What? There are rules?

I did warn you this day would come. If you don't believe me, you can go back to my earliest posts and you will see I am not gaslighting. While I was encouraging you to just write and forget about rules and to thumb your nose at your red marker toting grade eight language teacher, I did tell you there was a caveat. One which cannot be ignored. Yes, there are rules for writing.

Now of course you can site me dozens of successful authors, even acclaimed ones who have flauted the conventions of writing and yet have ended up on the New York Times best sellers list.

Yet the vast majority of those who disregard the same rules, even if they get to publishing, have books languishing in the bargain boxes at dollar stores.

Why is that? It is in the quality of the writing. Someone like a Ray Bradbury who wrote in incomplete fragments, run on sentences which ran on for miles, byzantine descriptions, is still considered an international treasure.

An author who has real talent and inspiration is able to circumvent the usual linguistic canons because they know exactly how to disregard the traditions when they want to, and do it in such a way that people not only overlook their lawless behaviour, but also become totally bewitched by the story telling. Do you see what I did with the run-on sentence here?

Now I not going to turn this into a grammar lesson, but suffice it to say, there are literary conventions which should be regarded. Unless it is deliberately done, if you expect to have a successful writing career, it will not happen if you sound like you are a refugee from elementary school

So you're thinking, that's a fat lot of good, how do I know when I can bend the rules, and when I need to adhere more rigidly.

My answer to that is: read. Search out the successful and maybe more important acclaimed and popular authors. Examine their style. See where they stray from what Miss Spinster told you was the gospel truth in elementary school. But more important, is how they do it? Does it sound amateurish? Probably not. More likely it is seemless, so much so that if you weren't searching for the places where they meander from the accepted ordinances of the pen, you would never even notice.

They have mastered the art of straddling the line between good writing and amateurish drivel. That can make for some magical story telling. I will try to expand on this in the future.