Rebellious Writing-- Creativity's Door

Oh man, I could write an entire dissertation on this.  Maybe.  In any case, the questions strike deep chords regarding opinion and feelings I have on the detriment of rules in creating good writing.  Here's toasting to 500 words (we'll see how this goes.)  Cheers!

I was taught few formal writing rules as a child.  My mother, a savvy woman with a knack for words, home-schooled my five siblings and me.  She was not a big proponent of one-size-fits-all curriculum; our writing education was practically and experientially based.  Thank-you letters were mandatory, and the opportunity was taken to teach the difference in voice, punctuation, spelling, etc.  My family wrote a yearly Christmas letter, and through that I learned the basis of outlines and narrative.  Occasionally I submitted pieces to our local newspaper, The Valley Journal, developing a sense of news writing as I strove to write mine similar to stories they ran.  As kids, the things we had yet to write were not pre-bound by any rigorous rules; it was only that which we had written that was critiqued, edited, and encouraged.  We also read—a lot.  I learned styles and voice from classic literature, and practiced it with my prolific journaling.  In high school my mother purchased me White and Strunk’s Elements of Style, the only rule book a writer needs, in my opinion.  I graduated high school a year early, and jumped into college at sweet seventeen.  

To me, rules were instrumental.  They represented the preservation of formality and etiquette, and to know them well was to present oneself well.  Structure and form did not dictate my writing process, but were friendly heuristics.  This unconscious mindset was cemented by my first “official” English teacher, freshman year of college.  Kamiah was her name, and she started each class period by having us free write.  She was incredibly encouraging of creativity, and stressed it first and foremost over rules.  The relationship between writing and following rules was once hardly existent in my mind, and is now intentional.  As I progressed through college, I found my obsessive and perfectionist habits damaging to my creativity.  Any strict adherence to a preset form nearly paralyzed me in writing.  I wrote on writer's block (link to my piece), and restricting curriculum, sometimes in unusual formats or nontraditional form.  It seems there are the rules we follow for coherence, (the progression of one thought to another, spelling words correctly, etc.), and the rules we follow because we are told (the three paragraph essay, always using third-person voice, etc.)  As writers, we walk a fine line--- rules are essential to understanding and coherence, but also can be debilitating to creativity.  Finding that sweet spot in the middle, knowing which structures aid and which hinder, is the quest of every writer.

On associations of rules and voice, the situation changes genre to genre.  I have found most English classes as supportive of creativity, but the business class I took last semester demanded succinctness and straightforwardness;"plain" writing, to me.  Less style, more “say it like it is.”  Ugh.  There are few feelings worse than being docked points for presenting something creatively.  Is there a point where creativity (by this I mean unorthodox methods, non-traditional form, etc.) detracts from effective communication?  I would dare to say no, when the creativity is done well.  What the word “well” means is another debate altogether.

And, I hit 515 words.  Adhering to the rule of word length has never been my forte.  To touch on the last questions, regarding personal opinion in writing, their respective scenes, and that which distinguishes them, no piece is devoid of personal opinion.  True objectivity is a myth.  Some genres, like news writing, ask for the author to create the appearance of non-bias interpretation, but the truth is that the author makes judgment calls each time she writes a sentence.  The distinguishing factor in these genres, the amount to which the writer is allowed to incorporate more personality, it seems, is measured against the extent to which the public wants to decide for themselves.  Society is allowed (and expected) to have an opinion on news; therefore we want it presented opinion-less, so we are free to formulate our own response without bias.  Perhaps we believe when pursuing knowledge, opinion must be absent so as to not infringe on our own thought development.  But knowledge is, and always will be, a collective which incorporates both opinion and fact.   

One last thing that has changed pre- and post- college. I learned the traditional “he” as a third-person pronoun.  With the current push for gender equality, that has been demonized as a formal rule.   It never bothered me.  I’m a female writer who kicks ass; masculine pronouns or not.