THEY'RE RULES, JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW THEM

Moses: the world's first Beta-Reader.

Life is full of rules. There are the big rules, made by leaders of countries that everyone has to follow or risk spending time in a small room with bars on the windows.There are medium-size rules that will get you banned, blocked or otherwise excluded from venues or activities if you break them. And, right at the bottom, there are the smaller rules - the ones you can do waggly finger-quotes around if you're that way inclined, since breaking them will earn you not much more than some side-eye and a few 'unfriend'-ings on FaceBook.

This is because us humans love rules. It's how we make sense of the world and sort everybody out into their respective tribes. You can't build an IKEA wardrobe without instructions, (sometimes even with them) and rules serve as the instruction manual to the IKEA wardrobe that is our lives. Hammer all those wooden pages in before you squish the two bits together, make sure you put those weird locking-nut things in the right way up and don't, for the love of God, lose the Allen Key, and you'll end up with exactly what you were intending to end up with. Mostly.

So it's hardly surprising that even writers - those free-thinking, creating-worlds-and-people-out-of-thin-air dreamers - decided that the craft of writing needed rules as well. Yes of course everything we create doesn't actually exist outside the pages of our work, so we are in effect trying to enforce discipline on pretend things - but even the intangible must be pinned down and categorised, dammit! We must know what tribe it belongs to, so we can decide if it's friend or foe to our own tribe - because only then can we figure out whether we should embrace it like a brother or chase its arse out of our village with the sharp end of our pitchforks.

And so the Writing Rules were born, and have been with us ever since. If you've been writing for any length of time, you'll probably know a lot of them already. Many are very good, and will most definitely help you to become a better writer. But this is why there are a certain number that keep on coming up, time after time, shouted throughout the writing community as if they were the sacred words of the God of Stories himself.

I'm going to say some terms and phrases now, well-known amongst writers, and see how many of them give you that inner urge to roll your eyes and sigh. Ready? Here we go then:

Passive Voice. Filtering. Show, don't tell. Adverbs.

Are you groaning yet? Sorry about that. I picked these in particular because they're the ones writers seem to get the most froth-mouthed evangelistic about. Somehow, these aren't just rules - they're RUUUUULLLLLEEEESSSS! As in, non-negotiable - you either toe the line on this or you forfeit the right to think of yourself as a proper writer.

Think I'm exaggerating? On many writing community forums you can regularly find long, ranty threads on the above four Rules. Just this week I saw one entitled '17 Words Good Writers Should Never Use' - that's NEVER, as in EVER, AT ALL. The Poster of this thread was serious, with no hint of irony in his message, and vigorously defended his point of view, as did a few others who replied to it. All fine and dandy - until you actually look at some of the words on that list of those Good Writers should 'never' use. Words like 'right,' 'then,' 'while,' and - I'm not making this up - 'was.'

That last one is particularly ridiculous. Anyone who seriously believes they will improve their writing by eliminating every instance of the word 'was' clearly does not understand how English works. You could certainly do it - but the verbal acrobatics you'd sometimes have to employ to still say what you want to say would leave your prose unreadable. Words don't stick around in a language for centuries if they're no use to people, and 'was' has been around for a bloody long time already.

The whole hate campaign against 'was' comes from the both the Passive Voice Rule and the Show, Don't Tell Rule - and there is some merit in the reasoning. Making the subject of the sentence the active element (doing the thing) rather than the passive (the thing is being done by them) does make that sentence more dynamic and help the reader to 'feel' the story more. The same principle applies when a subject performs an action that indicates an emotion (i.e. showing, with body language) than simply saying that subject 'was something' (i.e. 'Jane was angry' is telling.)

But here's the million-euro question: do readers care about that sort of thing as much as writers do?

To answer that question we need look no further than E.L. James' Fifty Shades trilogy, because it's easy to forget that, actually, it wasn't always branded the epitome of bad writing. When it first hit the (virtual) bookshelves it was a massive hit, and people were raving about it. Celebrities were happy to be seen - even photographed - reading it, and it turned Ms. James into a millionaire almost overnight.

And who was responsible for its initial, runaway success? Readers. As in, people whose first priority when choosing a book for themselves is a darn good story, not how 'well-written' a book is. It's only when the writer-readers - i.e. people who also wrote books themselves or aspired to - bought the book (perhaps to try and figure out what the heck the magic formula was for such phenomenal success) that the tide began to turn against it. Yes, it does break a lot of the 'Rules of Good Writing' and breaks them with repeated (very repeated) impunity. It's easy to see why legions of writer-readers who've spent years honing their craft and beating their writing into shape according to all these golden Writing Rules would regard Fifty Shades as a slap in the face to all that hard work and dedication. Especially when that 'badly-written' thing sells a million gazillion copies, gets made into a movie, has the whole world talking about it for years to come...

E.L. James isn't even alone in being ridiculed for her writing style. Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown are regularly labelled 'bad writers' too - in spite of also writing multiple bestsellers and having millions of reader fans. Heck, even J.K. Rowling gets picked on for her love of adverbs. But what they all have in common is the ability to tell a story in a way that hooks their readers in and keeps them turning the pages. And that's not achieved by obeying all the Writing Rules designed to make your prose technically brilliant - it's a different kind of magic altogether.

Or maybe it isn't 'magic' at all.

Maybe what those best-selling 'bad writers' are doing is simply writing their stories with slightly different priorities to the 'Great Writers.' Perhaps for them, the story comes first, and the 'quality' of the writing comes second. Sometimes, using passive voice is the only way to show a protagonist's feelings of powerlessness in a scene. Sometimes giving your readers a brief summary of certain events (telling) is preferable to making them metaphorically sit through every trivial detail (showing.) And sometimes a well-chosen adverb can add just the right flavour to an ordinary verb, in a way that reaching for the rare and beautiful Super-Verb can't. By all means make use of the Writing Rules - but never sacrifice clarity to do so. Say what you mean to say, in order to tell the story you mean to tell - even if that requires you to break out the 'was'-es  and 'ly'-words.

Story first, writing to impress other writers second. That's how to craft a bestseller.

3 Not-Obvious Writing Gremlins that Can Really Mess up Your Stories

The world of writing is awash with rules, and some are shouted louder and more often than others. Never use adverbs, avoid passive voice like the Ebola virus, show don't tell, etcetera etcetera... if you haven't heard these at least once in your life before, trust me, you will the moment you emerge from the nuclear bunker you must have been living in up until now.

Of course rules aren't always a bad thing. The three above are actually good, when used sensibly and as and when applicable rather than obeyed 100% of the time, forever to the power of infinity. In terms of writing they were invented for quality control, to help writers create the best work they could so that readers could have the best experience... well, reading it. And that, ultimately, is what us writers strive for (isn't it?)

But some of the little glitches that crop up in stories don't really fall into the category of 'rules.' They're more like gremlins, i.e. only a problem in certain circumstances (like - um, getting them wet or feeding them after midnight? Okay, bad analogy...)

At first glance, you may look at the following list and, for at least some of them, think "Seriously? Who's going to notice that?" But that's how they do their damage. Readers - especially readers who aren't writers, and therefore haven't been bombarded with a metric tonne of rules and regs about writing - will still feel their effects, but they won't know why. 'I don't know, something about the way it was written just irked me,' is the usual vibe that's communicated by those who tossed a book aside because they just "couldn't get into it," or "it bored me." Leaving aside examples like those who try to read a Barbara Cartland novel when they hate Romantic Fiction,  many readers feel this way because something in the writing keeps knocking them out of the story world and back into the I'm-reading-a-book world. And these little gremlins might not be obvious, even to the reader, but they're there....

1 - Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah.... jeez, this tune is boring.

We all know about the umpteenth Deadly Writing Sin of Repetition. Poor old E.L. James got called out on it in her Fifty Shades series, with her heroine's 'Inner Goddess'-ing and 'Oh My'-ing. (Every writer in the history of forever has that problem by the way, before we all get too smug. The only difference between us is how ruthlessly we edit our pet phrases out of our work before it sees the light of day.) Other variations on this theme include overuse of the same type of body language; that permanently windswept hero might fuss with his hair in a million different ways, but when he does it to express every emotion he ever has, in every possible circumstance... well, he's got bigger problems than just looking like a raging narcissist. These types of repetition are obvious, because the words are acting more like pictures for the reader, and they're seeing that same damn picture over and over again.

But a more subtle form of repetition is more like music, in that it messes with the rhythm of sentences - most often dialogue, over paragraphs, scenes and even whole chapters. It's a bit like listening to a Black Lace song (click on that link at your own risk.) Once you've heard one verse and a chorus you really don't feel a need to hear any more... but still it goes on... It happens when you use the same sentence structure for each line of dialogue, over and over again. Here are some examples:

EXAMPLE 1:
"I never killed your wombat," said Jane.
"But you were the last one to see him alive," said Tom.
"That doesn't mean I killed him," said Jane.
"Jane loved Flopsy like her own child," said Barry.

EXAMPLE 2:
"Well," said Mary, "how are we going to open this tub of Pringles?"
"We can't," said Harry, "when both of us have broken our nails."
"I wish," said Mary, "we'd never gone to that cowboy manicurist."
"But then again," said Harry, "she did give us great spray-tans."

EXAMPLE 3:
John straightened his tie. "I'll show that clown mascot who's boss," he said.
Susan patted his arm. "Ronald McDonald won't know what hit him," she said, smiling.
Ted picked up the briefcase. "You're supposed to meet him at noon. What time is it now?"
Miranda looked at her watch. "Eleven twenty-five," she said.

Did you feel the plodding rhythm as you read them? Each example may have had different approaches to where they put the dialogue tag/action beat, but they were always in the same place, over and over again. After just a couple of lines it starts to sound like a nursery rhyme, which is only fine if that's what you're writing. To avoid this effect, it's better to mix and match where you put your tags and beats (and indeed, miss them out entirely when it's obvious who's speaking anyway.) However, this can be difficult when you have more than two people in conversation at once, and is when Example 3 is most likely to occur. Readers need to know exactly which character is saying which lines of dialogue, and in cases where a two-plus group aren't 'taking turns' to speak, putting the tag/beat anywhere other than right at the beginning of the dialogue can feel too late to impart that vital information. Making your characters' speech patterns more distinct is the key to this problem, so readers can guess by the tone and word usage who's talking. And you can cheat it a little bit by having a couple of non-tagged back-and-forths between two characters every now and then before letting a third jump in. You can also mix up Example 2 and Example 3 placements; as long as the dialogue before the tag/beat is short (just one or two words) the reader won't have to wait too long to figure out who's talking.

2 - "What did you do to the house, Honey?"

 'For weeks Hermione had been coming in through the front door and flopping straight onto her living-room sofa after a hard day's work at TaxidermyRUs. Until that fateful day... she magically acquired a hallway! It wasn't there before, but at some point between the end of Chapter Five and the beginning of Chapter Six the Builder Fairies paid a secret visit, and now she has to navigate an entire new set of interior architecture before she even sees her beloved sofa. As if she didn't have enough problems, what with the gravity-warp from that giant wormhole threatening to swallow up Chingford in less than a week from now...'

Do not think for a minute that readers won't notice something like that. There are Star Trek fans out there who complain when one of the redshirts has 'the wrong insignia for their rank' on their uniform, so you betcha life there'll be readers who notice when you doof up with the layout of your settings. Of course there'll be many who don't, but for those who do it not only yanks them out of your story-world as they try to recalibrate, but they lose a little trust in you as an author. After all, if you can't get little things like that right, how are you going to get us to the finale of this novel in one piece?

If you have real-life settings in your story your job is slightly easier, since there are ready-made photos, maps and even floor plans of most places thanks to the wonder of sites like Google. For made-up locations, you'll need to draw your own maps. Yes you will, don't look at me like that. I've had to draw my own map of the secret underground base in Redemption, so that a) I could figure out where all the different areas should be and b) so I can then remember where I've put them. I spent hours on that map and looked at it loads of times since, but even now I still have to refer to it to find out if, say, my characters really would have to walk past the lab to get from the mess hall to the library.

Obviously it's nice to get all that info right first time... but you won't, so don't sweat it on the early drafts. Make it a bona fide editing pass in its own right later on, where you can go through a more polished draft looking specifically for those kinds of doofs. You'll be glad you did - and so will any eagle-eyed Trekkers who read your work. (Not 'Trekkies,' by the way. They don't like that, apparently.)

3 - Behold, the amazing multi-tasking superpowers of Octopus-Man!

'Kargo the Barbarian hacks and slashes his way across the battlefields of Doodah, his battered shield smeared with goblin blood and his sword all covered in entrails. When he finally storms his way into Castle Dropnuts he spies the fair lady Britnea, and is overcome with love for her. "Fair lady," he says, "forgive me for my intrusion. I may be naught but a lowly Barbarian, but I am still capable of rocking your world. Please accept this gift as a token of my love." She gasps and blushes as he presents her with a single, perfect red rose...'

Whoa, hang on a minute, where did that come from? Was he hiding that rose up his kilt somewhere? (And with all those thorns.... ooh, doesn't bear thinking about...) And what happened to his hulking great sword and shield?

Okay, that was a bit of a daft example, but sometimes when a character has a prop of some kind and there's a long portion of action or dialogue happening, it can be easy to forget that, until you say otherwise, they're still holding and probably even using that prop. The same thing can happen with having them do some mildly strenuous activity like chopping wood for the stove outside the front door, and then in the next moment they're somehow in a chair on the porch, chillaxing and cracking open a beer.

It happens most often when you have long sections of dialogue and interaction between characters, where it's easy to get so lost in the drama of what's being said you forget what they were actually doing before the conversation started. So it pays to make a note of what each character is doing and holding at the start of each section, and make sure you either keep those details consistent or add in the necessary 'transition business' if you want them doing and holding something else by the end of it.  You don't have to get silly about it - "Ted put down his cup on the table that was next to him and then got up out of the chair he was sitting in so that he could walk over to the closed door on the other side of the room before putting his hands on the handle and opening it..." - but unless your characters are wizards don't have them conjuring things out of thin air, turning them into something else in the blink of an eye or making them randomly disappear while they teleport to the other side of the building.

I'm sure there are some people out there reading this and thinking "this is pretty pedantic stuff here - nobody cares about little things like these, surely?" They do. Just look at some of the one-star reviews on sites like Amazon and GoodReads. It's easy to dismiss those who rage about the continuity errors in films and tv shows as nerds and obssessives - but the bloopers they spot only appear on screen for a few seconds at best. The average reader can take far longer within the page to spot any of your continuity errors - which means they don't need to be uber-observant to pick them up. The result? Many more chances for you to look like the prize wally if you don't take the time to check that stuff before you publish your masterpiece.

What other Gremlins would you add to this list? Do you have pet doof-ups that you routinely make in early drafts? Feel free to share in the Comments.

How Writing Rules Can Sometimes do Bad Things to Good People

A week or so ago, I found a thread posted in the Writing Forum of an online writing community I've been a member of for a while. Its title was "Words You Hate/Won't Use."

It started off innocently enough. The Original Poster listed 'gingerly,' 'albeit' and 'fastly' among her no-no words. Others added 'righter,' '-ish' words (like 'tallish' and 'brownish') and the godawful 'moist' (I can totally get behind that one.) There were smatterings of debate as to the dictionary-defined validity of some of the words offered ('fastly' was contested for a good few pages of the thread.)

My own, personal 'oh-hell-no'-word is actually a phrase - and it's entirely my own fault that I hate it because I was the one who over-used and abused it in a novel I started about ten years ago, that limped to about Chapter Five before I shuffled it quietly into the Novel Graveyard on my hard drive. I had two male characters who appeared to have only one way to express troubling emotions, and that was to "rake his hands through his hair." They were both at it, every time things got a bit tense for them, and after seeing that action so many goddamn times in one of my read-back sessions I wanted give them both a buzz-cut and staple-gun their hands into their pockets. This has had a hangover effect on my writing ever since; I can't use it in any of my stories now without feeling a little bit sick in my mouth. (I think I may have one variation of it in Redemption at the moment - or I may have already replaced it with something else and then dissociated from the whole traumatic experience. If it is still there, trust me, it's living on borrowed time...)

So far so conversational. But then things started to get a bit hardcore. Words like 'suddenly' and 'very' came up, along with 'then,' 'got,' 'almost' and 'just.' Not just once, but several times, with many others agreeing with those who put them forward. And adverbs in general, of course - and while we're at it let's not forget the dysfunctional families of 'was' and 'to be' (beGONE, evil Passive Verbs!)

The same little add-on phrases starting creeping in too - you know the kind of thing I'm talking about. 'Using this word in your writing just screams 'amateur'...' 'It's an example of lazy writing on the author's part - there's always a better/stronger word you can use...' And of course the ever-so-humblebrag 'I've made a point of eliminating every instance of that word from my writing now, and if anything it makes my writing stronger.'

Reeeeeaaaalllly? You've eliminated every instance of words like 'very,' 'then' and 'got,' have you? Well, aren't you the Star Pupil of your Fiction Writing 101 Class?

I'm sorry if that sounds snarky... well no, perhaps 'sorry' is the wrong word. Perhaps what I really mean is "I have no wish to upset or offend you, but my brain is rejecting what you just said so hard that this response is projectile-vomiting from my speech-hole faster than anything more polite and less sincere." Yeah, that sounds more me, I'm going with that, thanks.

Pick up a book by any famous-to-insanely-famous author - go on, any book you like. Pick one by your favourite author if you like. It's okay, I'll wait for you until you get back.

Done it? Good.

Now, do you notice a total absence of adverbs, so-called 'passive verbs' and words like 'very,' 'got' and 'then' in their work? To the point where they clearly made it their mission to weed them out like the canker-sore Violations of Good Writing Rules they truly are? Nope, didn't think so. And yet those authors seem to have done okay for themselves - even garnered themselves a bit of respect, you might say.

Perhaps those Fiction Writing Rules hadn't been hewn in fire onto their stone tablets back then - or said authors simply never got around to engraving them on their souls. How lucky all us millennium-generation writers are then, living in a webby-connected world that guarantees we'll never miss the chance to hear them trumpeted loud and long - and as such, be saved from committing such a heinous crime as a wanton adverb to the page...

Yes, my brain is projectile-vomiting again - I should probably calm down now ... *deep breaths, thinking happy thoughts...*

But here's what's winding me up about the Writing Police; how must fledgling writers, new to the craft and eager to stretch their creative wings, feel when they read this kind of twaddle? When basic words like 'very' and 'then' - words we all grew up with and use in our speech every day of our lives - are suddenly signposts to the writing equivalent of a minus score on an IQ test? Veterans don't realise just how damn scary this zero-tolerance attitude can be to the padawan writers. No matter where we are on the road to getting our work in front of readers, we're all in this together, aren't we? We should be helping each other, not finding petty little ways to make it even harder for new members to join the Proper Authors' Club.

Of course when it comes to writing there are things that work and things that don't. Yes, a lot of the writing rules - even this one we're discussing now - were invented for a reason, and being at least aware of them and why they're worth knowing will help you become a better writer. And obviously the staples like spelling, punctuation and grammar are important, because readers need to understand what they're reading.

But these are the technical skills of writing, and there's more to a great story than making sure the i's are dotted and t's are crossed. Even Stephen King, in his book On Writing, follows up his lecture on shunning adverbs with the cheerful admission that he doesn't always follow that rule himself. Why? Because godammit, sometimes that dirty old adverb adds the right pinch of spice to your prose, to the point where it would be more wrong not to put it in.

Getting perfect tens for your technical skills in writing will not guarantee a great story because story is not just science; it's an art. And when you sacrifice your art on the altar of technical perfection, all you end up with is a dead chicken. We don't learn the rules of great writing to slavishly live by them; we learn them to understand when, why and how it's okay to break them.

Readers who aren't writers don't invest huge chunks of their time learning all the Rules of Great Writing, because most of them aren't bothered about such stuff. Unlike fellow writers, they don't read books to critique them; they read them to be entertained. And sometimes, seasoned writers forget that in their quest to define what 'quality fiction' really is.

So, to all you writers-in-training out there, don't let yourselves be intimidated by The Rules - or the folks who sigh and tut at you when you 'break' them. It doesn't mean you're a bad writer and there's no hope for you, and it definitely doesn't mean you should give up on your dreams. You don't have to ban every adverb, talk exclusively in Active Voice for every single sentence or slavishly follow any jackbooted clusterbag of Thou Shalt Nots. Yoda said "Do or do not. There is no try." For writing, I would amend that to "You learn much more by doing than you ever will trying not to do."

Just keep doing what you do, for as long as you love doing it. And trust that, the more you do it, the better you'll become at knowing when you can improve your work by following those pesky rules - or equally, by not following them. Your choice. Your story.

Your rules.