Know The Rules, Love The Rules, Break The Rules
First of all, I agree with Truepenny that David Bowie deserves a whole blog post. He’s just simply one of the greatest artists I’ve ever seen. What I love about Bowie is his willingness to try new things, even if they don’t–quite–work out sometimes. That’s what living is all about.
On to my crank for the day. A comment was left on my website journal, which I hereby quote the salient bit of. This was a post where I detailed my five biggest writing sins and why they were peccamus. PJ replied with:
For goodness’ sakes. “Seemed to†is not bad writing. It could make the difference between whether something really happened, or the viewpoint character just saw / heard it that way.
PJ has a valid point, that “seemed to,” or “that,” or passive verbs–pretty much everything I tell my writing students not to do–can in the right frame occasionally be good writing, because it is appropriate to the situation.
The problem arises when a writer uses these common things as a crutch to avoid telling the story simply and directly, or even clearly and directly. You can find an exception to each sweeping rule of writing I espouse (I cannot find Matociquala’s most excellent post on this, but I know it’s there) in the classics of literature. But just because these are exceptions does not mean the rule is broken.
I specifically mentioned “seems to/seemed to” because I was going back through the draft of Night Watch (a yet-unsold book) and I found several places where “seems to/seemed to” could be cut from the sentence to make it tighter and more delicious, where the “seems to/seemed to” was just adding weight and dragging the sentence down, being merely a crutch for me to avoid saying, this is what IS in this story. It’s something I’ve cut in manuscripts I’ve edited until the cows came home and the fat lady took her ovation. It can be good writing–but cubism can be good art, too.
But only when the artist understands the rules of art thoroughly in order to break them with cubism.
This is something a lot of fledgling writers don’t get. They think that because they can speak at the drive-through or in the checkout line, they can write. It ain’t necessarily so. Writing means one has to have a tighter understanding of parts of speech and grammar. The best use of this understanding of language becomes knowing how to flaunt those rules with style. The worst thing about this understanding of language is “if you lack it, nothing will take its place.”
Meaning you don’t have a solid understanding of the rules, so you’re breaking them without knowing. Breaking of the rules in writing should be done deliberately, with full cognisance. With proper cognition beforehand. Not all of us are Shakespeares or Dickens (is the plural of Dickens Dickenses?) capable of getting away with such things. We must all choose our own rules to flaunt.
To get back to the point: the advice I give in my writing classes (and here) is meant to help. You could, I suppose, break every one of those pieces of advice and still have a sellable book. But I give this advice because most of the time when I see the things I give advice against, they are highly detrimental to a manuscript.
There’s also the fact that all these things (passive verbs, that, seems to/seemed to) can function as little ways for the writer to back away from taking responsibility for stating something clearly and unequivocally. Writing is fraught with emotion, and it’s easier if you have that mechanism to separate you from the manuscript. It provides a little bit of distance that helps shield the writer from “OMG what will they think of me? I can’t say THAT!”
Which is fine in the rough draft. But in revision, such things must be mercilessly slaughtered, for they impact the salability of thy manuscript. That little bit of distance such things give the writer in the rough draft may well be an impassable distance to the reader, who may decide not to buy/read/respond to your story because of it. Which is deadly when an agent or publisher is looking at your work, and no less deadly when someone takes your book off the shelf at the store, opening it up to the first page and asking to be wowed.
So one can break those rules and disregard that advice, once one has a clear understanding of the function of those rules and how to properly break them. Which is what makes writing–and by extension, all art–so broad, juicy, and wonderful.
Pontification officially over. Now I must go eat a bagel. Wish me luck. In my uncaffeinated state I might stick a fork in the toaster or something.
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