Are The Rules Beneficial?

tmesis said:

1. Dont use adverbs and adjectives to prettify your prose. (Link goes to Writers Digest article.)

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I tried to follow this advice once. I wrote about three pages with no adverbs or adjectives in it. It was horrible. When I whined about how horrible this advice was making my prose, a wise person told me that even Hemingway wrote of the Old Man and the Sea.

tmesis said:

The guidelines we're talking about--the three in the OP--have nothing to do with correct grammar. I'm not disputing those kind of rules.



Of course not. That's my whole point.

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so your point is a good book can have a weak paragraph, but the book is still good and the graph is still weak, and therefore the rules which make that graph weak do not matter because the paragraph is weak and the book is not overall?

*scratches head

tmesis said:

Yes. My question is, Do these guidelines actually help improve people's novels?

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Yes, they do. You can approach all the counter examples one of two ways. 1. That writer got away with it, by God, so I'm going to do it to. 2. That writer did it, but I'm going to do better.

The fact is, when writers go against most of the rules and still succeed, it usually means story and character are so good that they manage to write great stories despite somewhat poor writing, not because of it. Think Dan Brown. Would you seriously put forth the argument that his novels wouldn't be impoved by a closer inspection of the rules, despite all his success?

Thinking your story and characters will be so brilliant that you can ignore the rules is not a good path to success, even if it does work now and then.

You learn the rules so you can figure out how to break them effectively. It's the same basic idea as "do your research".

If you don't know that 80% of bad 1st novels (totally fake percentage, btw) start with the azure-eyed heroine waking from dream to flip her wavy auburn locks out of her face so she can look in the mirror, you might think it's a convenient and clever way to start your novel.

You might look at Divergent and scream "But SHE started with a mirror!!!!"

The reason it "breaks the rules" but still works well is because THAT mirror scene, isn't just an excuse to shoe-horn the MC's physical description into the story. It's setting and character because of the way it's presented.

tmesis said:

Quicklime, if you want to know what my point is then please refer to the closing paragraphs of my original post. I'm not going to keep on defending myself against absurd arguments that I'm not even making.

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oh dear....

--
hwere's the thing. You agreed the graph could be weak. Here was your original closing, which I did read:

"But ‘The Sense of an Ending’ won the 2011 Booker Prize and to some it’s a worthy winner. Not because he followed the ‘rules’, but because the book touched many people. How did he achieve this? Frankly, if we knew, we’d all be doing it. Presumably voice and pace and humour and metaphor and irony and subtlety and unexpected phrasing and honesty and dishonesty and levels of meaning play a part in it—a far bigger part than adverb count, IMO.

So are the rules beneficial? As a writer, do you feel they've helped you? Or is it time to leave word classes alone and look at other aspects of writing?"
--

so are you building a straw man of maintaining some sort of mutual exclusivity, that without a weak paragraph the book would fail to touch?

Are you claiming a stronger graph would produce a weaker book?


Because on one hand you did agree the graph wasn't perfect. The book kicked ass. There is nothing causal between the two, and neither as separate entities, or together as a whole, really say anything about the rules. I can make you an absolutely delicious zucchini and chorizo taco.....and spit in it. The tacos will still be sublime, which hardly disproves the rule that one shouldn't spit into taco filling. Nor does it suggest by not spitting in the filling I am hampering my creativity somehow.

You can get as defensive as you like, but you started this thread to disprove the importance of the rules, and the graph could be improved--all you're showing is that the whole can rise above the sum of the parts, which I'm not sure anyone here would ever disagree with. Since we can't count on that though, best to try to use the best parts we can. As a beginner that probably means using spec, regulation parts made by experts (rules), and perhaps, later, as we become more skilled, it means learning to use a part that is stronger but just needs to be shimmed properly, or whatever else, and breaking those rules. Just ignoring the rules from the start and going for a full-on fuckrigging results in way, way more mechanical disasters than masterpieces though.


As a side note, I've noticed most of the essays on breaking the rules I've seen seem to be from folks waiting to break in, most of the rants on following them and/or breaking them with extreme care come from folks with bookses. you can either attribute that to conspiracy or correlation, I guess.....

Jamesaritchie said:

Think Dan Brown. Would you seriously put forth the argument that his novels wouldn't be impoved by a closer inspection of the rules, despite all his success?

.

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thisthisthisthisthis......god help me, I'm in bed with JAR




*want a back rub, James?

quicklime said:

I think pulling good, and bad passages from mainstream work makes more sense than finding "nobody" passages, and I don't think any prize automatically means a particular graph or line must be flawless

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Exactly.

The principles still hold. It can be challenging to find something done well in other execrable writing—but it is generally doabale.

And the inverse also holds true.

tmesis said:

That sounds logical and sensible, but does it actually hold up? The man on the street forms hundreds of perfectly understandable and grammatical utterances every day without knowing the metalanguage of linguistics. You do not need to be a grammarian to be a good writer. They are separate disciplines. I'm not even sure there's any evidence that linguistics students write better essays than non-linguists, let alone grammarians writing better fiction than non-grammarians.

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Yes, it does.

To rigidly adhere to "the rules" is to strip out everything which makes the writing unique, which gives emotion. A good writer will know how to twist the rules in order to convey a feeling. However, a bad writer will write a hideous mess and not understand why it isn't working.

Jackson Pollock didn't just drip paint onto canvas - he *expressed* the image (the clue's in the name of the movement - "Abstract Expressionism"). The "hand-painted" canvases in Ikea are just shapes.

If you understand what you're doing - because you know the rules - you'll see the difference.

quicklime said:

As a side note, I've noticed most of the essays on breaking the rules I've seen seem to be from folks waiting to break in, most of the rants on following them and/or breaking them with extreme care come from folks with bookses. you can either attribute that to conspiracy or correlation, I guess.....

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Or they are rants from people who don't actually understand the principles they're ranting about . . . but think they do.

"Write what you know," like the adverbs/adjectives thing is frequently completely misinterpreted.

Those rules aren't all that helpful, mostly because they present writing in terms of strange absolutes. Other nonsense I've seen:

Don't use "to be."
Never show a character crying.
Never use "that."
Don't use Latin-rooted words (my mind still boggles at that one.)

It's far, far better advice to tell a young writer to look at his adjectives and adverbs and see if they're actually pulling any weight. Context is king, of course, but the sentence He ran quickly out the door is generally better without that adverb. There a plenty of adverbs that would work perfectly there, especially where you've established something about the scene and want to refer to it quickly rather than take time to put it in its own sentence again. Suppose the person running is in the middle of a nightmare - running slowly out there door might work fine there. If the character has some problem with his leg, he could run lopsidedly. He could also run quietly if there's some cause for stealth. In all of those cases, the adverb can be more vividly phrased in somewhere else, but there isn't always space to do so, and vividness isn't always appropriate.

If you want to get good at using adverbs and adjectives interestingly, try poetry for a while, especially if you can find a college textbook with lots of student exercises. Poetry lends itself to writing interesting on clause level, and is a great way to get better at doing so.

tmesis said:

Yes. My question is, Do these guidelines actually help improve people's novels?

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Yes. Think of the guidelines as writing exercises. Forcing yourself to not use adverbs, for example, forces you to think about your writing, not just spill onto the page. Now that you are thinking about your writing, what best serves your story? "Runs quickly" or "sprints"? It could be either, but now you are thinking about it.

If the guidelines make writers think about their writing, they help improve people's novels.

I don't have much to add. There will always be exceptions to the rules. All I can say is that if I pick up a book that has excessive adverbs, I want to throw it at the wall with force. (But I don't. I put it down politely because it is still a book.)

Honeybadger, I lol'd at your example.

Bartholomew said:

Those rules aren't all that helpful, mostly because they present writing in terms of strange absolutes. Other nonsense I've seen:

Don't use "to be."
Never show a character crying.
Never use "that."
Don't use Latin-rooted words (my mind still boggles at that one.)

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Except, here's the thing: no one worth listening to would ever say those things. Yes, that right there? That's an absolute.

As Terry Pratchett had one of his characters say, "The rules are there to make you think before you break them."

Personally, I learned a lot from the "no adverbs or adjectives" rule once I figured out that it should be applied in tandem with "use stronger nouns and verbs".

I still use adverbs and adjectives, but now they're a precision instrument in my toolkit, not a crutch.

Compare "The long line-up stretched far down the block" to "The line-up snaked down the block."

And I learned a lot from realizing that "to be" is often used to "tell" instead of "show"

Compare "The sky was dark" to "Storm clouds bricked off the light."

Jamesaritchie said:

Yes, they do. You can approach all the counter examples one of two ways. 1. That writer got away with it, by God, so I'm going to do it to. 2. That writer did it, but I'm going to do better.

The fact is, when writers go against most of the rules and still succeed, it usually means story and character are so good that they manage to write great stories despite somewhat poor writing, not because of it. Think Dan Brown. Would you seriously put forth the argument that his novels wouldn't be impoved by a closer inspection of the rules, despite all his success?

Thinking your story and characters will be so brilliant that you can ignore the rules is not a good path to success, even if it does work now and then.

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All so true.

Rules and Guidelines are learning tools. Once you learn the rules, then you will know how to effectively break them.

Rules are for people who can't write. If you need a rule book to tell you what is good or bad prose, you probably should give up writing. IMHO... That said, a writer knows these are guidelines, not rules. They are helpful and in many instances it's a good idea to implement them, but not always. The only rule to writing I know of is: "If it works, it works."

There are two, and only two, actual rules:

1) If it works, it's right,

and

2) Neither confuse nor bore the reader.

Now I can (and given half a chance will) talk all day about the use of adjective and adverbs: How they're like spices; the right amount (of the right ones) makes dinner delicious, but not enough or too many (or the wrong kind) makes the dish either bland or inedible. But that's all art, and the artist has the final say.

Yep, what has been said before. You must learn the rules before you learn how to break them. Breaking rules at random will produce crappy writing. Knowing the rules, and consciously weighing the pros and cons of breaking them can produce masterful work.

But until you know the rules, you've followed them and understand perfectly why they exist you shouldn't even be thinking about breaking them. Following all the rules will make for solid writing, you might be able to exceed that level by careful and processed rule-breaking on occasion, but you need to reach that 'solid' level first.

Rules/guidelines are for people who can't write? Of course.

And for those learning to improve their writing - or learning to do anything. Everybody starts somewhere.

The fortunate few may need little or no tuition but most folk need to learn somehow, and hopefully eventually reach the stage where, as you acknowledge, judgement and experience dictate whether any particular rule/guideline be implemented, moulded to taste, or ignored.

Brindle Chase said:

Rules are for people who can't write. If you need a rule book to tell you what is good or bad prose, you probably should give up writing. IMHO... That said, a writer knows these are guidelines, not rules. They are helpful and in many instances it's a good idea to implement them, but not always. The only rule to writing I know of is: "If it works, it works."

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tmesis said:

OK, but IMO what makes that example bad has nothing to do with adjective or adverb overuse. It's the fact that it doesn't make any sense.

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It's overuse when it's annoying. But what annoys one reader may delight another.

Right now I am reading the critically acclaimed Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. My mother loved it, and passed it along to me. Ugh. Every sentence seems to have two, three, five adjectives. They don't drink tea. They drink hot oolong tea from a bone china tea cup. And on and on. On the one hand, the rampant adjectivory (like that? I made it up. See, I'm not averse to rule breakin') does paint a picture. I'm sure that's what my mom liked about it, and why she loved the critically acclaimed Atonement as well (also suffering from acute adjectivitis). But it's what I hate about it.

They had tea. I don't need to know that they drank it from a cup (I'd assume that anyway, and depending on the setting I'd assume a tea cup). I certainly don't need to know the cup was made from china, let alone bone china.

Good golly, who gives a rip? Let's get on with the story.

So if you're writing for my mom, make sure it's adjective-laden. If you're writing for me, cut to the chase. You'll never please everybody.

Devil Ledbetter said:

It's overuse when it's annoying. But what annoys one reader may delight another.

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Right! Studying your genre, the authors who write it, and the readers who read it, will serve you far more than any set of "rules". The guidelines are helpful, but these days, a good story always trumps good writing.