Free to Improvise

When I was in college, a friend of mine came across a book called The Book of Qualities by J Ruth Gendler — “magical personifications of human emotions.” In it, the author describes a variety of emotions as if they were human: “In The Book of Qualities' magical community, Excitement wears orange socks, Faith lives in the same apartment building as Doubt, and Worry makes lists of everything that could go wrong while she is waiting for the train. In portraying the complexities of the psyche, Gendler uses the Qualities to bridge the distinctions between literature and psychology, and has created an original work that challenges us to look at our emotions in new and inspiring ways.”

I don’t remember much about it, but there was one particular personification in it that has stuck with me for all these years: Discipline. I had to go back to the book (I still have it) to remember the exact passage:

“Discipline does not disappear forever but she does take vacations from time to time. By nature she is a conservative person, and yet she lives a radical life…. She has a complex relationship to form. She appreciates the necessity and dangers of structure. She understands that the same structure which supports you can also hold you back. The bones of the skeleton which support the body can become the bars of the cage that imprison the spirit. After Discipline has mastered a form, she is free to improvise.”

That last line is the bit I’ve always remembered. The way I’ve always thought of it was around following rules. To me, the point is that you don’t have to follow the rules … but you do have to know why the rules are there before you start breaking them. As with Discipline, first you have to master the form, and then you are free to improvise.

In general, rules exist for a reason: to solve a specific problem. That doesn’t mean that the rule we humans settled on is always the best solution, but it does mean that there’s an issue or a problem that needed to be solved.

I think of this often in writing. Writing is a completely made-up invention. Without humans, or another life form of equal “intelligence,” writing wouldn’t exist. And yet we have all these rules that people think actually matter.

They don't.

You can break any of the rules of writing — but if you’re going to do that, you need to first understand why the rules are there.

Take quotation marks for example. Quotation marks are there to help us understand when something written is a person’s exact words. They separate narrative from dialogue. They clarify and simplify. If you just get rid of them, you need to find another solution for those concerns, or you have to accept that people will be confused, at least at first.

That doesn’t mean you can’t break the rules. That just means that you have to understand why they exist, and the consequences of not following them.

In any endeavor, master the rules first, and then you’re free to improvise.