I will be the very first person to tell you to screw the rules over. This is a personal gripe, I must admit, but there are good reasons.

Stupid rules and contriving structure can asphyxiate your work until it’s reduced to a gray, colorless shell of a good story gone to absolute for idiotic restriction. Think of your work as a living human, who cannot explore or progress if you subject it to the same rules and ideas over and over. Like dough, it needs time and space to grow and expand before preparing it and putting it in the oven; like a dancer needs space and time to move and understand the way their body moves and how to control it. The greatest pieces of literature had ed up with the rules in one way or another, had caused a stir for breaking a rule or two, or showcased a style uncommon to what was there at the time. Controvery for that at the time became the new set of rules over time, that is the cycle.

Creativity dies when you give it a time and place to appear, because it is a wild spirit free that roams around our brains. Sure, it appears in the least convenient times, but listen to what it has to say and learn to work with it. It seems ludicrous to me to constantly stiffle your ideas with dumb rules and to persistently exhaust your brain when it doesn't give you ideas (something I will talk about eventually).

I know a few "rules" (I use that word loosely) that I consider stupid: Chekhov’s gun could be considered badly used nowadays (religiously used, I could say, as in that they keep using it the same way and with the same principles), likewise Red Herrings are starting to lose its impact the same way because people are using it in obnoxious ways, the restriction of clichés and tropes it’s becoming a bummer because now you can’t even write your guilty pleasure stories without the puritan writers breathing angrily down your neck because it's 'already done', the ‘kill your sweethearts’ is a dumb rule to get rid of all possible fun that there can be in a story because if you get too attached to a character you created then they’re off the story because it’ll create an immediate REACTION even if it makes no sense from a technical (or practical) standpoint in the story—and believe me, I have seen so many people take that dumb rule seriously even in T.V. shows, and I’m not even going to name names because I’m still salty. 

And still, some rules CAN be useful to construct specific stories, some techniques are—after all—pretty popular for a reason. But not everyone will bend the same way for the rules, and I am the first person to applaud that subvertion of rules. Instead, I suggest to shift the rules, play against them, twist them around and let your raw creativity do as it feels fit with it or maybe, and just maybe, completely ignore them.

A personal project of mine—which I still have vigorously tried to make progress on—was the destruction of the plot structure and just playing around with it. You know, the ‘status quo’, rising stakes, the downfall, the and then the epilogue. Well, what I want to do is basically turn it upside down, inside out and just get rid of it all together. Then, I came up with a story that’s told backwards that relays important information from beginning to end, and in the end the painful look of the status quo makes the ending (aka, the demise) more sorrowful. A story that starts at the end and ends at the beginning. There was a movie like that (which I could never remember the name of) and I remember a critic mentioning that this idea was interesting but badly executed in the movie because after the initial blow faded and the information was transferred all in one package, there was nothing else to look forward to and no tiny detail made everything look different.

That’s an example on how something so mundane and simple as ‘structure’ can be worked around to explosive and refreshing ideas. I think another example is probably ‘Alex DeLarge’ from A Clockwork Orange, he’s an evil character—an anti-hero—but he doesn’t have a tragic past that made him evil, but rather that he just had a love for doing wrong things, for no visible reason other than the pure pleasure of destruction. There was no explanation other than that’s how he is, and I think simple things like that (‘Characters having tragic past that explain their behavior now’) can also be molded to change things. What I like to do is looking at the genre’s main description and thinking how to shake things up, see their common traits and how to give more traits or how to bend those traits to a brand new idea. It’s refreshing for the soul and believe me, readers are going to be ecstatic about it.

That’s not to say you always have to innovate! Write your guilty pleasure and bore critics to death with that romance story with a good character falling for the bad character! (God knows how I and many others eat those up), write that cliché fantasy story about knights and princesses, write that school love story, write that delinquent story about kid gangsters, write that movie adaptation with your favorite /slash pairing, write that Cinderella adaptation that—may I confess—have been my favorite since Hilary Duff’s rendition of it along with Selena Gomez’s dance-packed re-imagining of it, write that 100k words slow burn gay fic about two shy saps that cannot find a way to forget each other or something. Write you, strip the rules, strip the clothes—I mean, strip the restrains and challenge yourelf to do something for YOU.

We fight endless wars to create something original and with deep meaning, but we forget to create something fun, for us or others. 

Enjoy writing, after all that’s what we’re meant to do.

What say you? Leave a comment and discuss if you like, leave a question if you have any.
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