3 writing rules you should definitely ignore (at least some of the time)

I don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules in creative writing. As my former colleague Helen Francis often says, ‘If it works, it works.’  

The problem we face as writers, of course, is making what we want to do on the page work for our readers. So-called ‘rules’ and advice can be useful for understanding what has worked in the past for others, but the truth is you’re the only person who can write your books. Which means that the only one who can assert any ‘should’s or ‘shouldn’t’s about your writing is you.  

Here are three commonly quoted ‘rules’ that I think every writer needs to take with a pinch of salt:

1. Write what you know

Many of us begin writing by borrowing from the world(s) we know. That’s very sensible, but unless you plan on becoming a serial memoirist, you’re going to want to reach beyond your own perspective at some point. 

This advice often originates from two well-meaning intentions: 

1. To make things easier on you – writing what you know requires less research and less imagination; 

2. A fear of appropriation – it also gives you more sense of credibility and less chance of stepping on other people’s toes. 

I find this second point is the one that worries the writers I work with the most. However, I think we should be suspicious anytime we find ourselves making craft decisions based on fear.  

Another oft-quoted bit of advice I prefer is: write what you’re afraid to write. Confronting our fears on the page usually leads to much more exciting and interesting work than playing it safe.  

The truth is, writing what you don’t know is harder than writing what you do know, and it does come with risks. The greatest risk is that you’ll get things wrong and offend or upset those that know the topic/place/people/event/etc you’re writing about better than you. As with most risky things, though, the rewards when you do the work to get things right can be great too. 

What I think is essential when writing what we don’t know is to acknowledge our own positionality and understand why we’ve chosen to write about this particular topic/place/people/event/etc. Positionality refers to the social and political contexts that create our identities and the ways our backgrounds, thoughts, ideologies and biases filter how we perceive and interact with the world. Things that shape our positionality include class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and ability status. We can’t escape our positionality when we write, and we shouldn’t want to. Whatever our stories are about and wherever they’re set, it’s our unique perspectives that shape the reader’s journey through them. However, there are things, places and especially perspectives that each of us probably can’t write well because of our positionality. That’s not a weakness, but I think we do have a responsibility to identify the limits of our positionality in order to understand where our strengths as a writer lie. 

Rather than the safe, stay-in-your-lane approach that write what you know instructs, then, I prefer to encourage the writers I work with to write to the edge of your experience. How far can you push what you know and what you can know? How can you acknowledge your positionality but also widen your perspective?

2. Show, don’t tell

I’ve variously heard this clichéd rule first originated from C.S. Lewis, Anton Chekhov and even Aristotle. Whoever is responsible, I think they have a lot to answer for. While it isn’t bad advice for some parts of our work, especially for those of us working in long-form, it can never be applied throughout. 

What it usually means when someone asks us to show rather than tell is that our reader would like this part of our story to be dramatized rather than summarised.  

Scenes that are told or summarised are brief, efficient and factual. This means they require a passive reading mode and generally don’t stir our feelings as readers; we merely have to trust what the narrator says to be true. 

Fully dramatized or shown scenes, however, are slower, richer and full of sensory details, action and dialogue that require a more active reading mode. This encourages us to share in the emotions and sensations of the characters, which tends to make us feel more as we read. 

The latter is definitely more exciting to read, but the truth is we always need a bit of both. The tricky thing is knowing when to use each. 

Showing/dramatisation is best suited for: 

• scenes relevant to your character’s story arc and emotional development; 

• key turning points in the plot; 

• moments of conflict or high feeling; 

• anywhere you want your reader to truly engage with what you’re depicting. 

But telling/summary is really useful for:  

• exposition;  

• places where you want to move the story on quickly;  

• parts of the story with little emotional resonance or significance. 

3. Axe your adverbs and adjectives

In On Writing, Stephen King proclaims: ‘I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops’. Meanwhile, Mark Twain once wrote to a student, ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it.’  

Adjectives and adverbs are describing words, though, so shouldn’t it make sense to reach for them when trying to describe the settings, action and characters of our stories? In fact, aren’t they sometimes essential? It would be pretty difficult, for example, to ask a reader to picture a bespectacled old man driving a green racing car erratically along winding country roads by just saying ‘a man drove a car along roads’. 

One of the problems lies in the debunked rule above. By definition, adjectives and adverbs tell rather than show us what a thing is like or how an action is performed. So sometimes there is a better, more dynamic way to show the same thing. (In the example above, we might observe the effects of the character’s age and poor eyesight in other scenes.) Sometimes there’s not, though. (Colours, for example, often do need to be told.) 

The larger issue with adjectives and adverbs is simply quantity. In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron says: ‘Our brain can hold only about seven facts at a time. If we’re given too many details too quickly, we begin to shut down.’ So, if I tell you a wiry and spritely 90-year-old man wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a hot-pink three-piece suit drove an emerald green 1951 Marauder A three-seater erratically along thickly hedged winding country roads… Well. I suspect you shut down a while ago. 

As with so many things, the key is to be selective. We need to consider:  

• which parts of a scene and setting we most want to draw the reader’s eye to; 

• which descriptions truly add to our writing; 

• that concrete adjectives (those that can be experienced through our senses – e.g. red, wide, hot, salty, loud) help a reader picture things more clearly than abstract ones (e.g. lovely, angry, ugly, fruitful, kind). 

So, trust your instincts – write your own way – and remember that some rules can, and should, be broken. 

Natasha Bell is a tutor on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

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