Robert's Rules of Writing by Robert Masello

Robert's Rules of Writing by Robert Masello

Author:Robert Masello [Masello, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621537847
Publisher: Allworth
Published: 2021-09-14T22:00:00+00:00


RULE 57.

LOSE YOUR FORM.

Most professional writers have a favorite form—short story, essay, play, novel—that they regularly employ to express themselves and their ideas. But every one of them moonlights now and then, and uses a different form when the occasion calls for it.

So why shouldn’t you?

Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes what’s right for a magazine article is all wrong for a nonfiction book. What might work fine as a screenplay may not have the heft for a novel. What might make for a lovely essay may not be translatable into fiction. And if, while trying to write one of these things, you keep getting hopelessly stuck, it might be because you’ve simply chosen the wrong form. It’s the old round peg in a square hole problem.

So what if, God forbid, your idea seems to want to become a play, and you’ve never written a play before? What if the short story threatens to swell into a novel? A lot of writers feel they either have to abandon the idea altogether, or, first, spend several years studying the demands and requirement of the foreign form, buy every relevant book on the market, take every pertinent course—maybe even enroll in a university program and get a degree in it! If you happen to know that you are immortal, go right ahead—you’ve got all the time in the world.

For the rest of us, however, it’s not that easy. We hope to write, and even publish, our work in the span of a normal human lifetime. And we cannot become an expert in everything. Which is why it’s important to remind ourselves that we already know a lot more than we think we do. For one thing, if your idea is begging to take shape as a play, then that may be because you’ve seen some plays (I bet you have!) and you can already imagine, albeit imprecisely, how this idea would work on the stage. By the same token, you’ve seen a lot of movies, which may be why your inner voice is insisting that something about this new idea of yours would lend itself neatly to the big screen.

Writers, to quote the eminent author and literary critic Cynthia Ozick, “[breathe] inside a blaze of words,” and that’s what makes them writers. Some of these words they have read in poems, some they have heard declaimed on Broadway, some have even been absorbed just from watching TV. (These days, with the plethora of great shows, that’s more likely than ever before.) And whether the writers were aware of it or not, they were also imbibing the form that the words were embodied in. Drinking the wine, they could not fail to notice the bottle from which it was being poured. When a new form beckons to you, when you feel that tingle of excitement, mixed with trepidation, which comes from accepting a challenge, rise to it—don’t run away. I’m not suggesting you fly blind, that you take no time



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