When it comes to creative writing, know the rules of writing before you break them

Do the rules of good writing apply to creative writing? Surely creative writing is the complete opposite of information writing, with its focus on structure and clarity? 

In some ways, that’s true. When it comes to creativity, anything goes. The only real criterion of successful creative writing is whether anyone wants to read it. Does it work for the reader? If you can attract readers to your page of ungrammatical blank verse, good for you.

It’s the same in any art form. Who hasn’t looked at a famous piece of modern art, with a minimal painted squiggle or primitive-looking blobs of colour, and thought ‘my 3-year-old could draw that’?

Be careful. A good artist or writer really knows their craft. They know how to reduce complex ideas into something that seems deceptively simple. Simplicity in writing is hard to do well, because it often distils many ideas down to their essence. To do that, you have to understand the rules of writing. Once you know the rules, you can be free to break them—but it should be a conscious choice.

I came upon a useful explanation of how and why rules apply to creative writing in an interview Script Magazine did with Joseph McBride, a well known screenwriter in the United States. McBride teaches screenwriting at San Francisco State University, and has written successfully for film and television.

Here’s what he said:

‘Even though, in an important sense, creative writing doesn’t have ‘rules,’ writing without any knowledge of the rules of good English prose, the rules of grammar and sentence structure, is a guarantee of muddled, messy writing. There’s a frequent misconception among students that it’s not ‘creative’ to learn the rules of good writing. Those students’ writing is often merely free-form indulgence. Discipline is essential to any genuinely creative writing. You have to know what you are doing and where you are going. Otherwise it’s just scattershot, and the story falls apart on the page. If you can’t write grammatically correct prose, your writing will lack clarity, and the reader will become exasperated in trying to follow or figure out what you might be trying to say. My screenwriter friend Sam Hamm says the first job of a screenwriter is ‘to keep the reader’s eye moving down the page.’

Well said, Joseph. Any good writing, creative or not, has to meet the needs of its reader, or they simply won’t read it. And then all that creativity goes to waste.

Are short sentences meaningless?

Short well-constructed sentences can help the time-poor reader read a document and absorb the messages quickly.

Two seemingly unrelated things happened in my Saturday morning: my daughter got one of her first-year university papers back, and I joined Twitter.

My daughter was a little disappointed with her grade, and rightly so (not that I’m a biased mother!). If the marker’s comments are anything to go by, my daughter was marked harshly for seemingly minor mistakes. The comment that stood out for me was ‘short sentences are meaningless’.

‘Self-care is a human need.’ was one of the offending sentences in the essay. The sentence contains one idea, and is grammatically correct. In fact, it was the first sentence of a paragraph and the other sentences in the paragraph supported it. And it also neatly linked the topic of the paragraph it started with the one before.

Feeling somewhat vexed for my daughter, I then distracted myself by joining Twitter.

Twitter loves short sentences! You have just 140 characters in a tweet. People tweeting (are they twits?), write short, informative sentences. Long rambling sentences just don’t work on twitter.

Actually, I personally don’t think long sentences work particularly well anywhere—even in academic writing. But, ultimately, I think I should be grateful to people like my daughter’s marker—they keep me in a job.