Rules? What rules?
I recently asked for your input on potential topics you’d like to see discussed here.
Several readers asked questions that fall under the general topic of all the rules we’re told we must follow to write fiction. I’ll synthesize several specific questions into a more general, two-part question:
“Do I have to follow all these rules?
What if there’s an area where I’d like to bend or break the rules?”
Those of you who have been around A Writer’s Block for a while, or have taken one of my classes, attended a seminar or conference where I’ve spoken, or had me as your editor, you know my general take on rules for writing fiction.
Rules don’t exist.
Instead, there are techniques that are generally accepted because they’ve been proven to work in storytelling. You might call these principles, concepts, guidelines, or generally good advice.
These are tied to reader expectations. And these expectations evolve and change over time.
But there aren’t rules, laws, regulations, requirements.
Yes, some publishers will have requirements — rules a publisher places on works they choose to publish. It’s not a rule for writing; it’s a guideline if you expect that publisher to offer you a contract.
I have two actual rules for writers:
Don’t bore your readers
Don’t confuse your reader
Exception: if you’re intentionally confusing or misdirecting readers, and it’s done well, you can break Rule #2. That’s different than a reader who just gives up because she can’t make sense of your story.
Oh, some of you are saying, but there are rules for spelling, punctuation, and grammar (we’ll call that SPAG for short).
Yes, those are rules, I suppose. But they’re still not laws. No one is going to throw you in prison for breaking grammar rules. Maybe no one will find your book readable, but you’re still free to make up your own grammar.
Heck, you can make up your own language if you want.
Know why it’s a “rule”
For brevity, we’ll call these techniques and guidelines “rules,” even though I detest that word. It’s shorter.
The key is to know why each of these is a proven technique that works, what it accomplishes, and why it’s important.
Learn how it affects the writing, the story, and the reader. Learn the negative effects if you don’t follow those techniques.
Then you can learn how to effectively bend, break, or rewrite those rules to create a specific impact on your story and the reader.
Make sure you execute it intentionally and that it works. Break the rules for a specific reason, not out of laziness or not wanting to learn the rules.
Then smash those rules.
Gustave Doré (1832-83), artist
Types of rules
First, let’s break down all the rules into some general categories. It’s easier for me to wrap my mind around smaller bites.
Spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPAG)
Word choices
Sentence structure
Story structure
Narrative voice
No, we’re not going to be able to even touch on all of these this week, so this will be a four-part series to break things down into manageable chunks.
Never say never
Once you get outside the arena of SPAG, most of the rules you hear are more about overuse or overreliance on certain choices. But if you’ve been a writer more than a minute, undoubtedly you’ve heard writing advice presented as “Never do this. Always do that.”
Here are three more actual rules for writers:
Never say never
Never say always
Ignore any writing expert who says, “Never do this,” or “Always do that.”
SPAG: spelling, punctuation, and grammar
You might think SPAG would need to be correct. About 90 percent of the time, I’d probably agree.
But like any writing rule, if you know what you’re doing, and if you’re doing it for a specific effect, there are certainly times and methods to break these most basic rules in the mechanics of writing.
Quotation marks
These little guys tell us when someone is speaking, and often point to who is speaking. They’re standard equipment for writers. How would you write dialogue without them?
It’s been done.
Cormac McCarthy may be one of the most famous examples of a writer who shunned quotation marks. If you’ve read No Country for Old Men or The Road, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
Here are the opening three paragraphs of No Country for Old Men. Notice McCarthy dispensed with more than just quotation marks:
The deputy left Chigurh standing in the corner of the office with his hands cuffed behind him while he sat in the swivel chair and took off his hat and put his feet up and called Lamar on the mobile.
Just walked in the door. Sheriff he had some sort of thing on him like one of them oxygen tanks for emphysema or whatever. Then he had a hose that run down the inside of his sleeve and went to one of them stunguns like they use at the slaughterhouse. Yessir. Well that’s what it looked like. You can see it when you get in. Yessir. I got it covered. Yessir.
When he stood up out of the chair he swung the keys off his belt and opened the locked desk drawer to get the keys to the jail.
The interesting thing is you figure out pretty quickly what he’s doing, you get into the rhythm of his style, and you forget about the lack of quotation marks. It’s all clear.
It also adds to the voice of the narrative and the pace of the story without all the interruptions of quotation marks and dialogue tags.
In the novel What is the What, Dave Eggers sometimes (but not always) uses em-dashes at the beginning of a line of dialogue rather than a quotation mark, and no punctuation at the end of the spoken words. Again, it becomes clear very quickly to readers that this is dialogue, and why it’s set apart differently for some dialogue scenes but standard quote marks are used in other scenes. It’s quite clever, and it works. It does not create confusion.
Here’s a snippet:
—What are you staring at, Achak? she asks, laughing at me, using my given name, the name I used until it was overtaken by nicknames in Ethiopia and Kakuma, so many names.
Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, also frequently ignores standardized quotation marks. When asked about it, he said, “What happens when you get rid of them? I wanted to have parts where you can’t tell if somebody thinks or speaks. That’s the way memory is. I wanted to confuse that.”
Diaz’s intentional choice added layers and depth to the story and the reading experience.
There are many more writers over the past hundred years or so who have played with this convention.
While I do not by any means consider myself in the same league (or universe) as Cormac McCarthy, I developed my own approach in a short story, “Magnolia Nights,” which has been published a couple of times.
I embedded dialogue within the narration, in the same sentence as narration, and sometimes from more than one character all in the same paragraph.
The only indication I added was to capitalize the beginning of a sentence in dialogue, like this:
He waits outside the store so his cleats won’t leave marks on Caudell Food Market’s linoleum flooring. He carries the bag with the milk bottle all the way to my front door and hands it to my mother Here this belongs to you. My mother thanks him for being such a gentleman and invites him in for a lemonade You must be thirsty from playing those games boys play. Don’t mind your shoes. You can’t hurt these old floors. He clicks across the wood Thank you, ma’am, and drinks long with cool satisfaction.
As with anytime you stretch the standards readers are accustomed to, you will likely get some pushback. Some magazines I submitted to, some critiques, and some readers didn’t care for this. Some loved it. There weren’t many opinions in the middle.
Semicolons
I’ve written about my disdain for semicolons previously. I’ll let Kurt Vonnegut Jr summarize my thoughts:
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr
For me, in the vast majority of cases, semicolons don’t really do much. You can replace them with a comma or a conjunction or a period, and the sentence reads the same. Semicolons don’t have their own unique sound, like a period or a question mark.
There are certainly places where they can be helpful, but more often than not, I see writers randomly sprinkle semicolons around the page — often in grammatically incorrect places — with no real thought other than they like using them.
“Oh, wouldn’t a semicolon look lovely here?”
It’s much easier to eliminate them completely than to eliminate quotation marks.
Here, I suppose breaking the rules might be to use lots and lots of semicolons and ignore the advice from Kurt and me.
Ellipses and em-dashes
Like quotation marks and semicolons, there’s nothing wrong with these. As an editor, I frequently see manuscripts where writers seem to have an unconscious need to use them frequently. Yes, they can be used incorrectly.
Standard usage in dialogue:
Use ellipses (…) when a speaker trails off without finishing a sentence.
“Well, I was planning to go to…” Fred looked away, lost in thought.
Use ellipses to establish a longer than normal pause midsentence, such as when a character takes a moment to think of what to say next.
“Well, I was planning to go to… well, to Myrna’s Bar and Grill, if you’d like to go with me.”
Use em-dashes (—) when a speaker is interrupted midsentence.
“Well, I was planning to go to Myrna’s Bar and Grill, if you’d like—”
“Oh, Fred, are you asking me out?”
That doesn’t mean you can’t intentionally use them for specific effects when the rules say that’s not how to do it. The key is if it will be clear and obvious to readers, not confusing or just obnoxious.
I like to use them on occasion in internal thoughts. Our internal thoughts tend to be short, often jumping around without finishing a complete thought. One thought interrupts our own previous thought before we were done thinking it.
I find that judicious use of ellipses and em-dashes can bring a dash of reality to those stream-of-consciousness thought patterns most of us have.
Or you can use an em-dash to replace a beginning quotation mark, like Dave Eggers.
Grammar
Grammar is a lot more flexible than some writers realize. This is especially true when you’re writing dialogue. Your characters probably don’t speak in perfect English.
Likewise, if you’re writing in a first-person voice, I wouldn’t expect your character to speak lines of dialogue in common, ordinary, everyday, and not-quite-right English, but then narrate like he’s a 19th century English professor at Oxford. Perfectly fine, preferred even, to keep your character’s voice the same in dialogue, internal thoughts, and narration.
An exception might be if your first-person narrator is older (perhaps more educated and mature), narrating the story of what happened to him as a child, where his ten-year-old character will speak like a child in live scenes.
Think of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird — the child character in the live action scenes and the adult narrator version of herself looking back on her childhood. While recognizably the same character with a similar voice, the adult narrator’s voice will have matured.
I’ve written about this here before, but if your character’s dialogue is in a particular dialect or accent, it certainly won’t be grammatically correct. Be careful not to overdo the dialect or it can become difficult for readers to decipher what is being said. It can become unintentionally comical and even offensive if you try too hard to capture a particular regional accent or dialect.
Generally, you will want to be grammatically correct — or at least close enough to be acceptable to your reading audience — while staying true to character and narrative voices.
But you can also completely ignore a lot of SPAG rules to create voice and character.
If you don’t believe me, ask Mark Twain. Or Alice Walker in The Color Purple, on page one, where she uses a heavy dose of dialect while ignoring standard punctuation:
Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m already half dead, an all these chilren.
Next week
In Part Two, we’ll dive into word choices and sentence structures — the “rules” and some examples of when and how to break them.
After that, in Part Three, we’ll discuss bending the rules of story structure and narrative voice, then wrap up with some ideas on how to experiment and practice with breaking the rules in Part Four.
Books by Robb Grindstaff
Newest release: St. Izzy of F Street — Now on Substack
Thanks for validating some of the choices I make in dialogue and grammar. I'm on the fence about semicolons, usually I don't use them but sometimes they seem right in that particular place.
Thanks for the clarification on the difference between ellipses and em-dashes.