Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

Today, Americans celebrate Independence Day. I wish there were an Independence Day for writers, too — to celebrate our freedom from the Rules Police.

Just who are the Rules Police? I don’t really know. But still, I often see or hear about the laws they’re laying down for the rest of us: When writing a book, do this; don’t do that. Worse, every year, their do’s-and-don’ts list appears to grow longer.

It’s a bit like taxation without representation. I didn’t have any input into all these so-called rules. Did you?

There are some rules we need, of course — primarily those about grammar, punctuation, and spelling, etc. Nowadays, however, those are frequently ignored. For instance, I can’t tell you the number of times lately that I’ve been jarred from a book or a TV show by an incorrect usage of “you and I,” as in “It was Jane Doe who gave you and I the romance novels.”

But erroneous indirect objects, misplaced and dangling modifiers, the loss of the subjunctive mood, the mixing up of verb tenses, etc., are things the Rules Police seldom rant about. Instead, they have a plethora of other complaints — usually having to do with little more than their own personal likes and dislikes — that have metamorphosed into the so-called rules.

These should not be confused, however, with what publishers actually will and won’t accept and what they know they can and can’t sell. Further, just because one publisher will or won’t do certain things doesn’t mean that all publishers will or won’t do them, either. So sweeping generalizations about such things are simply misleading.

Let’s take fonts, for example. Debates have raged for years over whether one’s manuscript should be printed using a Courier or a Times New Roman font. Over the course of my career, I’ve written books for several major publishers, and to tell you the truth, I’ve never known a single one who cared whether you used a Courier or a Times New Roman font or some other font, as long as it was legible (warning: you really won’t do yourself any favors if you think BuxomD is appropriate for a romance or Shotgun for a western).

For my first several manuscripts, I used a Letter Gothic font, because that was the only font ball I had for my typewriter (we didn’t have personal computers then). No publisher ever sent me a rejection letter telling me I had used the wrong font. In fact, to this day, the subject of fonts has never even come up. From Letter Gothic, I moved on to Palatino; my publishers never said a word. Nor did they speak up when I eventually switched to Century Schoolbook, then finally to Times New Roman.

I also know that every publisher has its own ideas about what does and doesn’t sell — and that those ideas will change over time, as well. Over the years, I’ve had everything from a publisher who insisted on a love scene in every first chapter to a publisher who didn’t care if there were any love scenes at all, publishers who initially didn’t care about time periods and place settings, but who gradually came to care very much when it became clear that books set in certain times and places sold much better than those set elsewhere.

Many long-time authors will tell you that during their careers, they gradually lost the joy and the magic they experienced when writing their very first books, which, being ignorant of all the so-called rules then, they wrote straight from the heart. But the joy and magic needn’t be lost.

At her own blog, Brenda Coulter advises, “No rules. Just write.” In the end, I think that’s the one-and-only rule that truly counts — because it’s the one that frees your imagination and encourages it to soar.

Happy Independence Day!

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