Editorial: Learning to Forget - the Rules of Fiction and Writing as Craft

By: Christopher Stokum

I entered my first college fiction class clutching my story proudly to my chest and radiating confidence. Fifty minutes later I emerged confused, panicked and not a little embarrassed. I had thought that I could write, really write; I thought my words flowed from the muses, through my heart and out of my pen uninterrupted and pure.

While reading my story aloud in class, though, I’d choked on those words. My sentences were awkward, my characters static and my plot convoluted and contrived. The story was missing something essential, which means that as far as my skills went, I was missing something essential. In short, I learned the first lesson that any good writing class should teach a budding author: humility.

The second lesson came a few classes later. The professor passed around a sheet that listed the “Don’ts of Fiction.” Commandment-style, they forbade using more than two exclamation points in four pages, beginning a story with “And then I woke up,” ending a story with “And then I woke up,” and so on. What’s this? I thought, Writing doesn’t have rules.

I was partially right. Writing doesn’t have rules beyond those of grammar, syntax and the like. The point of the class, however, wasn’t to teach me to write – they assumed that I had learned that in approximately the first grade – but to craft. It’s crafting that the rules are for, and it’s crafting that makes strong writing of all kinds.

It’s hard to imagine the literary giants of the past writing according to a rulebook. It seems that Twain and Faulkner and all the rest were made to break rules, not abide by them. Something a guitar instructor of mine once said comes to mind here. He told me to practice the modal scales until I memorized them, and then to practice more. I worked until I could start on any note of the scale, anyplace on the neck, and find the rest of the notes without hesitation. And then he told me to forget every scale I had learned. Good guitarists, he said, know the scales forward and back. Great guitarists forget that they know the scales.

It seems that crafting a piece of writing – be it fiction, nonfiction or poetry – works in much the same way. My professor didn’t intend for me to write-by-numbers or eliminate all experimentation from my writing. Rather, he wanted me to learn the rules and to write with them in mind, and then to forget the rules ever existed and just write. For if a writer learns the rules well enough, they’ll show up in his work whether or not he or she remembers them.

What am I to do when I’ve learned the rules and forgotten them, when I’ve integrated them into my craft so that there’s no longer a need to make them explicit? The answer is, I find more rules to learn and forget. There’s no convergence to a writer’s craft. Hemingway said that writers are apprentices in a craft that no one masters. And if we’re willing to see ourselves as craftsmen instead of artists, as learned instead of divinely inspired, we can do just fine as perpetual journeymen.