The best writing is sleight of hand. Hannah’s story succeeded in part because she used accepted novel-writing techniques to hide a challenge to socially accepted norms. And she did so using a stiletto so thin that few readers will notice their moral high ground has been compromised. And that’s good storytelling.
There are lots of rules when it comes to writing English, and even more rules when it comes to communications. Breaking rules is fine, except when it confuses your audience to the point where they have no idea what you’re trying to convey. Or worse,when they are tossed out of that magical unspoken contract between writers and readers: the contract that says, 'let me tell you a story' and it takes them out of their world for an hour or day into another world. Storytelling uses a formula that’s worked for at least 4,000 years (in written works, probably 40,000 in oral storytelling). Before a reader can fall in love with your characters, they need to make emotional investment in them; they need to fall in love (or hate) with them in order to care about their story. To do that, within the first few paragraphs, preferable the first lines, the reader must empathise with the character.(s) Once you have seduced the reader, they will follow your character page after page, even when he or she takes them to bizarre places or makes morally repugnant decisions. In spec fic we call this first stage familiarisation but it’s really entrapment. We as writers have seduced the reader with commonplace realities, camouflaging our intention within the conventional rules of writing. Then we pounce, and drag the reader into the rabbit hole, masking the journey into the unknown with acceptable and comprehensible rules of writing.
Storytellers are tricksters, seducers, who use conventional rules of English to play the game we all love to play. But of course we doubt ourselves! Every day, with every word, we wonder if we have communicated what we intend—and then we decide to intend something different and re-write 120,000 words in the first person rather than third person (that was me, by the way, on my ninth novel).
Once you school yourself to do so, you realise rules give you more license to be creative because they create clear benchmarks and boundaries rather than having your creativity pulled in myriad directions.
Rules are also good for Spring cleaning. By that I mean, if you get stuck writing a passage (or even the next word). Stop. Go back to the beginning and clean up what you have. Read it aloud. Check the spelling. And 90% of the time something will strike you as not being quite right, or a gaping plot hole appears. Now you have a problem and you have to fix it. And guess what? Suddenly you’re writing again!
cheers
