Highly Irregular Newsletter #22 Oct 2024
So many rules, so many shoulds... what's going on?
Hello all,
Welcome to all new subscribers! I call this newsletter “highly irregular” both because there’s no fixed day of the month that it comes out - and also because there’s no fixed structure for what I might be writing about and offering you. A feature that’s become somewhat regular here is ‘Permission Corner’, and this month it seems that Permission Corner has taken over. I thought that, because of what I’m talking about, I might open this post to comments, because sharing these experiences can help all of us to feel we’re not doing it “wrong”.
So, what am I talking about? Well, there’s something that’s worrying me. I’d like to talk about “rules”. And “shoulds”. Recently these have been coming at me from many different angles. A lovely writer emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if they could use one of my older flash stories in a workshop because “it's a reminder to treat 'rules' about flash with a playful pinch of salt. In this case the 'rules' that you should stick to two characters, and that a flash 'should' illuminate one moment in time.” I was a little bemused and I asked who on earth was issuing these “rules”? The lovely writer told me that “there are quite a few 'how to write a great flash' articles online, and with them there seems to be a trend for using the word 'should'. One of my least favourite is 'your flash should have a compelling title'.” Well, if you take a look down the Contents page of the FUEL anthology of 75 first-prize-winning flash fictions I published to raise funds for Fuel Poverty charities (please do… info here: https://www.fuelflash.net/) you’ll see that this is something flash fiction competition judges don’t seem too bothered about at all!
A few nights after receiving this email, I was running my final Zoom writing workshop of this year, a brand new workshop entitled The Art of the Swerve - there were 63 participants and I was encouraging them to “swerve” and give themselves permission to play in many different ways, including, in one writing exercise, changing point of view (POV) once every minute. This exercise seemed to go down very well, and I was amazed when one of the participants said in the chat: “We are told to never head hop and I think that’s why everyone loved it. We could break all the ‘rules’.” Another chimed in with: “Yes I've been told not to change POV too often, I've even been told no more than 2 POVs in an entire novel.”
OK, people, what is going on with all this? Why on earth would anyone - let alone fellow writers, I am assuming, who are making these pronouncements - issue so-called rules and shoulds to tell other people how they must write, whether flash fiction or novels or anything else, it seems? I never thought that my own personal mantra, which I try and pass on in workshops and mentoring, of “write what you want in the way you want to write it”, would actually be CONTROVERSIAL. In whose interests is it to stop people writing in whatever way works best for the story/poem/creative non-fiction/hybrid/label-less piece they want to write??
I really am quite incensed by this. Yes, there was a little of this when I started writing, 25 years ago, but I feel like the Internet and the huge proliferation of writing workshops etc…, rather than encouraging permission and diversity of styles, contents, writers themselves, might be instead encouraging the further spreading of “rules” and “shoulds”, which, especially for those just dipping their toes into the writing waters, or switching genres etc…, may seem to be the Voice of Authority. And once these voices get stuck in our heads, as I know well, it can be hard to silence them. I was just talking to
over at her wonderful Witness Marks substack on exactly this. Mel asked: Why do so many of us start out feeling that in some obscure way we’re not allowed? Where does that come from? I said:“It’s so interesting, isn’t it? I’ve been writing for 25 years – first short stories, and now also poems, novels and uncategorizable hybrids – and I only very slowly realised what I wasn’t giving myself permission to write and how I wasn’t giving myself permission to write. I started realising it every time I got a shot of permission to do something from somewhere that showed me how I’d been stopping myself until that moment, how I’d been telling myself I couldn’t or shouldn’t. Couldn’t write about this, definitely shouldn’t write like that. When I understood it was happening, I started looking for permissions instead of leaving it to chance!
And now that I’ve been teaching and mentoring writers for eleven years, I’ve trained myself to hear when other people are doing it, stopping themselves in some way. I now have an Inner Critic Radar any time someone says “I should…” write in first person, say…”, or “I shouldn’t…” write in the form of a recipe or a parking ticket, for example; or write something “too short”, or something “too long”. The list goes on and on and it’s personal to each writer. Someone in a fiction-writing workshop once asked me if they were allowed to make something up. A FICTION-WRITING WORKSHOP. I was amazed.
These days when I hear something like this, I will gently say: “Who is judging you? Where are those shoulds and shouldn’ts coming from?” We then discover it was something a writing teacher or an editor or potential agent said to them, maybe years and years ago, or someone in a writing group they shared their work with. Or they read it in one of those books on How To Write. It can be really hard to shake those voices, especially those that sound authoritative, especially at the beginning of our writing journeys. They can get stuck in our heads. I know this very very well by now! And it is still happening to me, every time I move towards a new genre, a different form, a new Inner Critic pops up to tell me I can’t possibly – write sci-fi, say! That was the latest. I now gently thank it and tell it I am well aware of the pitfalls, and I’m going to give it a go anyway.”
Have you been issued with “rules” or “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” for any type of writing - either in workshops and courses or in articles and books, or from a mentor or someone who was in a writing group with you - or leading a writing group? I suspect we ALL have (I know I have…). If you’d like, let us know what the “rule” or “should” was in the comments, but please don’t name the writer who issued them, I don’t want to get into name-calling, and I will delete your comment if you do it. (That’s a guidelines, not a rule!) Let’s share so we can pass permission between us to - yup, you guessed it - write what we want in the way we want to write it. Because actually, we can. We really can!
Ahhh this was the perfect time for me to read this. I’ve been unravelling over a DEACDE of this nonsense as an autistic ‘self taught’ writer, who devoured free advice that was prettily packaged online (and was honestly just clickbait videos and articles aimed at promoting an author’s online presence). Being super literal minded and a teenager meant I trusted all these adults (especially totally unqualified novices!) who made very definitive & confident videos and blog posts about writing should’s and shouldn’ts. The most egregious & damaging for me personally was ‘always write a story from beginning. You’d never read a book starting from the middle so don’t write that way’. I felt like I was doing writing SO wrong because that’s my core process, but it seems bonkers that any self proclaimed writer would even dare to say something so ridiculous!!!! Bad enough the sludge that happens on the internet but it must be so hard to ignore when it comes from a paid programme or trusted teacher. Thank you so much for this post.
I was told that I had to plan everything I wrote. I'm an explorer, not a planner. It stopped me in my tracks, until I decided I was happier ignoring the advice.