This was a pretty bitter pill for me to swallow. There was no real “aha!” moment around this, it was more like a process of evolution — that and listening to other people make the same mistake and realizing that we were ALL not special butterflies.
That was the most eye-opening, I think. I read all these great books about writing, and took some workshops, and one of the pieces of advice that was often repeated was you have to learn to follow the rules before you can break them, but break them from time to time you must and will.
Ergo, I thought, I do not have to learn the rules. I will simply break them. Haha! I am a rebel!
And then I started reading some other work by people who had clearly had the same thought. Some of them were local, unpublished folks looking not for a set of eyes (because they too assumed they were special butterflies), but just looking to show off to someone they figured would “get it.” Some of them were published, people I never met, books I stumbled upon by chance.
Deliberately misspelled words. Rambling non-plots. Horrific cliches of all kinds, from over-used character archetypes to phrases like “black as pitch” and “light as a feather.” These were rule-breakers, all right, but as had been pointed out to me, they were not people who learned the rules, then learned when it was appropriate to break them, they just jumped straight to the breaking. The results were not edgy and ground-breaking, they were tired and annoying. And they forced me to realize that my own rule breaks were also tired and annoying.
I was not the special free-thinking rebel I had thought. I was a bad-writing excuse-for-not-doing-work-making taking-the-exact-path-thousands-before-me-had-type cliche girl. I wanted to be a writer — I wasn’t one yet. I wasn’t close.
That’s part of my embarrassment and why I say, “I’ve written some pretty terrible shit!” a lot. Because I really excused it for a while. When I was ignorant of what good writing was, I was at least working on picking up grammar and spelling, and how was I to know what good writing was? I hadn’t met any writers yet. But when I did know what good writing was, or at least, knew what good writing wasn’t, I got annoyed at the extra work it would take to learn that, too, and I just didn’t for a while. I just kept writing garbage.
I am not a special butterfly. I had to learn how to spell, how to identify parts of language, I had to learn style and how not to bore a reader, and then I had to learn when and where rule breaks could maybe work. No one gets to skip that part of writing. In fact, no one gets to skip that part of life. If you want to do anything well, you have to learn, you have to screw up, and you have to work at it. If you make excuses for why you won’t have to, you never will be a special butterfly.
