Last week I stumbled on an awesomely fun blogfest from Kristina Fugate @ KayKay’s Corner, and coincidentally on another great blogger (there are so many of you out there who are also writers…I love it {heart}). Turns out not only did I get to meet some awesome new people and get great feedback on my current WIP opener, I also was honored with two shiny awards:

and

To accept these pretties, I have to thank the person who awarded me (Thank you Kristina!), share some stuff about myself, and award it to some recently discovered bloggers and tell them about it.

So…about me…I reveal a lot through my blog posts, check out the archives 😉 Not good enough?

• I’m a Gemini
• I’ll over-analyze a situation to death if allowed
• I never talk about myself in the third person unless forced…or unless I’m writing as one of my characters
• During my time online I’ve gone by my ‘pretend’ name (Ariana) as much as my real name (Lori). I’ll answer to either equally as quickly, but will always have to think when someone calls me by my full name (Loralie) because until recently I never used it outside of official legal documents. But it is the name I publish under.

People I give these awards to (yes, both of them – double epicosity). This was not an easy decision because I’ve discovered so many amazing blogs lately.

• Megan @ The Punching Bag Fights Back
• Teralyn Rose Pilgrim @ A Writer’s Journey
• Gabriela Lessa @ An Aspiring Writer’s World
• Angeline Trevena Fantasy and Horror Writer
• Sarah @ Glissades and Gabble
• Tanya Reimer @ Life’s Like That

—begin thought purge—

I’m burying this after the award because I figure by the time most of you are done skimming that list, you’ll move on.

When I wrote my first novel I had no idea there were ‘writing rules’. It sounds so official, doesn’t it? It’s almost like a religion to some writers. I didn’t discover these ‘laws’ until I found a real critique group to work with. Then the punches started flying

• Adverbs are evil
• You’ve used too many paired adjectives
• Don’t litter a scene with too many instances of a character’s name
• Don’t switch POV mid-scene.
• Don’t use passive voice
• Show, don’t tell
• Stephen King* Says…
• Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

And when I first heard these things I scoffed…for about a week. Then the fear crept in. If these are the rules, what if I break them? Will I be blacklisted in publishing forever? Will every major publisher take one look at the sentence ‘Jason was running quickly in his tattered red sneakers’** in my first paragraph and toss my manuscript aside with disdain?

And then I started to figure out these weren’t actually rules. And they weren’t as simple as being able to quote a single line and then take it to heart and make it gospel. And that I love sentence fragments and words like ‘so’ ‘well’ ‘and’ ‘but’, etc. Anyway…

It took me a little longer to figure out why the endless list of suggestions (see what I did there?) exists. In my sentence example, yeah, it could have been said better. But in order to determine that for myself, I have to understand why. I can’t just say ‘because that’s what Stephen King* says’. That’s like when I was a teenager and I would say ‘but why can’t I stay up until three am wandering the streets of this quiet little town with my friends?’ and my parents would say ‘because that’s the rule.’ If instead they had said ‘because scary people roam those streets at 3 am and if you’re not careful you’re going to wind up dead in a gutter or worse’, I might have paid more attention before a group of older boys chased us all the way from the elementary school to the 7-11 and made me wish for the first and only time in my life that I was a runner.

I appreciate the rhetoric for what it is now – loose series of guidelines. We have to know why they exist and when it’s appropriate to step outside of them. We have to understand that just because someone used an adjective or the word was or opened a story with action or dialogue doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Sometimes people start three or more sentences in a row with the same word for impact. Sometimes people use present tense verbs in past tense dialogue to give actions more impact. Sometimes the writer did it for a reason – whether conscious or not.

So next time you’re reading for someone – even yourself – it’s something to keep in mind. Is the sentence ‘Jason was running quickly in his tattered red sneakers’** wrong because “you used an adverb and passive voice and paired adjectives and OMG we already know his name is Jason, try this instead…”

Or…

Is it possible that it’s surrounded by a series of other high-action sentences that need this brief descriptor to keep pace correct and to convey something that might be disrupted by taking another paragraph to describe Jason’s shoes, his thoughts, the sound of his light footfall slapping on asphalt, and the fact that he had bacon for breakfast and it was threatening to repeat on him?

Again, I’m not saying the rhetoric is bad, but it shouldn’t be a religion and it shouldn’t drive our every action in writing ‘just because’. Know why the guidelines exist and it will give you a much better idea of when you should and shouldn’t follow them.

Are you now or have you ever been guilty of parroting the ‘rules’ simply because someone said that was the way it was?

*I tried to read Stephen King once. My aversion wasn’t the genre – I read a lot of horror/thriller novels back in the day. I realize he’s a very rich, famous, and influential writer. That’s all well and good and I wouldn’t complain about having the kind of name-brand recognition he does. However, I was turned off by the tangents, the inability to write characters who fit with their backgrounds and description, and the fact that he breaks 90% of what people quote as his gospel. You’re welcome to him, but quoting him is not the way to inspire me to write more adequately gooder.

**This isn’t actually a sentence in any of my stories, but now I’m infatuated with it because it might make a good one. Maybe it’s time to create a character named Jason…