Just a quick little post…<\/p>\n
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!”\u00a0 That phrase seems to pop up a lot in books on artistic instruction.\u00a0 I’ve never been very fond of it.<\/p>\n
There either are rules or there aren’t.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If there are rules, then they have to name them, and then someone else comes up with counter-examples, and they fail.\u00a0 If there aren’t any rules, it might make the point of a book or lesson seem useless.<\/p>\n
I guess the problem really lies in that creativity and art in general cannot be taught, making books about creating art seem hypocritical.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Well, yes, actually it is.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unhelpful, but it does mean the author can’t always be objectively right.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I would say there are<\/em> rules, but they are psychological, complex, and many times subjective.\u00a0 We can’t yet write books on them, and merely knowing what they are might change them.<\/p>\n However, we can<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n But to say “you have to learn the rules to break them” is just an excuse for people to teach them.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 And you might discover it by yourself anyway.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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!”\u00a0 That phrase seems to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-92","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}