You have to learn rules to break them? Nonsense.

Just a quick little post…

I was ruffling through some books on screenwriting (like books on writing in general, some look interesting, brilliant perhaps, but most look like over-analytical, repetitive, worthless blither), and I saw the phrase “You have to learn the rules to break them!”  That phrase seems to pop up a lot in books on artistic instruction.  I’ve never been very fond of it.

There either are rules or there aren’t.  This “you have to learn rules to break them” is a lazy middle ground for scared confused people who don’t want to think one way or the other.  If there are rules, then they have to name them, and then someone else comes up with counter-examples, and they fail.  If there aren’t any rules, it might make the point of a book or lesson seem useless.

I guess the problem really lies in that creativity and art in general cannot be taught, making books about creating art seem hypocritical.  So, to justify the writing of their books, authors try to pull out “rules” … otherwise, the book is just a collection of subjective opinions, isn’t it?  Well, yes, actually it is.  That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unhelpful, but it does mean the author can’t always be objectively right.  And for some reason a lot of artists and authors really want that… for it all to be objective… if even in some small way.  That’s either because the artist is too afraid to think for himself and wants to create an objective way to think about the arts, or the artist wants everyone to agree with what he thinks based on things greater than mere opinion.

I would say there are rules, but they are psychological, complex, and many times subjective.  We can’t yet write books on them, and merely knowing what they are might change them.

However, we can write books on our opinions and patterns we find, and I think it’s perfectly valid to say that those patterns emerge from the shadows of those subjective currently-unknowable rules.

But to say “you have to learn the rules to break them” is just an excuse for people to teach them.  If it were true, it would imply that rules could only be broken within a set of other unstated rule-breaking rules, for which the rule of learning the rules to break them doesn’t apply, which of course is hypocritical nonsense.

What people should just go ahead and say is: “You don’t really have to learn this, but here it is if you’re interested.  And you might discover it by yourself anyway.”