You have to know the rules before you break the rules.
My creative writing professors would recite this like Shakespeare himself had handed it to them in its perfect iambic...hexameter. So close.
And in true Shakespearean fashion, I misunderstood it. I figured it meant that you must know all the rules before you create, that the learning came before the doing—never alongside it.
I spent years with pent-up ideas, waiting until I had learned the proper vocabulary, the proper historical context, and until I could cite the perfect Kurt Vonnegut quote for any occasion. In short, I explored my art inside the corners of a classroom, but rarely outside of it.
If I speak the language of the rules, then I’ll be a poet, I thought. I had all the accessories: the moody scarves, the typewriter, the authentic love for bad coffee. I perfected the face I’d make as I gazed longingly out of windows on autumn afternoons. I was ready to be a writer. But only as soon as soon as I could tout all A’s on my rules report card.
When I realized the rule book was longer and way less interesting than I thought it would be, I decided I could never become the creative I wanted to be. I muddled through a bit, I stopped a lot, I criticized my clumsiness in it all.
But one day as I was writing, I bent a rule. Ever so slightly.
|And—I understood exactly why I was bending it. Everything, everything cracked open in that instant. I had been learning the rules all along. Every line I wrote, or re-read, or shared with someone else had been part of the process, and I hadn’t noticed.
The learning and the doing depend on one another. If you wait to create until you know it all, you’ll be a million years too late.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, jot down a line or two, and read the first poem you can find.