Dissing the Rule Maker

By Garr Kuhl

Okay, so where’s the truth? You’ve been sitting there pounding out word after word of what makes sense to you, but it seems like just another string of words that almost anyone could write. Have you ever considered that you may be writing from everyone else’s truth and not your own? Truth is an elusive little devil that can whack the serifs right off your words, blindside and pummel all those well-intended phrases and words that claim to come from honesty but are actually other people’s thoughts and ideas disguised as your own. Why not make them your own?

Rules for honest writing are hard to come by. There probably aren’t many anyway, and the ones we do carry around seem to get in the way of good writing. If we have to rely on rules, our writing suffers. I suspect that much of the so-called writer’s block we experience has to do with trying to fit the piece we’re working on into a category that someone has told us is the rule, or the formula for success.

Honesty in writing can pop up in the most peculiar ways and in the strangest situations. Once, when asked to write a term paper for a college English class, I used more than my allotment of other people’s facts and figures for the body of the paper.  Because I couldn’t find any information for the introduction, I actually had to write it myself. What had come off the top of my head was what the instructor had questioned. He poured over the bibliography searching for suspicious paragraphs, his interest focused on the introduction. Of course, he never found any disparities because that introduction was good honest writing. Had he checked the body of the paper, well, that would have been a different story. I silently gloated and mentally strutted around the block when he told me that the introduction was too professional and so vastly different than the rest of the paper that I couldn’t have possibly written it.

This single experience changed my attitude about writing and about some of the established rules for it. It proved to me that when I free my intuition and break some of the rules, truth in writing is inevitable.

As inspiring as my experience was, it was also a rebirth of spirit and confidence. My truth hadn’t failed me, and in the end, it had brought about a peculiar sort of redemption.

Truth can be an innocent observer in any genre. My brother, being a journalist, and I, a novelist and playwright, have never had conflicting ideas about truth in writing. Even though he is a fact-based writer, researching for his truth, and I steeped in fiction, we jest about who the real writer is in the family. Aside from the joking, the one thing we absolutely agree on is that once honesty and integrity in writing has become a part of you, your voice will be found, as will your confidence in knowing who you are through your writing.

The restrictions of rules won’t necessarily get us to our own truth. We’ll have to confront our own voice some day, and then watch in shock as those rules melt from our minds, oozing us out of our comfort zone past what we thought we knew to be true to what is true for us. Call it intuition, that feeling we writers have that cuts to the truth about the nature of our being and allows us to view the world with a freshness all our own.

Inside each of us lies a small kernel of artistic honesty waiting to burst open, to penetrate our writing defenses. Granted, we as writers have a certain obligation to interpret the world as we see it, but why not look at it from the perspective of uniqueness, of originality, taken from that seed that wants freedom from the tyranny of the past and that tyranny’s obsession with the undistinguished.

As writers, when honesty is at stake, we can never be lost because our intuition tells us where we need to go, and by following its lead, we will end up somewhere in the final part of the creative process, the honest manifestation of our truth through intuition. Now and again, though, we may make false turns and sometimes find ourselves in a blind alley having to deal with finding a way out. This is the time to be honest with ourselves and look inward to see that the way is more than a journey, it is an adventure of discovery.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to co-write a screenplay with a writer friend of mine who worked at CBS. He was older and seemingly wiser with years of writing experience behind him, and needless to say, I was ignited by the thought of sharing my creative energies to harvest a truthful masterpiece. It was day one into our collaboration, however, when I quickly realized the disparity in our truths. Like the English professor mentioned above, my truths were simply being discounted by my friend who had succumbed to his ego, leaving me and my truth in a burning cauldron of frustration. My friend’s own truth seemed to be stuck riding on the coattails of what others had done, snapping the flap of the envelope of veracity shut.

This experience, thankfully, had brought home the fact that writing gives me a pathway to discovering my own truth.

So, go ahead and pound out your own words. Dive deep and go beyond the critic racing around in your head until you discover your own voice, the seed that generates honesty and truthfulness in your writing. Go beyond what people tell you is right or wrong. It takes courage to break the rules, but it’s worth it when you discover fresh ideas and new concepts that allow you to turn your own phrases into words that knock the serifs off of someone else’s writing who has not been paying attention to their own muse.

Okay, so where is your truth?

Garr Kuhl is a novelist, playwright, and award-winning short story writer. He has a wide variety of published educational material, newspaper articles and television scripts, as well as a co-written play, Brims—The sequel. He has also written a young adult trilogy, CAPTURED, COVER-UP, and CORNERED, and an adult adventure-thriller series, GUADALAJARA BURN and GUATAMALA STING. He has taught classes at San Diego Writers, Ink while dedicating his writing career to all those who rally round the rich, invigorating freshness of imagination. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Tia, and their dog Bella, and cat Nico.