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Words to the Wise
Defying the Rules
If you read a lot,
as I do, you will come across books that seem to break the
rules, books in which the authors defy the conventions of style
and structure, even of punctuation and grammar. You may wonder
how some writers get away so successfully with violating the
accepted hallmarks of good writing. The novel Austerlitz
by W. G. Sebald is written in almost a single breath: there are
no chapter breaks, only a couple of section breaks, and
sentences that go on and on, one for eight pages. Though perhaps
not a story for everyone, it is magnificently crafted: a close
look at any one of those sentences reveals that all are
flawless—every one of them works.
And that is the key.
The best writers—the ones whose names and books endure—can get
away with just about anything, because in the end, under the
finest scrutiny, what they have done works—and they have
made absolutely sure of it. Like Francine Prose, author of
Reading Like a Writer, they have "discovered that writing,
like reading, [is] done one word at a time, one punctuation mark
at a time. It [requires] ... putting every word on trial for its
life."
There are, of
course, successful authors who flout the rules badly and get
away with it spectacularly. The Da Vinci Code by Dan
Brown has been variously described by reviewers as a
"considerable achievement" and "a novel so bad that it gives bad
novels a bad name." It is worth examining for what it does well
and for what renders it, in the words of another reviewer,
"unmitigated junk."
The lesson here is
that to defy the rules successfully, you must first understand
them; and to understand them, you must practise them. As Prose
says, "We learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated
trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we
admire."
Reference:
Francine Prose,
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and
for Those Who Want to Write Them. New York: HarperCollins,
2006.
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