Have you ever read a book and noticed the author has broken what we writers often hear of as “the rules”?
My initial reaction is usually indignation: “Why can she get away with that, and I can’t??”
The more I study the craft of writing, the more rules I hear about, and most of these are guidelines based on making a book reader-friendly. As much as I believe it’s good practice to avoid the common pitfalls of beginning writers, there are always exceptions to every rule.
Here are six commonly heard rules for writers, and six authors who’ve gotten away with breaking them. (By ‘gotten away with’, I mean being published, selling tons of copies, and in some cases, winning awards):
Rule: Don’t write in First Person, Present Tense
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife: Niffenegger’s popular title is told by dual narrators from the first person point of view, in the present tense. We’re often told this is a rookie mistake, but I think it can be done well in the right hands.
Rule: Keep your novel under 100,000 words
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: Literary agents keep telling us it’s nearly impossible to sell an overly long book, these days. One edition of this novel weighs in at 560 pages, so it’s safe to say it’s far more than 100,000 words long. Mantel won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, so I suppose they saw past her verbosity.
Rule: Limit the use of adverbs.
John Banville, The Sea: This book, another Booker Prize winner, is beautifully written, but features heavy use of adverbs. In one sentence alone, I found the words tensely, fortuitously, and frustratingly.
Rule: Don’t begin a story with dialogue.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse: “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added. This rule must be a relatively new one, because a lot of older books and classics begin with dialogue.
Rule: Avoid repetitive language.
Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife: In the first paragraph of this book, the words still and stillness are (purposely) used 4 times, and variations of the phrase “the train was late,” are likewise sprinkled many times through the opening pages. Literary agent Nathan Bransford recently posted a great article on repetitive language. Ever since reading it, I can’t help but notice it in my reading and writing.
Rule: Don’t begin a story with “My name is…”
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.” I’ve heard of this type of story opening as being on the list of agents’ and editors’ major pet peeves.
How did they get away with it?
There are a number of reasons why these authors managed to achieve success regardless of breaking the rules.
- There are exceptions to every rule. Not every rule applies to every book. It takes experience and discernment to know when to follow them, and when to throw them out the window.
- Story trumps all. The storytelling in each of these books is good enough to cancel out any rule-breaking annoyances.
- The rules change. What was publishable 50, 100, 200 years ago, might not be publishable today.
- Selective breaking. Getting away with breaking one or two of these rules isn’t difficult, but too many at once becomes a problem.
Can you think of other books that eschew common writing advice?
Are you more likely to follow rules to the letter (for fear of rejection), or do you feel the urge to rebel now and again?
Middlesex comes to mind. It won the Pulitzer. He wrote in 1st person about events and people and what they were thinking and doing long before he was born. He also wrote about his birth, his time in the womb, he wrote about his mother’s pregnancy, all with him somehow in the room witness to it all.
I witnessed that style again with Joyce Carol Oats in We Were the Mulvaneys. The youngest son in the story recants events with each of his family members without him being in the scene. He even managed to be in their thoughts. Hmmm.
I found both styles to be annoying. It was very distracting for literary. If it were paranormal it would make sense, but these are supposed to be fictionalized memoirs. (I’ve heard conflicting comments on what a fictionalized memoir is, but these two were written like memoirs but were entirely fiction. Other people fictionalize true stories and call them fictionalized memoirs.)
Hi Tricia,
Thanks for adding these books!
I read Middlesex two years ago, and I enjoyed the story (or rather, found it strangely engrossing), but I had the same concerns about the narrator as you. Not sure that I found it distracting, but I definitely had moments of asking myself how he could have known all the things he seemed to.
A perfect example of a book that got away with breaking the rules. Thanks!
2 words – ‘Cormac’ and ‘McCarthy’…
Surely you’re not allowed to have a sentence longer than a paragraph AND have it contain at least 16 ‘ANDS’??? But somehow, it just works – and beautifully IMHO.
RG
I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy yet, but he’s on my list. Yes, I think huge sentences connected by several ‘ands’ would be against the rules, but if it works, it works!
Another rule that’s such a ‘no-no’ it is barely even mentioned: Don’t even thing of trying to write in first person plural.
Try reading ‘Then we came to the end’ by Joshua Ferris which is largely in the point of view of ‘we’. It’s set in a paranoid office environment ripe with gossip, rumour and institutionalized thinking so it works brilliantly!
Yes, that would be a no-no. But it seems sometimes it pays off to break the rules!
I find it rather relieving that it is not necessarily tacky to begin with a quote. I had always found that it can grab readers quite well, when used properly, and was rather upset when I was told it wouldn’t do. Is it acceptable to write formally in most novels? Teen chick books excluded, I personally can’t see why a teen girl would be interested in that (seeing as even when speaking, my sarcasm goes undetected, I think it best to explain that I am a female teen). This was an entertaining and informative article. Thank you very much!