Anarchy in the UK

I sit here in my little room gazing across the road (forsythia fully out now, cherry tree in bud, spring hurrying to catch up with itself), occasionally pontificating about the dos and don'ts of creative writing and the thought has occurred to me, once or twice, that in spite of all the advice and suggestions I try to give RULES ARE THERE TO BE BROKEN!!! So in this post I am advocating anarchy: tear the lot up and throw them all in the air.

Before you get too carried away, let me just add this proviso: in order to break the rules, you need to know what they are first, why they matter and how they work.  If you break them unknowingly, the end result can look slack or lazy or ignorant; if you break them in the full knowledge of what you are doing, it becomes a kind of consensual subversion. The poet ee cummings broke just about every rule in the book, but he did it in such an inspired and well-crafted way that the results are breathtaking. In his play Betrayal, Harold Pinter explored the effects of an affair upon a marriage - the classic triangular situation - but he told the story backwards, starting at the end and working to the beginning, and the effect is unsettling, surprising, poignant.

If you have a go at this yourself, you should find that it challenges you creatively.  It may take you out of a comfortable I've always done it this way because this is how it is done kind of a rut. You will suddenly feel bold.  I bet it makes you feel more confident. Some rules or conventions that you may consider breaking:

• Why not remove all quotation marks and  means of attribution and see what happens to your dialogue?
• Why not try writing in the Second Person (you get up, you make a cup of tea, you go and get a paper...) and follow where that takes you...
• Write in a cacophony of different voices and see which one shouts loudest.
• Try Pinter's trick and start at the end.

Apart from anything else, it can sometimes be a way of coping with writer's block, as it will get you thinking in different ways and may help you to change tack.