Ravana
Istar
What he said.
But, hey, why not make the first one even more emphatic? How about this:
A.2) Because I see a bunch of successful writers violating a rule, openly, flagrantly and frequently, I should violate that rule as well.
Guess what? You've just written yourself a rule.
Note that it specifies that you should violate the rule, not merely ignore it. After all, if you're trying to emulate the success of these authors, you'll want to do what they do, and since you've specifically cited their violations of rules, you ought to do the same. And in fact this might work in your favor… if you know what the "rule" in question is, if you can identify how, when and most importantly why they violate it where they do, and if you can take that insight and apply it to your own writing. It's the old advice: you need to know the rules before you can break them.
Before you enter that one into your personal canon, you might wish to devote some thought to the following question:
How many successful authors do you see who don't violate the rule openly, flagrantly and/or frequently?
Whatever "rule," or set thereof, that might be. Have you really performed a quantitative study to determine which techniques are most successful, most broadly used, most often "violated," and to what extent when they are? Have you done this even for a single author who you see "violating" whatever "rules" are your personal pet peeves, to know how frequently that author violates said rules, and how frequently he does not?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course: you haven't.
Consider it a challenge.
Don't tell me that, for instance, Rowling (or whoever*) uses adverbs, so they must be okay. Tell me the percentage of sentences in which she uses adverbs. Which will also yield the percentage in which she does not. Tell me how many adverbs appear in any given sentence when they crop up.
Then do this for another author you admire–their writing style or their financial success, whichever it is that prompts your admiration. And another. Et cetera. Be sure to include authors who are successful but whose writing style you don't admire if you wish to obtain valid data on which techniques lead to those results.
Then tell me that you actually want to write the way Rowling does–that you don't believe an occasional adverb deletion might improve her writing–and aren't simply throwing her up as an example of a successful author who "violates the rules." If that's your goal, great: go for it. By that point, you will understand what you're doing and will be doing it deliberately. Though you might wish to consider your target audience while you're at it. What works in children's literature may not work nearly as well in other contexts.
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I would point out that the "anti-rule" people appear to hold an opinion that the "rules are useful" people do not, and furthermore tend to project that opinion on the latter. That opinion is taking general rules as if they were absolutes. Those of us who find "rules" useful do not hold this opinion, and it should not be projected upon us.
There isn't a single "rules are useful" person here who has endorsed the notion of, for example, "no adverbs," anywhere in this thread, nor would they. I have never even seen a rule expressed as "don't use adverbs–period." No responsible author or editor would ever say this. Authors are enjoined to avoid adverbs, to limit their use… and for good reason: beginners have a marked tendency to use them at every opportunity. Which makes for lousy writing. In many cases, beginning writers pad their work with adverbs (and other items) simply to increase their word count, since that's the basis upon which they are paid: the more words, the better, right? Well, not if the story gets rejected for being purple-prose tripe, it doesn't.
Ideally, they are also told the why behind the rule, and how to amend their writing to improve it. This does not merely involve the deletion of adverbs–though for a beginning writer, trying this makes a good exercise, to demonstrate how many of them constitute unnecessary verbiage. It involves identifying what the author thinks the adverb is accomplishing, and seeing if the same thing couldn't be accomplished by, say, using a more precise verb which renders the adverb redundant and thus a candidate for deletion. Or realizing that the adverb is already redundant given the rest of the context, as is often the case. Or that it is a superfluous piling on, as with most instances of word "very," for example.
So beginners are told that this is a significant problem they need to be wary of. And since this is such a significant, and common, problem, and since beginners are probably unaccustomed to reading their own work critically, they are told this in direct and emphatic fashion: a simple rule they can remember. Once they have learned to apply the general principle, then they can pass on to more subtle gradings. Once a text has been pruned of redundancies and refined by more precise vocabulary, what adverbs remain will probably be unobjectionable.
While adverbs tend to bear the brunt of criticism–since they are the more often gratuitous–the same advice applies to adjectives: see if you can't come up with a more precise noun which renders the adjective superfluous. If you can't, fine. But it's worth the effort.
See Mr. Twain's rules #13 and #14.
Even this is but a single example of a "rule"… one which probably receives more attention than it deserves. Most authors who've practiced their craft for any length of time have long since internalized this one–and apply it, automatically and unconsciously, and when they do use adverbs they are well aware of it, and why, and genuinely do avoid using them where they would be gratuitous or redundant. There are plenty of other "rules" which might be profitably discussed, should anyone be growing tired of this one. (Bisson's, or anyone else's… note that Bisson doesn't mention adverbs on his list at all. He assumes people reading his rules are well past that point, and is focusing on a far more narrow aspect of the craft.)
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I would also point out that none of the "rules are useful" people has anywhere deprecated the necessity of reading, both broadly and in depth, as the core of the craft. No one is ever going to learn to write well from a set of rules alone… though, honestly, I can't imagine anyone wanting to write without having ever read anything, so any such argument borders on being a straw man. It is possible to learn to write well through reading alone, without conscious consideration of "rules"–the word "conscious" is an important one here: it isn't possible to write, period, let alone well, without having first internalized a vast number of rules, even if these are only ever applied unconsciously. The utility of list of rules is to bring the myriad facets of the craft to the writer's conscious consideration, and to introduce new facets the writer might never have noticed or perhaps even encountered otherwise.
Which is why I always take seriously lists of "rules" such as the present one: that chance at a "Wow, I never thought of that" moment.
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Again, what he said.
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* Disclaimer: I can't recall who all has mentioned Rowling, only that her name came up in the discussion. Wanted to make sure I'm not being unfair to anyone here by implying that any given commenter had her in mind.
P.S. Go ahead. Count the number of adverbs in this post. I don't mind. I know why I used them, each and every one.
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Inkling
