Losing sleep over "the rules"

voodoo said:

I know I have a long way to go, but the deeper I get into this writing journey,
the more it seems that all these rules are arbitrary.
Meaning some people don't follow them and it's okay. you're caught in semantics vs absolutes. ALL rules get broken, but there's a difference between saying, for instance "fuck them, I'm starting my book with the MC waking up, because that's where their Very Big Day starts" and them waking because the story starts, for example, with a man with PTSD and vivid dreams of his humvee burning with him trapped inside....in your case, I didn't see it, don't know, but ideally you may not want to open with that. On the flip side, whoever reviewed may have been as caught in absolutes as you are, and it was less an issue of if it worked in your case than them simply going through their own checklist. Some folks here know a lot, some a little, some are learning their way up, and their answers may change in a month...that is something for you to sort out carefully--not every piece of advice is golden, but you also have to make sure you're not just de-valuing any piece that is contrary to what you wanted to hear.

I recently submitted the first couple of hundred words of a completed MS for critique.
Because it opened with my MC waking to the sound of a phantom child whipering in her ear,
I was accused of being cliche.
"Opening with waking up is cliche. Either you don't care what agents think or you haven't done your research." if they actually said the second part, that was maybe a large stretch on their part....as mentioned above. Characters don't usually exist in a world devoid of mirrors, either, but again, having them look at a mirror so they can tell you about how they look is a cheap trick, like starting with waking when your story actually starts elsewhere, just so you can start at a "most obvious spot on their big day".

Pardon me, but I have done tons of research. I guess I just haven't gotten to that "rule." if their tone (above) about agents was not helpful, neither is yours. everyone gets angry, everyone rants, but if you take it to personal and snide, that isn't gonna help you either.

Three critiques down...same thing...writer opens with waking. Nobody called him on it. as i said it could have been a different scene where it worked better. it could also mean the "no waking" guy never critted that piece....not everybody picks the same things or says the same thing...sometimes I ignore whole swaths I'm hoping will be fixed or killed on re-write or someone else will address, in order to focus on peeves of ym own I feel either better equipped to address competently or more invested in, or fear everyone else will ignore
I don't know why, but that stung a little.
And not because I got called on a cliche - so what?
Easy fix.
But why not the next guy? Or the next? in any case, you should be more worried about fixing YOUR work than if someone else is being similarly "punished"...again I get your frustration, but this feels a bit like my kids complaining if I punish one for hitting, where they say "well, SHE does it all the time..." Don;t care--that desn't make it right, and you got caught, and YOU control YOUR actions. Same here, not from a parental responsibility standpoint but from the angle that if you're focusing on if others are getting the same penalties you are, that's probably effort wasted and misdirected--worry about if YOU got dodgy advice, or there was some sound reasoning behind it. these things aren't universal, but that doesn't mean they are arbitrary, either....
Why is it sometimes it's a big deal and sometimes it slides?

I mean even JK Rowling breaks a TON of rules.
"Oh, that's cuz she's JK Rowling."
Well, she was once a nobody and she got pulled from the slush pile. this is completely immaterial. because Rowling also does some things insanely well, and I don't see you claiming nobody who doesn't do the GOOD things as well can ever be published, so you can't point to the bad things and claim they're ok since she did them. that said, what does she do badly? We're all learning here, and I loathe her adverb tags, BUT I've come to the realization that for her market they are probably ok, if not appropriate. Now, if you want "bad" writers to hold up, fine...Brown and meyers come to mind....but the fact they did something shabby and got away with it doesn't mean "so don't critique mine for it," and it also doesn't mean "so it is ok, or even good." There's room for improving; do you think if Bella actually had a pulse suddenly housewives across the country would be demanding a refund because she did something besides sit on her ass, swoon, and complain about being clumsy?

So does it come down to story vs writing?
If the story captures you, it doesn't matter how crappy you write? no, it matters plenty. it may partially compensate for shitty writing, but good writing with good story is far better than having to excuse one because of the quality of the other.....look how many snicker about Dan Brown, or the Anita Blake books.....that isn't just "sour grapes"; those books distracted those readers to the point of anger and frustration with their flaws. If you're letting yourself do something shoddy enough it pulls the writers out of your story, well, you should fix that. you should fix anything under your control, no matter if Dan Brown fixes it or not. Because your story may not capture the popular imagination like his did. Also, because you want to write the best YOU can, instead of hoping you find the same agent and editor he does, and they maybe just chronically excuse bad writing....
I can't seem to reconcile this.
It's bizarre to me that some people are allowed to write freely - however they please, and readers/agents are begging for more.

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voodoo, i think you're letting your frustration get in the way of reasonable analysis. writing is subjective, and rules are guidelines, rather than absolutes. That said, even without the subjective, "good" is a multifactorial equation in books--maybe the book is a breakneck thriller with some silly purple metaphor you excuse because you love the gritty feel and the pace. maybe it has shallow little cardboard characters, but it is also a shamelessly manipulative love story, and you love the cathartic release of being in someone else's improbable but oh-so-perfect love story.....those could be made better in either case by fixing the weak points, but the good points were done well. That doesn't excuse the weak, and unless you're counting on so completely kicking ass in a few areas that your flaws are completely excuseable, it would seem most prudent to "fix" any weaknesses you can control.

this whole thing probably sounded meaner than i intended, but comes down to three things:

1. any rule can be broken, so long as breaking it strengthens instead of weakens the story....but that's the only good reason to break them.

2. any critiquer may be right, or wrong, and they may not all or even individually pick on the same things every time. you need to sort that out, and do careful to be analytical, instead of just letting your bias and ego make the decisions

3. there will almost always be strengths and weaknesses to any book. that doesn't excuse, and certainly doesn't invalidate, the weaknesses, and given the difficulty of selling a book, you're better off to do the best you can, rather than pointing to the lowest common denominator for validation


Hopefully some of that helps,
Quick

voodoo said:

I mean even JK Rowling breaks a TON of rules.
"Oh, that's cuz she's JK Rowling."
Well, she was once a nobody and she got pulled from the slush pile.

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It's not because she's JKR, but that she's sold in the millions, and made even more millions for her publisher that she can get away with things like this.

I don't recommend getting into the 'but big time author X does it . . .' If Big-Time Author drank a bottle of bleach you would do the same? I have far too much respect for my work to do so.

As far as being pulled from the slushpile, did the opening of the first book contain such a cliche? If it did, it must have been handled in such a way that the agent thought 'here's something special.'

What I will say, I think the critter is being too militant. The advice is don't start with your character waking from a dream. As in you've begun your novel describing your MC's dream sequence and duping the reader.

I like the your idea. But I haven't read your opening chapter, so couldn't say how well it works.

Don't think of them as rules, but rather as guidelines. The important thing is to learn and understand why they exist. You can drive yourself nuts worrying about what rules other writers have broken and still have been published.

Don't think of critiques as a personal affront. Think of them as reasons to learn more about writing in general, and about your personal style of writing. You don't have to agree with them 100% of the time, but you should understand why the critique was made and how it might improve your writing.

I remember one agent writing about how she didn't like novels that opened with a character waking up because she anticipated she'd then have to trudge through their morning routine with them. That may not be true of your work, but it's a perception that's certainly out there.

And yes, Rowling breaks a lot of rules. Plus, Order of the Phoenix is almost as boring as Clarissa. And Star Wars follows the hero's journey and is about as cliched as you can get. Unfortunately, none of this helps get your novel published. Or mine. Sometimes it's best to block out the unfairness of the world and focus on what you can control.

VTwriter said:

Don't think of them as rules, but rather as guidelines. The important thing is to learn and understand why they exist. You can drive yourself nuts worrying about what rules other writers have broken and still have been published.

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Agreed. Some of the "rules" I see mentioned here on AW leave me open-mouthed in amazement. Even as guidelines, some of the so-called rules are just plain silly. For example, "Never use the passive voice."

Come now.

And when it comes to the famous "Show, don't tell," I even challenge that one. It doesn't hurt for a beginner to keep it in mind, but don't let it get in the way of your creativity and your own voice.

Read a lot, and use your head.

I always say, don't follow a rule that can't be expressed without breaking it.

I'd like to ask a few questions:

How many critiques did you receive for the piece?
Of those, how many pointed to the waking scene?

One advantage that AW offers is varied opinion. Yes, some people point to specific things because they tried and failed or because it was a "rule" hammered into them by a mentor. Does that make any of their critiques wrong? No, probably not. It just makes them opinion. You know what they say about opinions...

Look through ALL of your critiques. Find how many of them are commenting on a similar story element. ("Characters are flat." "Story lacks cohesion." "Ending doesn't work with characters.") and work them.

When I get a large sample of critiques, I like to set a spreadsheet up, go through them and note lines of conflict and a count. The higher the count, the more likely I need to check the item in question. If only one person comments out of fifteen, its something to glance at, but less a problem than when ten out of fifteen comment.

Take a breath.
Relax.
Then realize that each critique is opinion based on the critiquer's experience, which may or may not fit yours.

quicklime said:

1. any rule can be broken, so long as breaking it strengthens instead of weakens the story....but that's the only good reason to break them.

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This.

A good writer can get away with starting a story with their character waking up. They could even get away with starting a story with "It was a dark and stormy night". But the writing has to shine and there has to be a good purpose: humour, or a certain irony; a level of meaning beyond the usual dull, cliched, lazy, lifeless, unintelligent, easy, flat, simplified, derivative, unoriginal [delete as appropriate] prose of below average writers who have no idea why "It was a dark and stormy night" might cause the reader to hurl.

If you've read a lot, and read well, then you don't need rules at all. The rules are there as a reminder of what's been done before.

The above is not a comment on voodoo's writing, which I haven't read. It could as easily be the case that the reviewer who offered that opinion was talking out of their behind.

If you want to break rules you have to do it well. In other words, there has to be something there that makes the reader not care that you're doing something they think they dislike.

I can't tell you how many crits I've gotten that start with "I hate first person but you hooked me so fast I didn't even notice 'til I was halfway through." I even posted a short story for crit and specified that I knew stories weren't "supposed" to have characters waking up in the first line. One of the responses was "I think that rule can be waived when the MC has six metal wings and is strapped to a wall."

The "rules" are meant to steer you away from lazy writing. But that doesn't mean that every instance of a character waking up is lazy. But if it's not done WELL, it will be tagged as cliche. The only way around this is to work hard and write better 'til no one cares if you're starting with a description of the weather while your MC wakes up.

Better writing equals less restriction by "rules". Complaining that people who write better can break the rules doesn't help anyone.

That's like the infamous quote by Rob Liefeld where he's complaining about people complaining about his art. "Well, look at Jack Kirby, he breaks the rules all the time."

Yeah, Rob, that's because Jack "KNEW" the rules and then knew how to break them to create an iconic style. Jack could also draw damn near photorealistic pictures when he needed.

There's a difference between breaking the rules and just doing bad art.

Same thing with writing. If you know "the rules" (and believe me, I agree that they appear pretty damn arbitrary), it's easier to break them to create someting artistic. If you don't know the rules exist, then it tends to fall into just sloppy writing.

(I'm uncomfortable using the word sloppy here, but I'm blanking on a better term at the moment - I think someone used lazy, which might work better, but let's run with it for now.)

voodoo said:

This critique felt a little superior
and I worried for a while that maybe I super suck at this.
OMG...how could I have made such an amateur mistake after all this time and study and reading? *head explodey*

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ok, the hardest part of getting critiques is deciding who is every bit as lost as you are, or maybe even moreso, who has an axe to grind or their head wedged in their backside, and who knows what is really going on. Depending on the style, the question, etc. these groups may even be in flux.

As a very general rule, if several people hang up on the same thing it is likely a problem. But I don't know your other board, it isn't impossible it is just groupspeak, either. Or that, as mentioned, you simply failed to pull it off.

In any event, you can get good and bad advice, and which is which is not always obvious on the surface. That's one reason it is nice to see if the complaint repeats, but it is also a good reason to hang out anywhere long enough to get a handle on a few regulars you "trust". If someone else says something that's a 180, you can try to pick apart if they are right, the folks you trust are, or maybe there's even room for each, but at first you don't know anyone from the next poster. It can take some time, and some reading outside your own personal threads, to get a handle on who you happen to respect and value the input of, and who may be a somewhat uncertain commodity, for any of several reasons (new, wrong, horribly biased, stuck in the 1970s publishing world, etc.). You will develop a bit of a radar for advice that sounds too absolute, or too vague, or too naive, to be sound, just like you will get a handle on folks who just seem to really have their heads screwed on tightly. But you gotta do a lot of wading through before that, and it can get confusing, especially when three folks you've never met all say different things. Welcome to the exciting world of writing, and forums.


on top of all that, the "superior" bit is just human nature: some folks are happiest when they are being smug little pricks, and the "arts" seem to draw an unfair share of that--I see the same sort of "fuck, am i special" in some of the folks here (they don't last long, this is a great board for separating the poseurs from the folks who actually want to write, instead of just telling everyone they do) that I see in ballroom dance. It has also generally been my experience, here and almost anywhere else, that the more obnoxious the person, the more likely they don't know half what they seem to think they do.

So, here's a story for me to critique. Hmm. I don't like the story's presentation. It does not engage me. There has to be a reason, but I can't put my finger on it. I need to find something concrete that is wrong with the writing that I can comment on to justify why I don't like it. If I can't do that, my critique is vague and meanlngless. Out comes the rulebook.

The problem isn't that you broke a rule when others get a pass on the same rule. The problem is that 1) you failed to jumpstart the enthusiasm of the critiquer, and 2) the critiquer doesn't know why.

I just figured all that out without having read the story or the critique. I should probably stop doing that. But I have seen the same thing happen time and again.

voodoo said:

It's just sometimes critiques can feel arbitrary, nit-picky.

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That's because critiques often ARE arbitrary and nitpicky. Each critiquer has his own pet peeves and hobby horses, which is why you're best served by lurking for a while in a crit forum -- long enough to learn individual prejudices and experience levels.

I've noticed that critiquers who are relatively new to writing tend to be more wedded to the random "rules" they've picked up than critiquers who've got more writing under their belts. This doesn't mean the newer critiquers don't have something to contribute. Just be aware of this rule-quoting tendency.

As for the waking up thing. I expect readers are less troubled by this, per se, than agents and editors who spend their working lives reading the same sort of opening over and over and over and over again, until its very existence (divorced from effectiveness) becomes the bane of their existences.

In all cases, whether it's a rank beginner who's offered comments on your work or the uttermost senior editor at the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world, respond in the same way. Take what you can from the comments, then say thank you and get out.

Al Stevens said:

So, here's a story for me to critique. Hmm. I don't like the story's presentation. It does not engage me. There has to be a reason, but I can't put my finger on it. I need to find something concrete that is wrong with the writing that I can comment on to justify why I don't like it. If I can't do that, my critique is vague and meanlngless. Out comes the rulebook.

The problem isn't that you broke a rule when others get a pass on the same rule. The problem is that 1) you failed to jumpstart the enthusiasm of the critiquer, and 2) the critiquer doesn't know why.

I just figured all that out without having read the story or the critique. I should probably stop doing that. But I have seen the same thing happen time and again.

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Good analysis.

I'll second what most folks here are saying.

The only real rule is that you have to make the story interesting and make the reader want to continue reading. Guidelines like "try not to use too many adverbs" exist because lots of people are bugged by adverbs and find them redundant (and often, though not always, they are).

That said, if your writing is good enough they probably won't even notice if it has something they normally hate. As you said, there are many, many successful books--even successful first books--that do all the things writers are told not to do; use infodumps, adverbs, POV shifts mid-scene, etc. They get away with it because they find a way to make it entertaining and coherent.

But since telling a writer to "be entertaining" is pretty vague and useless as a guideline, the rules are there in order to help a writer avoid things that can potentially turn off readers or cause them to throw a book across the room in irritation. But ultimately, what makes a story actually work and gives it that spark of life that hooks people is something much more elusive and difficult to teach.

I'm probably rambling, but this is an issue I've thought a lot about myself.

They're not rules as much as a list of things that require more understanding and experience to pull off properly.

I don't know where you got this crit, but it's also possible that the other person didn't get called on it because the critters are friends with that author.

Just try to understand the logic behind the rules, and see if it fits your case. Was your opening unusual and captivating enough that agents won't do a headsmack about another MC waking up in bed? Really think about it, and hopefully the answer is more clear. If you can't always tell, at least get a tough beta (alpha?) I swear by mine.

The rules are there for a reason. If you're asked, "Why did you break this rule?" and you can explain why, fair enough. But if the only answer a writer comes up with is "Well so-and-so did it!" then I want to smack them.

Learn what the rules are and why they exist before you break them, and when you do break them, do so from a position of power, not petulance.

The reason the guy below you didn't get busted for a "waking up" starter is probably because his wasn't recognizable as the standard setup (although, he probably got busted for other things). There's waking up and then, there's Waking Up. If someone wakes up in the middle of other narrative--i.e., everything flows toward the event and then away from the event in a way that makes sense--it's not the same as when the very first action is the character waking up and then, Stuff Happens.

Edits on blogs, though, aren't especially extensive. "It's cliche" is vague. All you can really take from a comment like that is that it didn't work for that particular reader. If it had worked, it wouldn't have been noticed. And that's the thing about waking-up openings (and first day of school and first day in a new town and having a dream, etc. openings)--they aren't ripped on for being "cliche" because they happen to be cliche. Cliche things are done all the time and people don't really notice them. They're ripped on because they're not interesting.

Have you ever sat and listened to someone talk about the dream (just as an example of another no-no opening) they had last night? There're exactly two people for whom that's actually interesting--the dreamer and her psychologist (and the psychologist is getting paid to listen).

Frequently, with inexperienced writers, the dream doesn't even have anything to do with the story--it's just "exciting"--otherwise, it's generally a cheap foreshadowing device. And again, there's no context. We don't usually know who's dreaming or why or what it all means or why we should care. Then the character wakes up and we have to orient ourselves in a completely different reality. It ends up being confusing in most uses.

Waking up is boring because that's very rarely where the actual story starts. As Quicklime said:

quicklime said:

...having them look at a mirror so they can tell you about how they look is a cheap trick, like starting with waking when your story actually starts elsewhere, just so you can start at a "most obvious spot on their big day".

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When you're starting with waking up so your character can start a journey, there's usually a lot of unnecessary throat clearing between the start of the story and where things actually get interesting. And interesting actually has to be interesting--you can't fake it on line one with "But an invisible child whispered in her ear!" and then lag for the rest of the journey until we get to where the real story starts. I think, knowing what I know, it actually would be better to start the character in the place she ends up, where the story gets good, and then, show a whisper dream thing at a place it'll make more sense and have more impact.

You already know that kind of crits you get in SYW. I'd suggest putting your new opening up there and ask specifically for feedback about why the "waking" opening doesn't work.

Also, a tiny caution: The online writing community isn't as small as I would have thought. I'm 99% sure I know this other site and your opening scene and the specific critique you're talking about. It's a fair assumption that if I'm on both sites, the original critiquer might also be. That's just something for everyone to consider when they're venting on one site about someone from a different site... I'm just saying. You can vent and question sure, but it probably still pays to be diplomatic, even if you think you're safely anonymous. ('Cause you probably aren't.)

voodoo said:

Pardon me, but I have done tons of research. I guess I just haven't gotten to that "rule."

Three critiques down...same thing...writer opens with waking. Nobody called him on it.
I don't know why, but that stung a little.

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You had never heard the rule, so perhaps those who crit the next guy hadn't either. It's not always the same people criting.

voodoo said:

The other critiques all said "I agree with what she said."

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If i got one critique that took the story to task, and then a bunch of "What she said," I'd say I got one actual critique. The other responders I'd challenge for a real critique, because they didn't give me anything to work with.

However, that is because I've gotten to a point where just hearing "What she said" has gotten me no where and I expect people to have their own opinion.

And because I've become a bastard with a loudmouthed opinion of my own.