least the truth as it exists within your fictional story. Really? What about the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart?” He doesn’t even have a name and yet few readers could ever forget him.

Show, don’t tell. I’m all in favor of this rule, except when it takes five pages to recreate the backstory of a minor character, information that might be conveyed in five sentences or less.

Never, ever, ever, mix genres. This rule is one laid down by the marketplace, not writers who might be itching to try something different. The consequences are not a trip to the principal’s office but a manuscript that probably will end up in an agent’s or editor’s trash. Presumably, such a book will confuse readers if it doesn’t fit a marketable category. A few authors, such as Colson Whitehead, have broken this rule successfully; his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad mixes historical facts with fantasy. If, as a debut author, you’re tempted to break this rule, however, remember an even stricter one: “Don’t try this at home, boys and girls!” Then again, sometimes you just need to step off the blacktop.

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