When writer Chris Castellini was earning his MFA, he and his fellow graduate students were discouraged from reading books on writing craft.
The concern, he said, was that the students would take titles like “10 Things You Must Do While Writing a Novel” or “4 Don’ts When Creating Characters” to heart, their prescriptivism and rigid agenda counter to the essence of what it is to create art.
While he understood the reasoning behind the caution, as the author of a book of writing craft, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, among many other works and an educator in fiction and nonfiction, he sees that books and essays on writing craft can enhance one’s approach to writing, authorial voice, and enthusiasm for taking risks on the page in numerous exciting ways and that ultimately reading books on writing craft make writers better.
Writing is an art form built on certain givens of communication, storytelling tenets, and perspective.
Rather than adhere to hard and fast rules as to how it should be performed, writing should follow the “there are many paths to a destination” axiom.
Much of the beauty and magic of literature is that a writer can explore and use risky or untried methods to get to where they need to go, and forge new ground while doing it.
A good writing craft essay or book on writing craft should be a wending, a writer’s meditation on a topic or their relationship to an area or aspects of writing.
Such books serve more as an invitation into enhancing the writer’s personal experience with language, idea, and narrative than a dictator’s list of rules.
What we get from such an exploration of a writer’s life via their approach to writing craft is the perfect metaphor for why we read in the first place: to learn about ourselves through stories.
(Though in the case of books on writing craft, you not only learn how to approach your life—but how to write—and do it better and more fully aware than you did before.)
Books on writing craft are in essence partnering with another writer to enter into their process and emerge changed.
Absolutely!
While building a piece of writing out of someone’s prescribed Do and Don’t list is a limiting approach and would make for a terrible read, if you look at such articles and books with a discerning eye, you’ll see they’re in fact useful for offering an opportunity to interrogate your own relationship to writing craft.
Rather than accept at face value that one should “never have your character look in a mirror,” or in memoir “stick to the facts” you can consider these rules an opportunity to identify whence they were created and why.
Querying the “rule” and coming to know your own thoughts on the issue—then deciding to either adhere to it or break it—puts you in the creative driver’s seat.
If you determine the “never describe your character in a mirror” rule stems from far too many writers doing it to the point of it having become a cliché, then it’s your job to find a fresh way to use this device or explore a different approach.
If you decide to upend the stringent dictates of a genre by bending or fusing two or more genres together for artistic effect, then you have knowingly broken new ground.
(Autofiction was borne out of such nuanced rule-breaking; Romantasy was created when two genres were brought into one).
*Some rules are simply good plain sense and a nice nudge toward appreciating yourself and your practice. These lists from Leigh Shulman, Zadie Smith, and K.M. Weiland are full of good advice.
The same holds true for grammar and style rules. Most writing craft style guides are designed to ensure your communication is clear and sound- a means to an end and a method of delivering your prose as you intend it to come across.
Most prescriptive rules you will find in style books such as Strunk and White, Dreyer’s English, and Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose are sound and reasonable, borne out of the necessity for good communication.
And for sure, avoiding passive voice is wise as it weakens writing. But a judiciously used passive can also shake up your reader and be a useful tool.
(Then there’s the one from Kurt Vonnegut from his book A Man Without a Country, which is bonkers (and likely his way of poking fun at rules to begin with)).
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing,
If you happen to like the semi-colon or even love them (as Lauren Oyler does in this New York Times article, which is essentially a love letter to the semi-colon), then you know a well-placed one makes a paragraph sing.
But again, by stepping back and examining what prompted Vonnegut to say this, you’ll realize he’s right to a point. One or two semi-colons on a page is plenty; more than that, and your work gets overrun and out of breath.
There’s also Stephen King’s famous suggestion that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Rather than avoiding them, identifying your approach to the adverb instead will help you tread with creative and rhythmic discretion, which is the whole point.
That quick prescriptive “don’t” is what may push a person to think about the punctuation mark and their relationship to it, and also what’s in the best interest of the reader, making that prescriptive opening a valuable one.
Castellini says it best. Read these works, but “don’t actually apply” the prescriptions. Instead, “consider the mystery.”
Some books or essays on writing craft we can engage with in full and be moved to a new place while others simply remind us that perhaps one too many stories begin with a long-winded paragraph about the weather (though despite the paragraph fronted by “It was a dark and stormy night” being overblown and pretty windy itself, it’s still a fun piece of writing.)
There are also tongue-in-cheek lists that are great for a laugh, such as Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing,” which includes one of the best rules for writing ever:
“Try not to write the parts that people skip.”
Solid advice if there ever was, Mr. Leonard.
This list is comprehensive but by no means complete ~
Please leave a comment with any book, essay, or other work that has taught you about writing. We’ll be glad to include it!
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