Great sanity and common sense about what gets called head-hopping, and is actually sophisticated narrative technique http://bit.ly/rbvGx5

Emma

Thanks for the link, It's really good. Honestly I didn't know what's Head-Hoping. I think learning is never ending process.

Great link, Emma. A worked example is always so helpful!

R x

Yes, great! Thank you, Emma.

This, which is a link at the bottom of that post, is also good:

http://constantrevisions.blogspot.com/2011/01/neil-gaiman-master-class-in-writingpart.html

The fact that all these "rules" are breeding and spreading makes me very cross. I think I've mentioned before that I have a few friends who write for the e-published erotic romance market. Their editors enforce all these "rules" very strictly, so much so that it is now impossible to write one of those novels well. One friend was forced to remove every single use of "was" and every word ending in "-ing" from an e-novel (because, of course, that is "passive" ...)

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- in fact, one of my friends was building up a worthwhile career as an erotic romance author, and making several thousand pounds a year from her books. She has recently given up on her publisher - one of the most successful e-publishers - because of the trouble caused by these "rules", and the impossibility of being allowed to write anything that she can be proud of.

Think about it: a good career gone and thousands of pounds of future earning lost, entirely because of this lunacy. I'm so sorry for her, and she can't be the only one.

Not sure I follow the logic of that, Catkin. If she was earning good money following the publishers guidelines, but can't make money following her own version of the craft, then why is the publisher wrong? Frustrating, yes, but not necessarily wrong.

why is the publisher wrong?

They're prohibiting perfectly good ways of writing, because they're incapable of understanding the real business of how writing works - which suggests to me they're incapable of understanding writing.

If Catkin's friend is any good, she's quite capable of "breaking" those "rules" in ways which make the writing as good or better - in which case of course she can use them.

Emma

Or, to correct Emma's English and take out all those ungainly 'ings':

They prohibit perfectly good use of the written word...

(that's three words to replace the unsightly 'ing' but better, none the less)

because they don't understand the real business of how narrative prose works, which suggests to me they don't understand narrative prose at all.

So, I rewrote what Emma said, taking out words that finish with ings (also known by single word endings, but let's test the rule) because ings are verboten even though they are perfectly acceptable, clear and concise in the context.

My version isn't more succinct, clearer or more elegant than the original. So why fix it, just to slavishly follow a rule?

Perhaps it's like simile, sublime in the right hands, ghastly in the wrong ones. So, it's not the technique that's 'wrong', it's how skillfully it's employed.

I once read a criticism of a piece that had a woman stop a man in the street and ask him for a light. He said he didn't have one, hurried on round the corner. Then the woman takes out a lighter and lights her own cigarette. It was criticised because the man, the POV character, wasn't there to see this happen. But I loved that little vignette, and couldn't understand the criticism. Still don't.

So, it's not the technique that's 'wrong', it's how skillfully it's employed.

Yes, exactly - that's why they're all tools, not rules.

Having had fun deconstructing (oops, sorry ) what's going (sorry) on when ignorant, rule-clinging (sorry) creative-writing-Stalinists criticise using (sorry) "was", and say "show don't tell"... I'd love more suggestions of other creative writing shibboleths which need putting the boot into (and not ending with a preposition is another shibbolith up with which I will not put, as dear Winston once put it...)

Emma

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"a piece that had a woman stop a man in the street and ask him for a light. He said he didn't have one, hurried on round the corner. Then the woman takes out a lighter and lights her own cigarette. It was criticised because the man, the POV character, wasn't there to see this happen. But I loved that little vignette, and couldn't understand the criticism. Still don't."

Jan, that's a great example. Why not? The only time it would be logically incorrect is if it's written in first person, and present tense.

If it's in third person, there's a narrator, who can tell the reader whatever s/he damn well pleases.

If it's in first person and past tense, then the narrator is a character, narrating the past. In which case, logically speaking, they can also say what they damn well please about what happened.

Of course, I can imagine a piece where that kind of thing happened all the time, and the reader ends up feeling sea-sick. But that's about not using your tools properly, which is different from saying you can't do something.

Great post. I loved this (from the passage by Richard Yates):

he could glare at the window and see the brave beginnings of a personage

Maybe rules are for those who don't know what they're doing creatively; or who do but have little creative drive to do anything other than the basic job towards a basic end. I read quite a lot of Science Fiction and like most genres, much of the writing stays within the rules of writing. In the case of SF, this tends to be either because the author is writing predictable space opera-ish stuff or because he's more interested in the ideas he's exploring than the writing itself.

The other day, I bumped into a novella by Theodore Sturgeon I hadn't heard of before. I think it had been all but dumped by him but someone's discovered it and put it on Kindle. Interestingly, it shifts around multiple viewpoints, looking at one event through several different characters. It's not a very well put-together story but what struck me is that it contains a few passages where the writing is transcendent - transcending the genre, the story even. These are sections where he breaks the rules, e.g. bits in italics that may or may not be the character's subconscious interjecting, or perhaps even their spirituality; it isn't clear but it doesn't matter, because the writing is so . . . beautiful. It reminded me of what writing's all about, for a writer at least.

Sturgeon didn't always write like that, of course. I'm not sure anyone can all the time. But at least he did it fairly often and, I'm sure, because he simply could. I don't think it's coincidence, either, that he was well known for pushing through social and mental barriers with his themes, in a way that Ray Bradbury (much as I love his stuff, too) just wouldn't dare.

So, I think when a writer knows what they're doing, they don't break the rules just to be different. I believe it's just their creative yearning finding its right way to appear.

Terry

I'm always amazed that however repeatedly and trenchantly a blog post of mine explains why X isn't a rule - there's no such things as rules - there are only techniques which you need to learn to use well... some commenter always says, "Thank you so much for explaining this rule; I'll know when to break it now..."

It's as if people WANT there to be rules in writing, I find myself thinking. They want me to be setting forth "the rules", and read me as doing that even when I'm doing the exact opposite.

I find it very peculiar: how can anyone with any creative spark actually want there to be rules in writing? Guidelines, perhaps. Techniques, certainly. And of course, a developing sense of good and bad, fit- and un-fit for purpose. But rules?

Emma

A question very succinctly posed:

how can anyone with any creative spark actually want there to be rules in writing?

The answer, it seems to me, is in the question. A person with a creative spark wouldn't want there to be rules; someone who thinks writing is a cookery-book-style exercise would, because that's how recipes work. But people who slavishly follow cooking recipes rarely come up with their own original ones.

I've met endless numbers of people who approach other activities in life in much the same way: they want there to be rules about how you're supposed to do it, and will even go as far as to invent their own rules if there aren't any. Even when there are clearly defined rules, as, for example, with driving, there are people who will invent their own rules-of-thumb for situations in which you are supposed to apply intelligence and experience. People, basically, like to follow rules blindly, because that's often easier than actually thinking about what you're doing.

Jan's example is an excellent example of a half-understood "rule" being applied blindly. Here is a scenario that would work perfectly in, say, a film or TV drama. The fact that the man couldn't see what the woman did wouldn't even be on most viewers' radars, at least as far as criticism of the scene is concerned, because his POV is clearly not what we're being shown. So why is that same scenario supposedly not within the "rules" of writing? Why can't a piece of prose narrate exactly the same scene, in exactly the same way?

One friend was forced to remove every single use of "was" and every word ending in "-ing" from an e-novel (because, of course, that is "passive" ...)

I think I might be tempted to write a piece involving cling film, in response to such an editorial decision. And maybe set it in Woking.

A person with a creative spark wouldn't want there to be rules

That's a tad simplistic and, for me at least, insupportable.

A lot of creative people find inspiration through railing against the rules, still others from finding ways to circumvent the rules, and others still find status by living outside them. And, of course, doing away with rules also does away with the creativity in many arenas of creative word-play including, but not limited to; poetry, punnery, sophistry, anything by Douglas Adams, limericks, haiku...

If there is no "in the box", you can't think outside it.

Thinking outside the box is about more than just knowing when to step away from rules. It's also about stepping away from one's assumptions about the way life works. This is often much harder to do than stepping away from rules, because, in many cases, people aren't even aware of the assumptions they are making. I suppose one could argue that most assumptions are rules, but many are so fundamental that most people wouldn't think of them as being rules. One example might be that secretaries are always female. (That's an assumption that I've seen applied, unthinkingly, in reverse: that the only female in an office full of engineers must be the secretary. The woman in question, being an engineer herself, used to get understandably irritated when people automatically asked her if she was the secretary. I doubt whether most of the people asking the question even realised that they were implicitly assuming 'secretary=female'.)

That's a fair point, Gaius. It got me thinking about comics. When the new wave of young, talented writers and artists flooded into Marvel and DC in the late 60s/70s, they had to work tightly within the confines of the medium. This didn't just extend to the strict number of pages, panels per page ratios, etc; they also had to work with other people's characters within strictly delineated mythologies.

And yet . . . I saw the film 'Watchmen' the other night, which seemed to me a pretty faithful reproduction of Alan Moore's 1985 graphic novel. When he wrote that book he had the freedom to create a whole new set of characters and to write a finite story. He was able to show sex, realistic violence and to take any satirical swipe he liked at western politics, gender conventions, etc, etc. But watching the film now, so much of the story looked heavy-handed; too much speechifying, not enough story; crude characterisations; ambiguity, not necessarily of the intentional kind, about women's roles, and so on. I think the best work Moore ever did was on 'Swamp Thing' - an already-created character in a strictly-limited format, boxed in by the Comics Code (at least to begin with). But Moore turned it into something beautiful, unique and exciting, I suspect because of those restrictions not in spite of them.

Having said that, I think that maybe this discussion is moving around two different kinds of rules: technical and conceptual. There's no doubt that new writers have to learn technical rules, otherwise they simply can't translate their intentions into prose that mirrors them. Later, they can dispense with them if need be, in such a way the reader won't even notice. But perhaps we're saying that conceptually and creatively, those same writers have to be encouraged to keep their visions clear right from the start.

Terry