No Rules to Writing

Some say writing is a talent you are born with, some say writing is a craft you can learn. Some say writing is like breathing, you do or you die. Anyone who has ever picked up a writing instrument, however, will know how challenging writing is; that's why some will say writers are born, and not made. However, even if you think you're not born to write, can you learn how to write?

Let's not be elitist. Story telling is an innate part of being human, of that cliched campfire our ancestors sat around, and the stars and stars of stories they told each other to get them through the night. Writing is a form of that night time narration, and it's for everybody. It's a way of telling our bedtime stories, and like with film, song, and every oral or written piece used to narrate a journey, writing is a tool that has become a skill.

My own belief is that you can learn any skill over time, and the skill of writing is no different. Practice can make perfect; I found the rules for writing on the left at AllPosters.com, and they are as good as any I've ever read. As a discipline, writing is one that everyone can follow (and in my opinion should follow, because it has its benefits). Now, if your reason for wanting to write is merely to produce the next bestseller, then you will need a talent for telling a story (or nowadays maybe just a really good AI tool). Put in another way, the art of storytelling is about the imaginative talent to find a story; the craft of stroytelling is knowing how to put that story into words. You are born with one, you can learn the other. Rules are only guidelines for how to tell your story well.

Thus, in storytelling, writing becomes a real craft when learning how to pen your story. This is what the rules help with, and once you have a grasp of that, conversely you realise there are no hard and fast rules in telling your own story, only rules that work for you. What one eventually discovers is that some authors become so advanced in writing, they push the boundaries of craft into art, and create their own rules. If you search online, you will discover timeless advice on writing from great writers, such as Elmore Leonard, who has his own ten rules for writing fiction and W.H. Auden's views on writing and orginality, which are my favourites. But the collected wisdom of all the greats shows that really there are no rules to writing, only your rules to writing.

For those who find it difficult to write, will following these rules help make writing less challenging? Well, why should it? While AI tools (instructed by these and every other rule ever to have been shared online) will aid you in the process, I personally believe that it defeats the purpose. Writing should be challenging, it's a good mental session for the mind. I enjoy the challenge of thinking, of writing, of editing the dance of words and grammar to the music of a sentence. Moreover, if you find it so difficult to write that you need an artificial intelligence to write for you, then it could be that writing isn't for you, and you need to tell your stories in a different format.

Not to oversimplify it, but for budding writers, in the first, internalisation has to be a concious decision; for those, in the second, there is no choice, they have to write as they have to eat and breathe. It sustains them. We don't consciously breathe to stay alive, but it's what keeps us going. In that sense, writing is not just beneficial, it is fundamental. No AI tool will ever give you the original thought or idea - that first spark inside you that pushes you to the blank page or screen, but it will give you a very well written piece of regurgitation, the sort of (usually horror) memes once written in collaborative efforts between humans in what has been described as an "open-sourcing of storytelling". AI might be perfect for memes - the original sense of a replicating idea - but it won't tell you what what makes us tick, and sometimes you need to know what makes you tick, in order to be able to break the rules when necessary.

I wrote before I even knew there were rules to writing. My own love affair with words started at the age of four, and I began bashing away on an electronic typewriter from the age of six. Since then, I advanced to a word processor, laptop, and now a touchscreen tablet (minus the keyboard bashing), but there has never been a day I can remember without writing in some shape or form - even if it's in my own head. In other words, I'm not trying to hammer out a skill in writing for any specific reason apart from the fundamental one that I was born that way. To stop writing would be like holding my breath.

And as each individual breathes differently, but for the same reason, or eats according to their individual tastes, no two writers will employ any of these rules in the same way. Some will have particular quirks, or fastidious fads, or lucky charms that they cannot write without, and some will just sit down and write when the pressure gets so hard to stand, they think they'll literally die from the thing they believe they're born to do.

I know it sounds dramatic, but then all good writing is drama between varying degrees of the forceful and subtle. It should be dramatic, and passionate, and sincere, and honest. It's been my personal experience that writing should contain all the virtues of a human heart, for that is the single main purpose of good writing: to map out the infinite terrain of the soil in which we grow, which nurtures and keeps us alive. To this extent, as any writing is the product of a writer's heart, it will inevitably be governed by these rules and much more.

Having a Tell-Tale Heart

Human beings are all about connection, and writing is an intermediary that can assist in connecting in some way, either with ourselves, or with others. Some writers view writing as a distinct two way process, and that a reader's take on the text is also an inherent part of its form, but the question of a writer's relationship to the reader is a complex one.

Writers generically have tell-tale hearts, and a creative journey is often seen as a personal one taken by the journey-maker to share with others. The custom of storytelling around camp fires is a case in point. Connecting all cultures throughout human tradition, storytellers and listeners have been drawn together, to gather and share in folklore the compact wisdom of fairy tales as commentary to human values. And as the designated passenger on the ride, as is human nature, the audience will see the journey through their own personal perspectives. When the spoken word of oral traditions became locked in the static print of text, this relationship may have become less fluid, but what we take and understand from a text is still a work of our own.

Is the work complete, however, without first needing others to share the journey? Great writing can change a reader's take on life, but can different reader perspectives change the original written work for the next person to come along? As writers are readers, too, they understand that once a piece of work is put out there, people will get what they want out of it, on the basis of their own experiences as readers, and this may not have much to do with what the writer intended. And though the best rules of writing focus on the main object of writing well, namely to maximise the writer's chances to communicate their views clearly, words will take on different meanings, not only depending on the context bestowed on them by the writer, but by the reader's own perspective.

This is because we read in the way we process information, filtered through our own independent beliefs, viewpoints and life experiences, and a piece of writing should account for and reflect that, or run the risk of being an information dump. At first instance writers do have omniscient control over the writing itself, but it's unrealistic to think you can completely control how your work is going to be understood by others. It's no secret that words need an enchantment that draws the reader and writer together to make the writing work, and how far a person should go, in considering the reader when writing, is a fine balance. It will find the writer walking a tightrope, between being stingy with information or explaining everything. Sometimes a perceived negative can be used as a stylistic plus, for example, I'll use abstractions in my poetry to engage a fuller reading, rather than try to explain everything. By leaving things, often feelings, open to interpretation, the work becomes more intimate, and brings an extra dimension to the writing.

Balancing on a tightrope of information, a writer will need to decide whether to use the safety net of sticking to to reader expectations, too. If a writer's first concern is to get published (or make money), then the focus will unavoidably shift towards reader demographics and statistics. Indeed, once a writer becomes established within the literary world, there are many examples to show that succeeding works are prone to formulaic deterioration, because the writer feels increasing pressure to consider writing work that will sell to the masses. In doing so they run the risk of becoming ghost writers or caricatures of their former literary selves, with the writing becoming ineffective if it tries too hard to cater to what the writer thinks the reader wants.

Of course, if you want to make writing your profession, then you have to sell yourself. It's part of the deal, and I'm certainly not arguing against publication. How would great works of writing have reached us otherwise? As with most things, it all depends on your point of view, and I don't strictly adhere to any school of thought either way. That being said, you'll notice there isn't a rule in the list covered by this article that expressly suggests a writer should consider the audience. Although it might be safe to say that it's assumed, I think it's because the list, quite rightly, doesn't confuse creative writing with article or feature writing. The second rule in the list mentions the reader, but only insofar as the writer should treat themselves as a reader, and write about what appeals to them.

Writing for Yourself

It's not always possible to consciously observe my own rules for writing (they become second nature after a while). But there have been times I've tried to analyse the rules I instinctively write by, and if I were to add one of my own rules to the list, it would be to write for yourself. The list of rules above are suggestive of this, but it's worth mentioning as a separate rule, because it also helps to address the question (and balances out the difficulty) of how far a creative writer should consider the audience in writing.

I don't usually advocate selfishness, either, but as with respect, writing has to begin with the self. Arguably, a creative writer should first and foremost write for themselves, because it will make the text reliable and authoritative. It's more honest, and honest readers won't appreciate a writer merely paying lip service to them. Similarly, if you don't write from your own experience (not even, but especially in works of fiction), how will the writing be believable? What are our best fairy tales after all, but an insightful look into the human psyche. And as a reader can't read with the writer's vision, they are just brought to eye-level to see what the writer sees, so to a writer shouldn't write with anyone else's viewpoint, but one that comes straight from their own heart and mind.

And should a reader really be trying to work out what the writer intended, rather than working out what they got from it instead? When I studied English literature, my school tutors tended to be very careful about making statements about authorial intent, especially about an author dead for centuries. They discussed the narrative of the text, and about patterns in the text that might suggest different kinds of meanings. A current writer can, of course, explain what they intended outside of the work, but a good piece of writing has the power to speak for itself. It will hold the reason and the justification for its existence inside it. For when a piece of writing can break free and breathe independently of the author, that is when the work truly comes alive. Words need to breathe free and easy; and as butterflies caught in a writer's net, instead of the writer trying to pin them down, they should be set free to fly again.

During times of personal scrutiny, I've noticed that, more often than not, I'm a writer who prefers to use a net to catch ideas instead, and not to hold the words themselves down. It's more captivating to point out words in work in their own natural surroundings, or to let them flutter briefly in the palm of my writing, because their life reflects our own; it's an elusive glimpse of beauty. I've also discovered I've become more interested with my relationship with words, because I write regardless of a specific audience, and if writing is a two way process, then I tend to live on a one way street. I write what I want to read as opposed to what I think others want to read, and my ideal world is one where it's just me and my words, and a few, good friends with which to share them.

Put another way, having other people read the work should not be the reason for the writing, it's just one facet to it. As a human being, I do write to connect, because that is a facet of me; I am all about asking questions and finding connections. The sharing of the word feeds the more universal human need of connection, allowing for more perspectives and a more multi-dimensional view of our world. The more I share of what I learn, in turn the more I learn, which will affect what I write - but not how or why I write.

My own reasoning is my writing won't get better if I have a large readership, and my writing won't necessarily be better just because I have a large readership. I've had a large readership, and it suffocated me. I've realised I don't want to be tied down by the number of readers, editors, publishers, or literary agents who want me to cage words in some pulp fiction zoo of books (although I've had a few try to slip a figurative noose around my neck to haul me in).

Again I'm not against publication (especially if done for the right reasons and in the right way), but I'd rather justify my writing to the laws of good literature and the true nature of words, rather than to a group of people, because words are not subservient to the reader or writer. We are all in a partnership with words; one is nothing without one or the other. And if my writing is about my life, then I need to write the way I want to live, with a freedom that doesn't take liberties with others, and asks the same in return.

Writing well matters to me. As breathing correctly improves our lives, writing correctly will no doubt improve the writing, and our lives. And if a writer's goal isn't to chase after readers and opinions, but to focus on improving their writing skills, then arguably the way to achieve this is to practice those skills, and not concentrate so much on who reads it, or whether someone will read it. And if I were to add an addenda to the rule to write for yourself, it would be to develop ourselves along with our reading habits.

Critical thinking is the font of writing. A person's writing improves as they improve themselves and their brain, because if you can't form your thoughts into something to say, then how can you write about it? Sometimes, the ideas people try to convey in their text can override the lack of grammar if they inspire, but the best writing skills cannot dress up content with no body to it. But it's doubly rewarding to better our writing skills alongside ourselves, so when we find we have something to say, we can convey it clearly. A diamond in the rough can be appreciated, but it doesn't beat a polished gem in its best setting.

It's for this reason, therefore, I try not to involve myself too closely with any other component of the writing process apart from critical thought and the writing itself. A quantitative amount of feedback is not generally indicative of someone writing well, only what is popular, and there is a big difference. Equally, if a writer can't tell good writing from bad without the help of a third person (or without the aid of feedback), then it will be almost impossible to learn writing as a craft. This is why so many rules of writing will emphasis that writers read other works, to get a sense of what good literature is and how writers work.

Naturally feedback is great (who doesn't want to read that another person has enjoyed their work?) but if something I write finds life in others, it will. If it doesn't, then it won't. I would feel uncomfortable if I used my writing to make people think the way I do (or if a populist view impinged on the direction of my writing for no other reason than it was popular); I'd rather my writing made people feel and think for themselves. My main focus isn't to get a large amount of people to read and like my writing. Ultimately, irrespective of whether there is someone there to read and appreciate - or hate - what is written, the writer is going to write if they feel they were born that way; they won't write to publish; they'll write because it's a need.

And that's one rule you won't find in any list on the subject of writing.

Published 15 December, 2010 14 January, 2026

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