WRITING LIFE: When Those Well-Intentioned ‘Do This, Not That’ Rules Grind You Down by Lori D’Angelo

There’s lots of writing advice out there. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad, and some of it is downright paralyzing.

Not only do I write fiction — at night, early in the morning, on random paper notes, whenever and wherever I can — but I’m also a professional writer in a declining medium: print journalism, a.k.a.“the legacy media.”

That’s a term I kind of hate because it suggests the medium I spend most of my days producing is dead, dying, maybe even already extinct. But newspaper journalists aren’t dinosaurs, at least not yet, though at times I feel like we’re living in that time right before the meteor hit, wiping out a way of life.

Still, I hear from readers nearly every day who tell me that the work we’re doing in the face of declining resources and demoralizing environments (the empty desks, the colleagues who left journalism for the greener grasses of public relations and now get paid more to do less with saner hours and better benefits, the realization that the job you’re doing now used to be done by three or sometimes even four people) matters, that it helps.

For many newspaper outlets, all those checks and balances — the copy editors, the news editors, the proofreaders — are like onsite printing presses, a relic of days gone by.

But, nevertheless, we write. People read the words and sometimes we make a difference. I know that there’s a place to slow down, breathe, smell the roses and reflect. And research that suggests it’s good for us.

However, I’ve long been a fan of 17th century poet Robert Herrick’s famous booty call poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” which could be paraphrased in simpler language as “let’s get busy, girl, because we’re not going to be young and spry forever.”

In the age of Ultron (and yes, I am making a reference to an Avenger movie in a literary essay because don’t tell me what to do), where most of us do have many other demands on our resources and ironically have to do more with less, more technology doesn’t mean more time. In fact, I feel like it means we sometimes have less. How often have you gotten the next new gadget, the next have-to-have thing, only to find that the process of doing what used to be simple has gotten more complex?

I was telling somebody just yesterday that I missed the era before cell phones and constant email access, when you could leave your house and be unreachable for hours. Imagine clothes hanging on lines in yards outside, kids wiling away summer afternoons playing, and if their parents wanted them, they would have to yell. One of the most persistent memories of my childhood, though he’s dead now and last I heard she lives in Atlanta, is my down-the-street friend’s dad, Mr. White, yelling for his daughter to come home. In the time of good old rotary phones, a booming voice was a key parental asset.

But now, when it’s really hard and sometimes feels darn near impossible to get off the grid (or in the words of Battlestar Galactica’s prescient technophobe Colonel Adama “the network’), sometimes you have to steal time, and that means that there often isn’t time to be concerned about the rules.

I was raised Catholic, sort of. It’s complicated because my mom dabbled in a lot of religious practices, some of which bordered on cults and maybe even were. I came to have a love-hate relationship with rules that eventually turned to a hate-hate relationship with the rules.

I hated the hierarchy, the patriarchy, the bureaucracy, the big picture you have to go to church every Sunday. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to church. I did. I just didn’t want to be told that I had to go to church to the smallest sit-stand-kneel details. It felt like the Devil was in the details, but not in the way most people mean. I finally had a priest tell me when I was in college, “Don’t think of them as rules. Just think of them as guidelines.”

It helped then, and it still helps now.

Because, as much as I don’t think that a news article or a literary essay or a Catholic mass should be a punctuationless free-for-all mess, I also don’t think that standard overused advice is all that helpful. And, sometimes, it’s the opposite.

For example, the oft-repeated writing advice, “Show, don’t tell.”

Even Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford once told me (in a college class that I got into but felt like I didn’t belong) or, rather, he told the class, “Sometimes you have to tell.”

Stories (and life) require balance, nuance, not one-size-fits-all prescriptions.

For example, here’s a rule that’s probably a good rule that I have broken: Let it sit for a while.

There have been times when I have written a story in one day, submitted it and had it accepted on that same day.

When it comes to writing, some people have special spaces, special times, special pens. And let me tell you, I tried the special pen thing. Not only did I try it, I went all in ordering highlighters and color-coordinated sticky notes to match, and it did not go well. Because, like many regimented systems that were created to help but end up hurting, it’s possible to take a well-intentioned idea too far. (Think utopia to dystopia.)

When I told a writer friend about my brilliant new system where I would take notes with a different pen color on a different day that coincided with the colors of the rainbow (it seemed like a good idea in theory!): she told me the truth — you make things too hard.

And that’s the problem with rules — sometimes the rules, even the ones we create for ourselves, make the writing process more difficult rather than easier.