Growing up, my mother was both a writer and a high school English teacher. Knowledge about writing and stories poured out of her constantly. As she harvested that knowledge from every field she could find, I followed her every step, catching the thousands of grains she let fall from her arms.

“You have to learn the rules so you know how to break them,” she often says.

This could, perhaps, be applied to many things in life, but in writing, it is paramount. This simple phrase has always reminded me to make educated decisions about the ways I communicate through both grammar and stories. 

I believe stories are the most powerful tools of communication we have, whether fact or fiction. It is imperative that we learn the rules and use them responsibly, so we can affect the change we want to see in the world.

Breaking Grammar

The English language comes with a whole host of problems. This is due, in large part, to English being a hodgepodge of vocab and grammar rules from the many invasions they endured back in the Middle Ages. It led to a lot of words from one type of system and a lot of grammar rules from another, making the rules rather difficult to understand.

Your editor can do a lot of the dirty work for you. However, the better you learn the system, the more you will start to play with language and develop your own style. This is the most important step if you want to move from being a beginner to a confident writer with a unique voice.

Determining your voice will also help you choose the right editor based on whether or not their editing style fits with your writing style. Do they want to be more economical with words than you do? Do they rearrange your sentences in a way that doesn’t sound like you anymore? Being able to answer these questions is necessary when shopping for an editor.

Breaking Stories

There are also plenty of writing rules that are begging to be broken. Breaking some of them will leave your reader confused, but breaking others can infuse your story with surprise and excitement. Readers are used to certain story arcs or structures, so messing with these structures can subvert their expectations, and pull them deeper into your story.

Without knowing these rules, you are still following many of them, but you are likely imitating what you’ve seen done before. Imitation is a necessary step of the writing journey. It helps you to learn the story tricks that your favorite authors use. However, if you don’t learn these rules and move past them, you won’t get the fun of developing your own personal story structure and writing process.

Here’s Where I Come In

I am here to teach you the rules of both grammar and stories so you know how you want to either follow or break them. Sometimes I may offer ideas on how to break these rules effectively; other times, I’ll leave the creativity—and the mayhem—up to you. No matter what though, I hope you come away from these blog posts feeling empowered by the knowledge you receive to create stories and prose you never dreamed of.

(Yes, I ended on a preposition. No, the roof did not cave in on me when I did.)