The Rules

By Julie Kibler

photo credit Dori Young

My recent first round of edits while under contract has shown me that sometimes the best route from point A to point B is breaking a rule.

You know … “The Rules.” The ones that say how we’re supposed to write. (There are also plenty of "rules" for pregnancy, right?)

This has come as a bit of a shock. We’ve had these rules drilled into us for so long, fully believing they are critical to whether we find an agent, get a book contract, wow the world.

Of course, they always say it’s okay to break the rules at times, but if you are going to break a rule, you better break it well. What does that mean, exactly? How will we know? Oh, you’ll know. You’ll know. Right.

I tried really hard to avoid backstory while writing Calling Me Home. Backstory, according to millions of articles and blog posts about querying your first novel, is anathema. Suicide, really. If your first few chapters, especially, contain backstory, you might as well quit now.

Then, as I was completing my revisions for my editor, I worried and worried and worried over this one point in my story that just wasn’t coming together, and I realized I needed a flashback. (Thanks to the suggestion of someone in a really great online group I belong to ... not mentioning any names … BOOK PREGNANT!)

My kneejerk reaction was, “NO! NO BACKSTORY!” I had totally discounted flashback in the attempt to follow the rules. I inserted what ended up feeling like a really nice section that rounded out a relationship I’d been trying to flesh out in the moment, when what these characters needed was history. We’ll see what my editor thinks. 

On another note, I was shocked to find my editor calling for more of this, more of that, with very little cutting of something else. WHAT? I thought. If I do THAT, my manuscript breaks the 100K word barrier! Oh, nooooo! Run away! Run away! I was being so legalistic, I thought I must lose a word for every word I added in order to stay below that holiest of all word counts.

Guess what? I turned in an edited manuscript that weighed in around 103K words, even while I had pinched it so hard, you could hear the words screaming as I knocked them off the page. And the world hasn’t fallen apart yet. Again, I’ll let you know what my editor thinks later. And, ultimately, that story is stronger, deeper, longer, and brighter, I hope.

This has been a good reminder to me that writing rules are almost always about the spirit of the law, and not the letter of the law. Remember that—when you’re finishing your masterpiece, when you’re querying your first-choice agent, when you’re getting ready to go on submission for the first time. (When you're pregnant and gaining 32 pounds instead of 30.) In the words of someone else, I can't remember who ...

It’s about the story, stupid.

(p.s. It is now a month after I wrote this. My editor loved the revisions and nary a word was mentioned about word count!)