Rules

I’m writing in the middle of a lined notebook on a page where there are no rules. Print fail.

I’ve been writing on college- and wide-ruled paper for decades and no longer need the lines. Looking at my scribble on the lines pages, I am not great at writing on the lines anyway.

Lines. Rules. We need them to teach us parameters, layouts, boundaries, best practices, and such. But we don’t always require the rules. And sometimes, as creatives, we need to bend them.

I might dangle a preposition for impact, drop the quotes and italicize dialogue lines to draw attention, mix metaphors for interest, or skew semantics (who needs rules?) just to be wild. Sometimes I post a blog that reads like the first paragraph of an expository essay. I never wanted to write an essay, because when I exhaust an idea in academese, I lose interest. Don’t you? The cryptic post is a morsel to encourage my readers to chew, a spark to light up their own expositions.

I break writing rules all the time. That’s okay, because I studied and followed the rules and I know what I’m breaking. I’m comfortable on a pages without rules and in a creative piece that’s not sure if it’s a poem or a story or an essay.

How do rules show up in your creative process? Do you require them? Maybe you use them as reference to remember the difference between a verse and a poem, a sketch and a doodle, a story and a fable, a photo and an image. Or maybe they cripple you. If they’re choking your flow, you might consider writing on unruled paper.

Like the first couple of dozen pages, the last pages of this notebook have rules. I won’t hate them when I get there, but it’s good to know I don’t need them.

©Pennie Nichols. All Rights Reserved. 2024.