I am a rule breaker. I've probably broken every writing rule known to man in the course of drafting my stories.
And you know what?
I don't care.
I find it perfectly and spectacularly awesome that I can, amazingly, use astonishingly high amounts of -ly words in nearly every sentence. Really.
I love that I can allow myself to write without worry of run on sentences, or dangling modifiers.
Every time I see a missing comma it makes me smile.
My tense may change every other sentence, but that's okay because my character is being genuine.
It's the first draft, and I'm allowed to break the rules!
Will I go back and fix them? Yes.
Giving myself the artistic license to write whatever I feel allows me to be authentic to my voice -- to the character's voice. I can go back and refine it later.
It's what works for me. I allow myself to use "just" every other word if necessary, along with "so", "like", and "maybe".
Whatever works to get the words on the page.
What about you? Do you allow yourself to break the rules, or do you stress over every single word?
6 comments:
When I first started writing, I had to get it perfect the first time. As you can imagine, it took me FOREVER to write even a chapter. Now I'm more like you. I just have to get words on paper. It's much easier to fix what you already have. :)
Rule Breakers Unite!
Ha! Janet, I like it! We can be The YA Renegades!
Loving the YA renegades. I think you need to leave a few rules broken. But I do fix some the second time around. Sometimes. lol.
Sadly, I'm on the straight and narrow. I try to break the rules during my first draft, but I can never shut off my internal editor. I'm hoping I'll have a breakthrough during NaNoWriMo next month.
Hmmm... I'm a little of both. I try to avoid cliches as much as possible, and I'm pretty anal about grammar/punctuation.
But overall, I just bash out the first draft as fast as I can. Line-edits and smoothing are definitely revision territory.
Nice post -- it made me think. :)
first run, no rules! but you're right. Revision = time to fix it all... :D
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