Writing Rules

There seems to be something going around these days. My various feeds–which feed me with flash stories and articles on writing–have bombarded me with posts recently on writing “rules.” (I put that in quotes because ultimately writing rules don’t exist. Writing is much akin to Fight Club, with the exception to the rule about talking about the club, everyone has something to say about writing, even me!)

I think much of the hubbub is a reaction to an ARTICLE posted on LitHub. Much of the ire is understandable, as this particular list of “rules” includes things like “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” (Ironic, coming from a writer publishing web articles.)

There are a few rules on the list that have merit. Such as “Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.”–This one is gospel to me, and I think more writers need to take it to heart. People come out of college thinking first-person is the default, which it is not, because they are being taught by a bunch of grad students who were told what to read and write, and now think they know the “truth.” I was there at one point, too, though I refused to conform. There is way too much unnecessary use of first-person out there. It’s too the point that one of my favorite indie publishers, Bards and Sages, at one time listed it as a hard-sell criterion.

Fellow blogger, and transparency upfront OMAM contributor, Richie Billing also jumped on the topic with a post of his own. Richie is asking folks to discuss what “rules” they disagree with (he uses the word “detest”) and why. So here’s my take on the topic.

I have written elsewhere on how editors often take “no adverbs” much too fundamentally. I once had an editor reject a flash story of mine for “having too many -ly adverbs”–in total, about 8 in a 1000 word story. Moreover, they were adverbs that could not be replaced with more efficient verbs. In short, they were essential words, if only tainted by having an -ly at the end of them.

But that’s not the rule that grinds my gears most. The one that is most troublesome for me is the “don’t ever use passive voice” rule, because it ultimately comes from a misunderstanding of what we use passive voice for in our language.

The idea that “active voice” sentences are “active” and “passive voice” sentences are not is flawed. If I write “Jim threw the ball” or “the ball was thrown by Jim,” both sentences are equally active. Both show a ball being thrown. The main difference between the two sentences is the subject, and that is the critical point to consider.

When an editor starts red-lining passive voice sentences in a paragraph, what they often end up doing is replacing a single subject for many, in turn making the passage more convoluted and harder to follow. Here’s an example of a passage which uses passive voice:

A arrow shot out from the slit in the wall like a bolt of lightning. It was spun around by the wind, hissing as it went. But suddenly it was snatched out of the air by a hound and delivered, unceremoniously, to its intended target. The lost arrow was broken in twain and left on the ground.

In this example, our subject is “the arrow” and continues to be the subject of the passage throughout. Our focus is directed to the arrow and what happens to the arrow. The use of passive voice is what keeps our attention locked on that one idea.

Now let’s see what the passage looks like after the editor takes a red pen to it:

A arrow shot out from the slit in the wall like a bolt of lightning. The wind spun it around, making it hiss. But suddenly a hound snatched it out of the air and delivered it, unceremoniously, to its intended target. The man broke the shaft in two and dropped it on the ground. 

In the above example, we went from one subject to four! The end result is a bland passage that feels disjointed and confused. (This example is, of course, an exaggeration to make a point, not an example of masterwork writing. But I have had interactions with editors in similar ways, which ended up diluting the prose, as above.)

There is a reason why we use passive voice often in our daily speech. It helps us keep the focus of the moment on a single subject. Few of the writers or editors that rail against the passive voice seem to understand that key point. Like with other rules, they have simply been taught that it’s “bad writing” or that “readers won’t like it,” rather than the idea behind the rule.

To that end, for me there is really only one “rule” that I think holds up to scrutiny: Always be efficient. Efficiency trumps all.

This rule captures the important aspects of the “no adverb rule” in that much of bad adverb use is inefficiency, usually poor word choice or redundancy. Same goes for unnecessary narration styles, when using a journal as a plot device or a first-person narrator doesn’t actually add anything to the story. A lot of the writing errors I come across have to do with redundancies: repeated words, repeated descriptions, dialogue tags that are necessary because the tone is convey in the actual speech. Or in the case of Stephen King, entire scenes and chapters that should be chopped off and left for dead. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Do it in as few words as possible and those words will be all the better for it.

Well, I hope this helps you in your writing. If you want to practice efficient writing, the best way is to dive into flash fiction. It is a format that forces you to consider the life and death of every single word in your manuscript.

Happy writing!

~JM