Myths and Rules About Writing

Aspiring writers, and even experienced writers, often look for advice on how to write better, more productively, more salably, and so on. This is natural and on the whole a good thing. It's a major way of learning to avoid pitfalls and not reinvent the wheel, for one thing.

At the same time, it's important to know to take a lot of this advice with a grain of salt. Just because something is often true, or works for many writers, doesn't mean it's always true or works for all writers.

On Sunday a group of us were on Zoom talking about a little of this. My friend Dirk van Nouhuys mentioned the Odyssey as something he had enjoyed in childhood, and observed that, in contrast to what we're told a protagonist should do, Odysseus doesn't change. He doesn't even look all that different after ten years fighting in Troy and ten years finding his way home--his dog recognizes him. Yet we always hear that the protagonist of a short story or novel must change. Well, this set us to thinking of other major works, or at least famous works, in which the protagonist doesn't change. Voltaire's Candide doesn't really change. It didn't seem like don Quixote did either. Nor Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. In more recent fiction, people noted that Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple don't change, which suggests that in series mysteries, change is optional for the detective-protagonist and has become more common over time. Now, of course, externals do change in all of these works, so perhaps we can figure that in Western fiction, something has to change, even if not the protagonist. I'm not sure that change is necessary in some of the nonwestern traditions, but I don't know enough about, for instance, Ojibwe narrative tradition.

In addition to asserting that the protagonist must change, people also often exhort us to "show, not tell" and to make sure to throw plenty of obstacles and complications into a novel. While these prescriptions are not bad advice, and can be very useful to follow, they certainly aren't ironclad rules for creating good fiction.

In the realm of advice on process, again there are various prescriptions that sound good but aren't always as important as you might think. One of these is the notion that a writer must write every day. Sounds good, doesn't it? I've never paid a lot of attention to this advice since I do write most days, in some way or other, but Tim Grahl presents a good argument for a different way of approaching how often and how much to write. Basically, he suggests that writing to complete a project can make more sense than fretting that one didn't happen to write for a while. I'd add to this that the beginning writer does need to write a lot, and frequently, because that's how one learns one's craft, but--as one of the commenters on Grahl's post notes--some of our writing is in the form of emails, blog posts, tweets, journaling, and the like, which also counts to some extent. It may not move us along the path of finishing articles, stories, or books, but it's keeping us in the habit of putting words together for ourselves and others to read. I sometimes go for months (usually during the academic year) without getting much written on anything that has no deadline, but while this annoys me, it doesn't worry me, because I know I'll get back to my various writing projects and over time they'll get finished.

Which rules do you find over-emphasized about writing?