How to Break the Rules With Novel Writing

There are as many ways to tell a story as can be thought up by writers. However you want to write your book or story, you can.

There are no rules for storytelling, so if you've got something you want to add into your book, you can.

You don’t need an excuse to add things in that aren’t traditional prose, if just writing that alone will feel restrictive.

The classics, as great as they are, were written for a readership that was much different to ours. Trends change, and not by playing it safe, but by innovation and risk-taking.

The definition of a novel, however slowly, is widening, it always has.

We should feel free to try to find the edges of it, if we want.

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[KierenWestwoodWriting]

MY FLASH FICTION COURSE:
WE'D LOVE TO HAVE YOU IN OUR DISCORD COMMUNITY!:

[JoeyPaulOnline]

Always do love your view on writing, how we all approach things in writing is completely different and that's just how it works!

[durandaldevil]

Thank you for confirming what I suspected. It’s great to think outside the box of literature.

[writeitdown]

Great topic! "A chapter can be a sentence"---that reminds of of a William Faulkner book I read in college called As I Lay Dying, and one chapter literally is this long: "My mother is a fish." It's a strange book but ties into your message here, which I think is really valuable.

[NicoleWilbur]

It’s so fun when authors take a different form!! One of my recent novels was epistolary with journal entries, texts, stage notes, script -and considering it was about putting on a play it worked pretty well! This is such a great point -telling the story in the way the story needs to be told!!

[Joseph.S.Roberts]

Love it! I struggle with allowing myself to write rubbish for the first draft. I can’t get passed my ego, or the imposter syndrome.

[ShawnWeekly]

I’m sure this happens often, but as a newbie to reading fiction... I enjoyed how Scythe by Neal Shusterman breaks up chapters with different journal entries.

[themeanderinghero]

Interesting stuff man,
Made me think of Michael Crichton that I read a lot when I was a teenager. Can't remember specific examples from Jurassic Park but I remember that Congo and Terminal Man had some pretty interesting communication formatting in them.

[hayleywestwood]

I've seen some great examples of different communication within books recently. In The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex there are 3 women being interviewed, but you don't hear the interviewer and their questions - you just have the transcript of their response. I also read a book recently where social media posts were included like Twitter and Mumsnet. I think it's a much more modern way to provide information than just direct character dialogue or prose 👍🏻

[MeredithPhillipsWrites]

Have you read The Illuminae Files series by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff? Those came out a couple years back and the entire series is told through emails, instant messages, transcriptions, security reports, diagrams, and all kinds of other creative methods. From what I remember, there isn't a single time where they resort to just a straight narrative.
I'm using text messages in my current WIP, which isn't anything super out of the ordinary, but it can be a nice way to break up the more typical narration in a book.

[Lasherluke]

It's funny how I keep hearing there are no rules for storytelling and yet you have editors and publishers and authors who are constantly making out like there are rules to writing otherwise the books won't have an audience.

[MiaowMcDonald]

how do you write about flashbacks without it being all ‘tell’? and what’s your thoughts on the whole ‘show don’t tell’ thing?

[kilian-one-l]

One of my favs like this is World War Z, it's almost entirely made up of the MC's interviews of other characters