A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Thirty-Nine

Recently, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who teaches writing in college.  For those first learning to write on a serious level, a situation that many college students face, it can seem a bit odd.  For one thing, we are all used to utilizing language on a regular basis, and in contemporary society, that is often in some form of textual exchange, even if it is largely informal.  Many young people believe that the ability to utilize language to communicate should translate into the capacity to write effectively.  Even for those who do not have such an overt belief, the sense of proficiency with language can make it frustrating.  In any venture, beginners will miscalculate their capacity, as the ability to accurately assess ability relies upon the same skills as one needs for proficiency.  Thus, it seems to the student that they know how to write, and are doing well, even if the work is atrocious.

This often leads students to ask for clear and hard rules about how to write.  They want to know exact specifications, without contradictions.  Yet, whatever rules are to be offered, it is certain that any edict has been negated in some successful work.  That is, the rules, while they may work, are not laws.  To break them, if one understands how and why, can be ingenious.  But, very often, it is possible for that to be missed.  Either, the students hear a rule and think they know writers who have ignored it, so it must not be correct or useful, or they accept the idea as completely true with no potential for any alternative.

I bring this up because it is often something that I encounter when talking to even experienced writers.  For example, I've had several arguments where fiction writers will tell me that no book can succeed without change in the main character, but I can think of numerous counter-examples to this, books where the main character's lack of change is essential to the book.  For example, Billy Pilgrim in Slaughter-House Five does not, indeed cannot, change.  He is trapped in the experience of his live, with no agency, only a passenger who can do nothing to alter the path ahead.  

Now, that is not to say that most books should not have a main character who changes, or that following this advice is not helpful.  I would say that most of the time a character who is stagnant will not work.  At the same time, it is important to recognize that other possibilities exist beyond the common advice that is generally offered and accepted. 

To me, the danger in accepting these concepts as absolutes is not that any one of them will become a hindrance, or that the writer is limited by the specifics of what they have learned.  Rather, it is the larger issue of thinking that writing is limited in this way.  I recall the story of Euclidean geometry.  For centuries it was held that certain concepts were absolute, though no one could prove some of them to be true.  Eventually, a mathematician decided to do a proof by refutation, accepting the opposite ideas from those to be proven and demonstrating contradictions that arise from those assumptions.  The end result, though, was that no contradictions were discovered, and instead, a new branch of mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, was born.  

Writers believing a certain rule or set of rules are useful and following them can lead to great work, but when those rules are taken as absolute, it means the work has certain boundaries placed on it. Those boundaries are often useful, in terms of creating work within a certain context or perspective, but they also make it impossible to see what else might be achieved within a different paradigm.