Why Do Writing Rules Contradict Each Other?
Because each rule fixes a different failure, and advice written for one problem gets repeated as a law for every problem.
Writing rules make me cranky. Most of them are good advice that got promoted to law by people who never understood why it existed, and new writers pay for that by sanding every interesting thing out of their prose before anyone’s had a chance to read it.
Never use adverbs. Show don’t tell. Avoid passive voice. Start with action. Kill your darlings. Write what you know.
Follow all of them and writing feels like defusing a bomb. One wrong move and everything explodes. Then you pick up Cormac McCarthy and he doesn’t use quotation marks. You read José Saramago and his paragraphs run for pages without a break. You read Elmore Leonard breaking his own rules in the same book where he published them. (See Elmore Leonard Day) So which is it? Follow the rules or ignore them? Neither. That’s the wrong question entirely.
Watch: These 7 Writing Rules Are Perfect ... So You Should Break Them, Bookfox
Why does every writing rule exist?
“Avoid adverbs” exists because weak writers lean on “said angrily” instead of writing dialogue that sounds angry on its own. The adverb patches over lazy work. (See also fluff words and when to keep them) If your dialogue already crackles, an occasional adverb won’t hurt anything.
“Show don’t tell” exists because amateurs stuff their manuscripts with emotional claims the reader has no reason to believe. “She was terrified” asks for trust. Showing terror through behavior earns it. But sometimes telling is faster, cleaner, and exactly what the moment needs. “Three years passed” is telling. It’s also better than showing three years of nothing important.
“Start with action” exists because new writers bury their hooks under three pages of worldbuilding nobody asked for. It doesn’t mean every novel needs to open with a car chase. It means the reader needs a reason to stay on page two.
None of these rules are arbitrary. They’re guardrails against specific screwups. Understand the screwup and you know exactly when the guardrail is protecting you and when it’s in your way.
The Passive Voice Example
Take “avoid passive voice,” the rule that gets enforced the hardest and understood the least.
The problem passive voice creates: it hides who did what. “The window was broken” conceals who broke it. “Mistakes were made” dodges responsibility. In action scenes, passive voice bleeds momentum. “He was hit by the bullet” lands softer than “The bullet tore through his shoulder.” But passive voice solves problems too.
When the agent doesn’t matter: “The city was founded in 1847.” Nobody cares which specific person signed the charter.
When you’re hiding information on purpose: “She was being watched.” The point is that the watcher is unknown.
When the receiver matters more than the actor: “My father was killed in the war.” The grief matters. The enemy soldier who pulled the trigger doesn’t.
Same construction. Three different effects. The rule is right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and the only way to know which is to understand what problem you’re solving in that sentence.
Should you master a writing rule before breaking it?
The “rules are meant to be broken” crowd leaves one thing out. You have to understand a rule before you can break it well. Not because breaking rules requires permission. Because it requires understanding what reader expectation you’re violating and delivering something better in its place. When McCarthy drops quotation marks, he creates an immersive, dreamlike quality where dialogue and narration blur into each other. That’s a deliberate choice serving a literary effect. When a first-time novelist drops quotation marks because they saw McCarthy do it, they create confusion and the suspicion that they don’t know basic formatting.
It’s the same decision with completely different results, and the gap between them is competence. McCarthy knows what quotation marks do, knows what readers expect when they see dialogue, and knows how to compensate for their absence.
His rule-breaking is a trade: he gives up one thing and delivers something better. Rule-breaking from ignorance gives up the same thing and delivers nothing, and I’ve got no sympathy for the writing advice that tells beginners to break rules before they’ve learned what the rules are for.
Genre Contracts Are Not Craft Rules
Some rules are promises the genre makes to its readers.
Romance readers expect a happy ending or at least a hopeful one. That’s not a suggestion. It’s the reason they picked up a romance instead of literary fiction. Violate it and you haven’t written something bold. You’ve written something that earns one-star reviews from people who feel cheated.
Mystery readers expect the clues to be available before the reveal. They want to be able to solve it, even if they didn’t. Hide the decisive clue until the last chapter and you’ve broken the contract.
I think breaking a genre contract by accident is one of the cruelest things a writer can do to their own book. The readers who feel cheated don’t come back, and they tell other readers why. Thriller readers expect escalation. Horror readers expect dread. Literary fiction readers expect ideas and emotional depth over mechanical plot.
These expectations are the reason readers choose particular genres. You can push against genre boundaries on purpose, but you need to know you’re doing it and manage the transition carefully. Accidental violations read as incompetence. Intentional ones read as innovation. The Genre Mastery Handbook maps these reader expectations across every major genre so you know exactly what contract you’re working with.
| Genre | Reader expects |
|---|---|
| Romance | A happy ending, or at least a hopeful one |
| Mystery | Clues available before the reveal, so it can be solved |
| Thriller | Escalation |
| Horror | Dread |
| Literary fiction | Ideas and emotional depth over mechanical plot |
How Do You Decide Whether to Break a Rule?
I think breaking a genre contract by accident is one of the cruelest things a writer can do to their own book.
Before you break a rule, run it through three questions. What problem does this rule prevent? Do I have that problem in this specific passage? And what am I giving the reader instead?
If you can answer all three, break the rule. You’ve earned it. You understand the risk, you’ve confirmed it doesn’t apply here, and you’re trading up. If you can’t answer all three, the rule is probably protecting you from something you haven’t spotted yet. Follow it. Not because rules are sacred. Because you haven’t found a better option.
McCarthy trades quotation marks for immersion. Saramago trades paragraph breaks for hypnotic, unbroken flow. Every effective rule-breaker is making a trade. If you’re not offering something better in exchange, you’re not breaking a rule. You’re making a mistake.
The rule I’d throw out first has nothing to do with prose.
I think “don’t use AI” is the most wrong piece of writing advice going around. A writer who uses AI as a digital assistant, for transcripts and summaries and first-pass outlines, and still writes the book can probably get books out four or five times faster. Writers who refuse on principle are going to find it very hard to compete with the ones who don’t.
My take
Most rule breaking I see is a mistake dressed up as style. Every writing rule exists to prevent one kind of failure. Ask what failure it guards against, whether your passage has that problem, and what the reader gets in trade. If you can’t answer all three, follow the rule. Genre contracts are the ones I’d never break by accident. The rule I’d throw out first is “don’t use AI.” Writers who refuse it on principle will have a hard time keeping up.
Which Rules Should You Never Break?
Underneath every surface-level writing rule, three things hold up the entire structure. Break any craft rule you want. These three aren’t negotiable.
Clarity. If readers can’t follow what’s happening, nothing else you do matters. You can experiment with form, voice, structure, and chronology as long as the reader stays oriented. The moment they’re lost, you’ve failed at the one job every writer has.
Causality. Events connect to each other. This happens because that happened. Random sequences of scenes are collections. Even experimental fiction maintains internal logic. Even nonlinear narratives have cause and effect.
Investment. Readers need a reason to care. Usually that’s a character they understand pursuing something that matters to them. Without investment, perfect prose is just wallpaper. Beautiful and empty.
Every other writing rule bends. Adverbs, passive voice, prologues, flashbacks, head-hopping, telling instead of showing. All of it works in the right hands for the right story. Stop asking whether something breaks a rule and ask whether it serves your reader. Answer that and the rules become what they always were: tools you pick up when you need them and set down when you don’t. The Novel Handbook covers how all of these craft decisions fit together across the full arc of a book.
Give me a writer who breaks three rules on purpose and misses on one of them over a writer who follows every rule and never takes a chance. I think the rules exist to protect readers, and too many writers hide behind them to protect themselves from the part of the work that scares them, the part where they have to decide.
Show Don’t Tell takes the most repeated rule in writing and explains what it means, with more than a hundred before and after examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The Three Punctuation Rules of Cormac McCarthy (RIP), and How They All Go Back to James Joyce, Open Culture
- Jose Saramago, Encyclopedia.com
- Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Good Writing, The Christian Science Monitor
