Lesson 0: Learn the rules before you break them · 2:27am Aug 22nd, 2015
I know full well that I'm talking down to a lot of people in this post--my excuse is that writing it out is also a way for me to refresh the lessons in my own mind. Story tags are because I plan to go back and "grade myself" based on my own advice as i write these.
Anyway: read the title of this post. Read it and really understand it, and uncritically accept it without putting caveats or qualifiers on it. That phrase, "you must learn the rules before you start breaking them," is incontrovertibly true no matter how much you want to resist it. If you disagree with what I’ve said so far, you are wrong.
Remember, this isn’t me giving advice on how to write fanfiction; this is me relaying lessons from taking a class that had the sole purpose of teaching its students to write better. Being able to write clearly is much more important than being able to write with flair, and besides, if you aren’t an expert at writing clearly and correctly, then you are going to suck at flair.
So.
The first and most important rule is, fortunately, the easiest one to swallow.
The only important person is THE READER.
The instructor would ask "who is the only important person?" and expect us to reply "THE READER" out loud, like we were in grade school again.
You may have heard that it's important to write what you want to write, instead of cynically trying to get people to like you. That's all good and well, but it's not a good mindset for improving your writing skills. In fact, it's not a good mindset for producing good work at all.
Look at it this way: when someone says that his own opinion about the adventures of his red and black alicorn OC is more important than that of THE READER... would you honestly agree that this person’s goal is to make his writing “good?”
Hopefully you can internalize the idea of THE READER being more important than your personal feelings, because the rest of these rules are going to test that conviction.
No sentence fragments
Uh huh. I know. Get it all out. I felt that way too. Spit it into a comment if you have to. Then read the first section again.
Bear in mind, “no sentence fragments” doesn’t mean “no questionable sentence structures.” The ban on starting a sentence with a conjunction, for example, isn't even a real rule, so that can stay in your inventory. The only things categorically banned were sawn-off not-sentences.
Things like this. A subject with no action. Things that don’t count as “bad sentences” because they aren’t even sentences. A tough habit to break, but one that shouldn’t be a habit in the first place.
Giving sentence fragments a free pass in the name of not imposing rules on creativity is no different from giving any other rule a free pass. Would you agree with someone who tried to defend tense errors the same way?
That's how the instructor put it, anyway.
I put it this way if you frequently use sentence fragments, then you have a habit of making grammatical errors. Intentional sentence fragments are almost always weaker than proper sentences. Break yourself of them, if only temporarily, and hopefully you'll see that my instructor and I are right about this.
No pronouns
Yep. Sorry, should have given a trigger warning.
Go ahead and take a minute if you have to, but not too long, since you should’ve already gotten it all out of your system with the last one. You good now? Okay.
Every single pronoun you use runs the risk of being a bad pronoun, such as an ambiguous pronoun or a dry weak pronoun where you would better off with a more descriptive word or phrase. Even pronouns in phrases like "those things" and "when that happens" are still pronouns.
You’re about to say something about Lavender Unicorn Syndrome. Well, you're wrong. Telling people to avoid Lavender Unicorn Syndrome is stupid advice that everyone should just purge from their awareness.
This is a weird one, so I'll go through examples.
Rainbow Dash flew at a steady pace across the blue sky. She knew that she would tire herself out if she pushed herself too hard, and she still had five laps to go for today's workout.
There were two of them left when Twilight Sparkle appeared. It was so sudden that she had to swerve hard to avoid crashing into her.
"Whoa!" she said. "Watch it!"
"Sorry!" squeaked the lavender alicorn.
Surely you agree that some of the pronouns need to go. So let's kill them every single pronoun and see if there are any improvements that you wouldn't have caught if not for this exercise.
My usual solution is to restructure the whole sentence/paragraph.
Rainbow Dash flew at a steady pace across the blue sky. There were still five laps left in her workout, which was too many to take at a sprint.
Note that "her" doesn't count in this case, because it's a possessive.
Of course, sometimes you can just find and replace. Being less obsessive about word repetition helps.
There were two laps left when Twilight Sparkle appeared with a loud POP. Twilight's entrance was so sudden that Rainbow Dash had to swerve hard to avoid a collision.
"Whoa! Watch it!"
And, of course, I did say that Lavender Unicorns are perfectly acceptable substitutes for pronouns...
"Whoa! Watch it!"
"Sorry!" squeaked the flying lavender unicorn, hovering unsteadily on her days-old wings.
It's been three-ish years since I was involved with this class and its tyrannical instructor, but these rules are still with me. Even the incredibly annoying pronoun ban served as a good exercise in constructing clean, readable prose, as you can see from the examples.
There were other rules, some of them equally restrictive, but most of them were specific to the task at hand. The next post, however, will require you to forget some rules as well as learn some new ones. Stay tuned.
Thus far, this is bullshit. Um, just so you know.
The reader thing is pointless. Which reader? I have thousands. Bad Horse likes things that Jake R hates. My AppleDash readers don't usually care for my TwiJack. And all of that translates to OF writing just as well. You need to understand your readers, and what your readers expect, but none of them are the most important thing, and they aren't a hive mind as a group.
The sentence fragments thing... sure. Know that rule. But break it whenever it feels right.
The pronouns thing is one I didn't know, and I can only say that in all the writing I've done, over the past fourteen years, including the book I placed with a publisher, I've been blissful and successful in my ignorance.
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When someone writes about a red and black alicorn and refuses to change something because he's personally attached to it, he's not writing for the reader. When someone spends three paragraphs on dry boring worldbuilding and insists on keeping it no matter how many comments say that it's dry and boring, he's not writing for the reader. That's all that means.
As for sentence fragments, I'll just say again that a habit of using fragments is a habit of making errors, and if you give them a free pass then you won't see when you should have used a real sentence, which is most of the time.
The pronouns? Whatever. It taught me things.
The goal of all three rules here was to get the class to not make faux pas like using gratuitous sentence fragments. I know they're not actually good rules, but following them or at least taking them as strong suggestions does help.
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I get that, but I think it's a bad way of looking at it. Take the dry worldbuilding thing-- to me, that describes the entirety of stories like The Lost Cities, which other readers are gaga over. Cold in Gardez was writing for some readers, and it would be easy for a new writer without an audience to publish that and not attract any of those readers. In that case, the problem isn't the writer, it's finding that audience.
In my blog post about the BronyCon Advanced Writing Panel I talked about "taste level," which I think is a much more useful way to think about it. It's useful to be able to gauge what different groups are looking for, and to recognize them as different. If red and black alicorn boy really loves his OC, that's fine, but he should know that it's considered bad by FiMfic readers, and why people think it's bad, even if he wants to keep writing it.
This is great. Thank you for posting this, because it's definitely going to help me write better.
I love the paragraph about sentence fragments that's written entirely in sentence fragments.
*Edit:
Also, thank you for standing up for "lavender unicorns." I've never thought it to be a bad thing to use brief descriptors in place of characters' names, as long as it's done sparingly and unambiguously. I once wrote a story where none of the characters were given names.