Inspired by mountains near my home.

All last week I tried to think of a topic for a blog entry, but couldn’t seem to think of a thing. Yesterday, while serving as a panelist on dialogue in historical novels, it hit me. I had a hot topic.

Society works hard to tell us there is only one way to cross a T.

I’m here to tell ya, there is more than one way to peel a banana.

Have patience. This does have something to do with writing, I promise you.

Since I was a child, I’ve been bombarded by messages that say there is only one right way to do things. Clean a house, make a cake, play a game, make a friend. Failure was not permitted, but it happened to me anyway. My experiences with attempting to fit in and do things the right way started at childhood, but it lingered way beyond that. Mathematics says one plus one is two. A word can only be spelled one way. Peer pressure demanded there was only one right way to dress and speak. Any deviance from the norm meant there were consequences to pay.

Internally, I chafed against that advice even as I did what I was told and tried to do it the “right” way. As an avid reader, I sometimes came across books written by Irish, British, Australian, and Canadian authors. I noticed they sometimes spelled things differently than Americans, like flavour instead of flavor, honour instead of honor, or tyre instead of tire. My young brain started mixing up the spelling. So what did my teacher do? Instead of noticing that her student was spelling things the British way and explaining that Americans spell it differently, she told me the British way was wrong. Yep. Wrong. My mother was angry that the teacher told me this, but I don’t recall my mother getting on the teacher’s case.

Know what I found out? Sometimes you could get the answer without doing it the way the teacher said (and I don’t mean by cheating). My brain hates things in linear. I’m much more likely to just pull the answer out of midair without understanding how I got the answer. As a very right-brained individual, I sucked at math. Sucked big ones! When I was fourteen, my vocabulary and comprehension when it came to reading was tested at college level. School administrators were friggin’ baffled. They decided to test me to see why I had a difficult time with math. I could have told them, if they’d asked. My second grade teacher ran her class like a boot camp. There was abuse in the classroom, but that’s a whole different story. I’d learned in that class to be helpless when it came to understanding math. After all, failure was not an option and there was only one right way to do it. Since I couldn’t get the answer the teacher’s way, or get the answer as quickly as the other children I failed. If failure is your only result, pretty soon you give up.

Anyway, back to this figure-out-what-is-wrong-with-this-kid test. On a lark, I imagine, the school psychologist asked me two questions I shouldn’t get correct because I hadn’t taken Calculus or Trigonometry. I got the right answer by pulling it out of thin air. Her mouth flopped open. The psychologist told my mother that she had a very smart daughter, but that said daughter was an enigma. Okay. That helped a lot. (See Denise pulling sarcastic expression.) No one could figure out why a supposedly highly-intelligent child couldn’t do math. They stuck me in a special class with kids who had trouble reading. Go figure. But it was in that class that I discovered my love for writing. I’d always read voraciously, and had done well on essay tests. I adored writing stories, and from that point forward I was always writing something. Sometimes it was poetry, sometimes it was short stories, sometimes it was an entire handwritten, eighty page gothic novel. I was hooked.

As an adult, when I decided I wished to write for publication, I took short story writing courses, novel writing courses, and also attended workshops through my Romance Writers of America chapter. All of it in pursuit of the right way to create a novel. Once I got published, I figured that all of that learning had paid off. Last year while I attended yet another novel writing workshop, it dawned on me it was time to stop taking courses and stop listening to the messages that said there is only one right way to write a novel.

Why?

It sucked my creativity right out of me! I discovered that all the outlining, plotting, and synopsis writing didn’t do jack for me. That’s not the way my brain works. My brain is only happy when it can create unfettered, without a ton of rules to pin it down. Structure, in my mind, means a lack of creativity, not a flourishing of ingenuity. This is why outlining or writing a synopsis beforehand means I don’t want to write the novel afterward. Writing the book without a surefire plan is the easiest way for me to write the best book I can.

So, this last week while I was telling writers how to put sizzle into their novels, or how to write historical dialogue, I sometimes felt like a fake. Because all you have to do is read a novel that doesn’t follow the rules and understand there was something about that novel that got a publisher’s attention. Didn’t matter whether they broke all the rules or not. Who was I to tell writer’s how do anything? Plus, I’m not the best at explaining to others how I do things. For me creating is organic and comes out of thin air. How do you explain that to other writers and have it make sense?

That being said, here’s my advice to writers out there. Yeah, read all those how to books, take all those workshops, but realize that at some point you have to decide when to stop listening to the right way to create a book and just write it.

So when have you broken the rules and the norms to satisfying results?