I’m sure I’m not the only person who has ever had an English teacher tell them, “You have to learn the rules of grammar before you can break them.” I always thought that was an idiotic statement. Breaking rules is frequently caused by not knowing them. Adrienne once expressed the concept perfectly: You have to know the rules in order to break them in a meaningful way.
I’ve been thinking about that statement as it applies to tropes in fiction, especially in genre fiction. When I first created my detective, I intended to do all sorts of things that went against genre conventions, mostly for the mere sake of doing them. Now that I’ve read more widely in the genre and, more importantly, started to focus on writing something publishable, I’ve discovered that a little bit of trope-busting goes a long way. Tropes are there for a reason: they help the reader suspend disbelief and identify with the characters, among other things. (This is the major difference between a trope and a cliché–tropes help readers; clichés help lazy writers.) Violate too many tropes without a damned good reason and you’ll lose your audience. In other words, I need to know the rules of good fiction writing so that if I’m going to violate a trope, I do it in a meaningful way.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Adrienne // Jun 25, 2007 at 6:53 am
You know, it’s a damned good thing that *other* people remember the brilliant things I say, because clearly they fall right out of my head.
2 Heather // Jun 25, 2007 at 11:48 am
I think that makes perfect sense. It is not rebelling if you don’t know what the norm is, then it usually is ignorance or being arrogant.
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