According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for “planning, prioritizing, and controlling impulses” doesn’t mature until a person reaches their mid- to late-twenties. I was twenty-five when I passed the bar exam and became a lawyer, and I’m damn sure that prefrontal region had a lot of time to go before it ripened.
Which is a long way to say: I needed guidance. I needed rules and people who knew better than me to tell me what to do. Because I didn’t trust myself to know what to do, I held on tight to the rules and didn’t question them, and it was lucky for me that the legal system loves rules and makes them up about just about everything.
As a writer, I have searched for the Magic Writing Rulebook. I figured there has to be one, otherwise how could all of the writers I admire produce books, short stories, poems? The rulebook might be called “Follow these 33,000 easy steps and win the Booker,” and the Writing Authorities might hand it out on the first day of Breadloaf or the last day at Iowa. Simple, right?
It is difficult to turn off my rule brain, or accept the advice of more mature, developed writers who assure me there is no rulebook. There is no formula that works for everyone; there isn’t one way to organize a story or write it out. There’s no universal system for editing. It’s personal, they assure me. What works for me what won’t work for you, and vice versa.
This deeply frustrates my rule-brain, but what has helped me, when I need to reach for guidance, is NAMING THE WORD AND OTHER EXERCISES FOR THE CREATIVE WRITER. The marvelous novelist Jennifer Close recommended it during a class I took in June of 2020, and I find myself reaching for it all the time. In this book, authors as varied as Elizabeth McCracken and Tom Robbins write on important topics that all writers need help with, like point of view and character, in humble, funny, urgent essays, and then provide some exercises based on their lessons. It’s not a step-by-step guide, but it is the closest I’ve come to sitting in a room with a bunch of wise elders and hearing their rules.
Instead of wasting time seeking the Rulebook, now I write, and as I do, I become a writer.
Simple, right?
Random House (2007)