When was the last time you bounce-tested a pickle?
I don't know that rules are made to be broken, but we're allowed to be creative
A reminder: The rules are made up.
The rules about publishing, awards, what you must do or never do as a writer are all made up. They aren’t laws of nature. People created them, followed them, continued to teach them. People have challenged them and chosen to follow different ones. But ultimately, we’re all kids on a playground deciding that everything outside the yellow lines is lava and the big tree is base.
When I catch myself getting really nitty-gritty about how I’m “supposed to” be doing this thing, what I “should be” writing, why I need to be going about it the way that this or that person has done it, I remind myself that literally all rules are made up and that they have to change. The same reimagining and dismantling I believe we need in so many aspects of what’s acceptable and normalized, I believe in that for us as creatives too.
But I’m a living thing trying to survive the world, so I forget and fall back into default thinking — that’s ok. I just remind myself: it’s all made up. And then I think of a particularly stupid rule, like how in 1948, a law was passed in Connecticut that all pickles must bounce or how kangaroos are banned from the insides of barbershops in Alaska.
We’re supposed to let made up rules tell us how to create our art in 2025? No thank you.
This isn’t to say that all the rules or expectations are bad or that we should throw them all away. But I think we forget that we can question and evaluate these ideas, and that just because something works for someone we admire (or at least that’s what they said once in an interview that’s been excerpted and repurposed for social media content for years) doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
For me, and for so many writers I work with and know, the rules and our ability to work within them become conflated with our ability to write at all. We go from “Write every day” as a strategy to maintain a practice to “Write every day or you’re not really a writer.”
Getting a book deal with a Big Five publisher becomes the only way to be a “real” author.
And often, when we take a closer look at when and why these norms were established — and who by — we find out they’re far from essential to the nature of our work.
Many writing “rules” are lessons extracted from the study of the Western literary canon. And the response a writer shares during a press tour or one interview becomes representative of their process for decades.
A million years ago, I was profiled on a site for women who lifted weights — back when that was a fairly novel thing and not so mainstream in fitness. I felt inadequate in every possible way (shocking, I know): the wrong size, shape, color. And everyone else, I was convinced, was so much better at this than I was. More structured, more disciplined. Their profiles were so complete; they had an answer for every question that illustrated how rooted they were in their healthy, strong lives.
One of the questions was about my morning routine. This was long before the wave of awareness around adult ADHD, and I was deeply ashamed of how messy and inconsistent I was behind the scenes. The answer I gave reflected the most ideal version of myself, the me I was for about 3 collective minutes of my entire life. It went out in the profile, portraying me as organized and dedicated, a model to admire.
The site reran content periodically, and every time my profile came back up, I felt the shame under my skin. Some of the photos were cute, but even the cringier ones didn’t sting like what felt like lying.
I finally confessed to a fellow weightlifter. She was well known in the community, basically famous, and I was horrified to find the words coming out of my starstruck face. She just shrugged. “I’m pretty sure no one actually does all the stuff they say they do,” she said. “Plus, routines change over time. We learn new things, let go of what’s not working, get sick of spinach…”
This has stayed with me for nearly 15 years. I still remember the disorienting rush of relief and disbelief, like a cold wave washing up over my ankles at the shore. We were allowed to change. We felt pressured to have an answer, to appear put together. We were flattened by the page, by the quotes pulled for social media promos and sales copy.
The same waves lapped over me when I read the truth beneath the mythology of Kerouac’s On the Road, a successful marketing move I’ve shared about here:
And every time I see someone share a fragment of an interview as writing advice/gospel, I wonder if we’re holding that creative to a version of themselves they’ve outgrown, or someone they’ve only ever imagined they could be.
Some questions to consider when confronted with a rule:
Where did this come from? What was the context of that origin?
What systems or pockets does this rule support?
What changes for me if this rule came from or upholds a system I don’t want to give more power?
Do I feel resistant to this? Where is that resistance coming from?
How does this fit with what is already working for me?
“What we call craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations. Those expectations are shaped by workshop, by reading, by awards and gatekeepers, by biases about whose stories matter and how they should be told. How we engage with craft expectations is what we can control as writers. The more we know about the context of those expectations, the more consciously we can engage with them.”
―Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping
Work(ing) in Progress is a free publication, but paid subscribers get access to 3 creative spaces each month. Here’s what’s coming up in the second half of March:
Worth Another Look, Tues. 3/18, 5 pm PT/7 pm CT/8 pm ET: A self-revision workspace so you can take a draft to the next level, or add strategies to your toolkit
Prompt Potluck, Sun. 3/23, 12 pm PT/2 pm CT/3 pm ET: An invitation to dig into your stash of prompts from the courses, newsletters, social media challenges, freebie downloads, etc. that you’ve collected and promised yourself you’d come back to someday.
If you’re a paid subscriber or a member of my Write On community, access to all 3 WIP events is free and you just have to stay tuned for the Zoom link on the day of each event.
Free subscribers and visitors, you can grab a one-time ticket for the events you want to attend here. You can also upgrade to a paid subscription to get access to all 3 events each month. I hope we get to write together soon!