Most of the hard-and-fast no-foolin’ “rules” of writing — no adverbs, only said for dialogue tags, write what you know, etc. — don’t hold up under scrutiny, and truth is, things work when they work and don’t when they don’t. They’re a starting place, not a stopping place.

Writing advice is bullshit, but bullshit can still fertilize.

YMMV.

I endeavor to begin all my writing books by knocking down the idea that writing is some precious thing. Or a thing with rules or maps. Writing is a rogue-like game — you go in, you die, you come back resurrected but the world has changed and you’ve only party adapted.

Most things that are WRITING RULES are for the individual writers who wrote those rules, and barely even then. They break their own rules all the time because chaos fucking reigns, that’s why.

That’s not to say it is without value to regard those “rules” — to hold them up to the light, see if they shine for you, or not. Or why they exist, or when they don’t or shouldn’t.

Every author changes with every book because every book is its own weird creature and you can’t feed a MOUNTAIN WYVERN the same swill you feed a HYPERBOREAN HELLMONKEY, jeez, c’mon.

As a point of trivia, I tried writing several books early on that failed because I was chasing other styles, voices, markets, rules. But then I wrote BLACKBIRDS, the book I wanted to write, and one that was deliberately contrary. It was the first to get published.

I am wont to say we learn the rules in order to figure out how to break them, and then we break them to figure out why we needed them in the first place. It is a conversation in chaos, a narrative in flux, entropy and creation in tandem.