Category: rules

Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025. The year of Pacific Rim, as I mentioned in the newsletter the other day. What? You’re still not subbed to the newsletter? Well, there’s your first thing to do this year.

Anyway, first ranty blog post of the year (and already running late). What to write about? I’ve already planned out a lot of my year, writing-wise, and maybe so have you. Or maybe not. No worries there, either way. This is my job, so I’ve got to schedule things to some extent. You may have a lot more leeway. Heck, writing might be your zero-stress after work cool-down thing. If that’s how you like to do it, that’s great. What works for you works for you.

I’ve had a couple possible topics bouncing around in my head for two weeks now. And in that time I’ve seen a lot of other folks offering their own start-of-the-year advice nuggets. And that got me thinking even more…

So, look, some of you may be thinking of finally writing that novel. 2025 is the year we’re getting it done. Maybe we’re starting from scratch. Could be we’ve had a few false starts. Maybe some of it’s already done and this is the year we finish it.

And it’s possible, as I mentioned above, that you’re seeing all sorts of advice and encouragement from different folks.

They’ll tell you not to worry about how much you write every day. Don’t worry about how often you write. And don’t worry about spelling. Don’t worry about grammar, either. Don’t worry about structure. Don’t worry about getting the facts right. None of that matters! What matters is the writing! Which, uh, you don’t have to do today.

And it may cross your mind after some of this, well, hang on. What the heck am I doing? If none of this stuff matters… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Seriously?

This is a little tricky to understand because technically all of this is true, but it’s true at different points in the process and in different ways. If I apply all of these rules (or lack of rules, I guess) evenly throughout my whole process, I can be doing more harm than good.

For example, I’ve talked about first drafts and forward motion—just getting it done. That’s how I tend to write. I won’t worry about spelling or formatting and it’s really common for me to leave notes to myself about checking if this is correct and how that actually works. So at this point in the process… yeah, don’t worry about any of that stuff.

But this doesn’t mean I never worry about these things. It’s more a question of when I worry about them. Personally, I tend to clean most of this up in my second draft, and I’m usually still adjusting it in my third. Because these things matter. No, really, they do.

A lot of this is going to boil down to what I want to do with my writing. What are my end goals, so to speak. Is it my after-work cool down? A personal project? Maybe something I want to share on a Reddit thread or Wattpad. Am I going to self-publish it? Am I hoping a traditional press will pick this up?

Y’see Timmy, the truth is when I’m at home, the park, the office, the library, on the train, or wherever it is that I do most of my writing… I can do whatever I want. Seriously. When it’s just me and my keyboard, absolutely no rules apply. Whatever I want, however I want, for as long as I want. That’s my process, and nobody can say my process is wrong or weird or whatever.

But…

If I want to send something out into the world, to put it in front of other people’s eyes—especially people I’m hoping will give me money—I need to start seriously thinking about all of this stuff. That’s when I do need to worry about spelling. I definitely want to double check my grammar. And triple-check my facts. And if I’ve got a deadline, I absolutely need to be considering how much I’m writing and how often I’m writing. Because these things will matter to other people. They’ll matter to different degrees for different people, but they will matter.

And the more chances I give people to say “that’s wrong” are more chances they’re going to set my story aside and move on to something else.

So, yeah, write freely. Don’t be concerned about things. Just write.

But be aware we’re just deferring that concern till later. Not saying goodbye to it forever.

Next time…

Well, heck, like I was saying. Start of the year. new projects and new goals all around. Is there anything specific I could cover for anyone? Something that’s been gnawing at you, a topic where you’d really like some kind of advice or tips or encouragement? Let me know down in the comments and I’ll make that happen for you.

And until then… go write.

Okay, yes, I said I was only going to do this biweekly now but this is me posting for the third week in a row. I messed up my schedule/lost track of time because… look, life is a mess sometimes. And now I’m trying to play catch-up because some of these were planned to come out on certain days and I want to pretend this is still slightly relevant.

Point is, the ranty writing blog is still biweekly. Mostly. With only a few exceptions.

Anyway…

If you’ve been following along here for any amount of time, you know I’m a big believer in the rules of writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what they said. There are rules and we have to learn them.

Now, granted, most of these rules are just in place to make sure we don’t end up in a metaphorical car crash before we’ve gotten any real experience. It’s like that driver ed instructor who screams at you to keep your hands at nine-and-three on the steering wheel. That’s a real thing. They’re not wrong to teach it and there’s reasons we need to learn it. But eventually we’re going to hit a point where we understand that a lot of the time we can relax a little bit while we’re driving. And that there are still absolutely times we want to keep two hands on the wheel.

One solid rule is spelling. Spelling’s important because that’s how we identify a word. If my readers can’t identify the word I’m using, they can’t understand what I’m trying to say. And if they can’t understand what I’m trying to say, well… It’s going to be tough to get them interested in what my characters are going through.

Of course, some folks will arrgue that spelling doesn’t really matter. I mean, really all those spellings were just made up anyway, right? Some random guy decided this was the right way to spell it and we all just went along with it. It’s not a rule. I don’t have to spell things that way. People wil figure out what I mean from context.

Maybe? Y’see, one of the other cool things spelling does is it lets us keep readign without any intruptions. Every time we notice a misspelled word, our brains sort of trip fir a moment. It might not completely knock us out of the story, but it breaks the flow a bit. And after the flow gets broken again and again… well, we’re not reading the stor yany more, we end up auditing it. Watching for the next typo to land

A solid follow up here is vocabulary in general. Sometimes I may know how to spell a ward, but I don’t actually know what it means. Other times I may know what it means, but I’m not entirely sure how to spell it… and maybe I’ve accidentally spilled something else instead.

You probably noticed both of these things in the past few paragraphs, didn’t you? Ha ha ha, he’s talking about spelling and he’s got typos. And that’s kind of my point. It knocked your brain out of reading mode. You were still working your way through the paragraphs, but it wasn’t a casual, gliding-along thing, was it? And that’s just here on a random blog post where I’m not really trying to draw you in. Imagine if you’d been trying to read a story?

Thank goodness for spellchecker, right?

Welllllllllll…

Here’s the problem. A spellchecker wouldn’t notice half the mistakes up above. I know, because I ran this post through mine. See, a spellchecker will notice a word that’s blatantly spelled wrong, but it won’t register a word that’s spelled correctly but being used wrong. For or fir? Ward or word? Spelling or spilling? A spellchecker doesn’t see a problem with any of these, so it doesn’t care which one I’m using.

But my reader? They’re going to notice. I mean, you noticed, right? Every one of those, ping, ping, ping

Well, that’s no problem, says random guy #23. I’ll just use one of those more advanced grammar programs, or maybe even an AI. They’ll understand the difference between a preposition and a noun. They’ll know the word I want.

Ha ha ha haa haaaaaa no they won’t. Sorry.

Kameron Hurley recently told a cute story on Bluesky about how she was looking through a blog about dentistry and the writer had capitalized the word tartar through several articles. When she asked why, the response was basically an internet shrug and “Grammarly told me to.” Because Grammarly can’t understand the difference between tartar (the build up on your teeth) and Tartar (an Asian ethnicity). This is a supposedly expert grammar program that doesn’t understand capitalization can drastically change the meaning of words. Which also should make you wonder about giving your Polish glassware a good polish, or that fine china you got in China.

Really, the more most of these assorted systems offer to do, the less they’re often capable of doing. I mean, heck, how many times have you gone looking for a specific book on Amazon and the algorithm instead recommends random Blu-rays? Or camping equipment? Or an anime t-shirt? None of these are bad things, but they’re definitely not what I asked the algorithm to find for me.

Again, spellcheck can’t solve all my spelling problems. A grammar program isn’t going to understand a lot of grammar situations. And this really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Human languages are complex, and English is one of the messiest, most confounding languages there is. Sometimes it’s hard for people to grasp subtext and nuance or even just basic meaning. So the idea that some guy threw together a machine that can understand all of that better than most people…?

Well, I mean, we’ve been talking about how they don’t. They just don’t. Sorry.

Let me be clear. I still use spellchecker all the time. But I’m not expecting it to do the work for me. It does help me catch the odd blatant misttake that crops us—and usually a lot faster than I could—but it also labels a lot of other things in my story as mistakes that aren’t. I still have to keep an eye on it and make sure it’s not screwing up. I don’t assume every correction or suggestion is right, and most of the time they aren’t.

Y’see, Timmy, too many folks get a result from a spellchecker or some half-baked LLM and they immediately accept it. It has to be right because… well, it’s a computer. It knows everything, right? That’s what decades of sci-fi has taught us. Computers are never wrong. Computers is geniuses.

This is why I need to know how to spell. I need to have a good vocabulary. Because ultimately, I’m the one who needs to be doing the writing if I want it to be my writing, saying what I want it to say.

As they said in the Princess Bride, anyone who says differently is spelling something.

Next time… well, crap, if I get back to biweekly posts, next time will be Halloween, so I guess we’ll talk about something scary. Or something we want to be scary, anyway.

Until then, go write.

Old person pop culture reference.

If you’ve been following along the ranty blog these past few months, or maybe subscribed to the newsletter, you may have picked up on a few subtle hints that the past four or five months have… not been great here. Sickness. Sleepless nights. Anxiety. Lots of stress.

Lots of stress.

One thing that’s helped me get through it is stories. This might not exactly be a surprise, but I love a good story. Reading them. Listening to them. Watching them.

But let’s face it, that should sort of be a default for us, yes? We take in material to produce material. Input—output. If I want to build muscle, I need to eat a lot of protein. If I want to grow nutritious food, I need soil with lots of nutrition in it.

And if I want to write… look, it only makes sense that I have to read, yes? Again, input, output. No input, no output. We have to feed the machine.

That’s why, even with all the crap that’s been going on in my life, I’ve still read twenty books in the past nine months. Plus a bunch of comics and short stories. And I was glad to do it. Hell, I definitely wouldn’t’ve been able to write half of what I did this year without these pauses to rest and recharge with some good stories.

Now, the reason I bring this up every now and then is… well, every couple of years I tend to see some”pro” or “coach” insist that “real writers don’t have time to read.” Time reading is time you should be writing, they’ll say. And the folks saying this sort of thing, politely, tend to be the people who like to talk very loud and very confidently.

Despite being, y’know, 100% wrong.

I mean, this is kind of like saying real drivers don’t have time to stop for gas. I’ve met lots of professional writers, interviewed a bunch of them, and read about even more. And the one thing they pretty much all have in common is… they love stories. They love input. Seriously, check out some of your favorite writers and see how often they’re talking about other books, shows. movies. They all love stories.

Also, quick pause here. I’m going to talk about “reading” a lot in the next dozen or so paragraphs, but I don’t want you to think this is some screed about “only the printed word counts” or anything like that. Audiobooks count as reading. And ebooks. You don’t like ‘em, fine, that’s you. But they count as reading.

I’m a big believer that a writer should have a regular diet of works in their chosen field. I think it lets me keep up on what’s currently out there and what’s been done before. Plus it also… well…

Look, I think a lot of the folks who push this view are coming from a place of “I took classes. I‘ve read textbooks about this. I know how to write!” And that’s great. I’m all for educating yourself and learning the rules. For the most part.

But as I’ve mentioned here before, writing isn’t really something you can teach. Never has been. Because all of us are going to be telling our own stories in our own ways, and my process isn’t your process and it’s definitely not his process. All these classes teach us is the baseline rules. They’re showing us how to avoid the easy, common mistakes.

It’s not until I start reading and exposing myself to lots of other work that I really start learning how to break those rules. That’s when I begin to see how what would be a mistake there is brilliant here (and vice versa). How great writers sometimes use the fact that you, the reader, also have a grasp of the rules to guide you through their story in mischievous ways.

But again, I have to read. To expose myself to that beyond-the-basic material. It’s a knowledge vs experience kind of thing.

Having said that, let me give you a few little provisos experience has taught me.

I know some folks try not to read similar things while they’re working on a project because they don’t want to be influenced. I think it’s fair to be a little concerned about that. But I also think this just serves as another bit of learning for us. Figuring out if we’re doing our thing or just copying someone else’s. Most of us learn by copying to some extent or another, but I think we’re also very aware of it and notice it happening pretty quick.

(I was going to tell you a whole story about how I inadvertently turned my weird western into an episode of Old Gods of Appalachia, but it’s just a little too long. Trust me, funny, relevant, very educational and relatable)

I also think sometimes this idea, trying to avoid influence, gets taken to an extreme and that’s where some of the “don’t read” mentality comes from. Don’t read. Don’t listen. Don’t watch. Definitely don’t talk to other writers!

Again, just my opinion, but I think this kind of advice ends up as more of a punishment. You’re a writer—don’t enjoy the written word! Don’t watch shows or movies with your friends! And while I know there’s some folks who believe being a writer is all about suffering, I’m a big believer that if my personal process makes me dislike writing, or openly hate it… maybe I’ve got a sucky process.

Read. Read everything you can. Read in the genre you want to write in. Read related genres. Read that genre you have zero interest in and see what the writers are doing there. Read that bestseller you can’t stand and try to figure out why it sold almost a million copies.

And as a bonus–you’re supporting other writers. And your local bookstore. Or maybe your local library. It’s all a win.

Next time, I want to talk about spelling. Yes, again. It’s been a while.

Until then, go write.

Wanted to try out a sort-of new analogy. Congratulations! You’re all my test subjects.

I’m going to make a bit of a leap here and assume most of you reading this know how to drive. Just, y’know, basic driving. A car. A pick-up. Maybe some of you even know how to drive a motorcycle.

I’m also going to assume most of you have a degree of experience at driving. You’ve been doing it for a while. Yeah, there’s a chance one or two of you are still in high school and only just got a learner’s permit, but the general vibe I get here in the comments—and from my readers in general—is most of you are solidly in the “adult” demographic, which means I can say you’ve probably been driving for at least a decade. You’ve got a license and got a solid feel for it. We can put you behind the wheel of a car and you can follow the rules of the road.

Of course… well, let’s have a little moment of honesty here. We’re all friends, right? We trust each other to a certain degree? And we can all admit that maaaaaaaybe we don’t always follow the rules of the road.

No. No we don’t. Come on, we said we were going to be honest. Okay, look. Quick show of hands. Just put your hand up, nobody else can see it. Well, I mean, all those people there at work, but they don’t know why you’re doing it. If they ask, tell them you’re stretching.

How many of us have broken the speed limit in the past week?

Don’t nitpick. It doesn’t matter if you were only going five miles over or that there wasn’t anyone else on the road at the time. Going over the limit means you broke the speed limit. So put your hand up if you’ve done it in the past week.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Oh, of course I’ve done it too. I’m not lording it over anyone.

I’m sure more than a few of us have also failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Made a U-turn we weren’t supposed to. Let’s not even getting into signaling for turns or lane changes.

Now here’s the thing. We all know this is wrong. We know we’re breaking the rules. But we keep doing it. And a lot of the time, we get away with it.

Why?

Well, a lot of it ties back to the experience thing I mentioned up above. Yeah, we were all taught the rules by a relative, in a drivers’ ed class, or maybe from a friend. We had to demonstrate we knew the rules to get our license.

And most of the time we need to follow the rules. I can’t just decide red lights and stop signs don’t apply to me anymore and plow through ‘em all at full speed. Eventually that’s going to catch up with me. So to speak.

But the thing is, once we’d been out on the road for a while, we started to see there’s still a degree of flexibility. Like driving on the freeway. Ten, fifteen miles an hour over? It’s breaking the rules but it’s also… just kind of accepted. We all do it.

Because we’ve all learned when and where it’s acceptable to break the rules of the road. When it’s going to make my driving experience a little faster or easier without hurting anyone. We know we can be a little excessive on the freeway, but we should probably rein it in a bit in school zones and parking lots. Making that u-turn on an empty road in the middle of the night isn’t the same as making it at lunchtime in heavy traffic. We understand why why it’s okay to do it here, but not here.

Let’s have one more moment of horribly honesty. Some folks get caught speeding and get a slap on the wrist. Other people get large tickets. Or worse. The ugly truth is, some people can get away with breaking the rules just because of who they are. Doesn’t mean the rest of us get to break them in the same way. Sucks, but that’s the way life goes sometimes.

And yes… there’s definitely someone out there who taught themselves how to drive and didn’t bother getting a license and drives 83 miles per hour past the school and the police station every day and they’ve never gotten a single ticket. Hopefully it’s clear this person is a rare exception, not a role model. Please don’t follow their example.

Now, hopefully you see where I’m going with this.

Y’see, Timmy, there are rules to writing. Absolutely, no questions, no arguments. There are rules, we need to know them, we should be able to pass a basic test on them. And a lot of the time we’re going to have to follow these rules to some extent or another.

But…

Once I’ve done this for a bit, I’ll get a sense of when and where I can bend those rules. Or break them. Or flat out shatter them. And I’ll know I’m totally, 100% justified in doing it. I’ll be able to tell you exactly why it’s okay. Yeah, the rule says do this, but I’m doing this because it’s better for the dialogue, the flow, the suspense, or what have you.

I definitely don’t want to break a rule and then just say “ehhhh, I don’t know why. I just felt like breaking it. Shake things up a bit, y’know? I’m disrupting storytelling.”

That’s not going to go over well.

Next time…

Well, there’s a whole aspect to this rules thing I just barely touched on, so next time I think I’m going to talk about why Doctor Watson told all those stories about his old roommate.

Until then, go write.