Ever stared at one of those rules of Good Writing and wondered: Why this 'everybody know it's wrong!' thing doesn't feel wrong to me?
I started reading 'Craft in the Real World' by Matthew Salesses who works on answering this challenging question. This is another book on craft (first was Theodora Taylor's '7 Figure Fiction'.) Both authors are POCs so they both know first-hand that the traditional lit is not what people pick to read worldwide and how to write as yourself, not the next Hemingway.
However, Salesses examines the issue from the academic and literary fiction standpoint, while Taylor writes from the self-pub trenches (Amazon).
So far, I only went through the essay portion of Salesses' book where he makes his main point--the rules of craft as we understand it are informed by the cultural, ethnic and racial storytelling background. The rules are not universal. It spoke to me as someone who didn't grow up in the Western narrative culture, and was genuinely surprised to discover that adjectives or asides are bad for you. H
Taylor's book (that I read and re-read a couple of times) addresses me as an online writer looking to strike a chord with the online audience.
The biggest difference for me so far is that Salesses assumes that the default audience and fellow writers are dominantly white heteronormative males. This is patently untrue for Wattpad and we all accept that. So Taylor is five steps ahead of him already, writing for an international multi-ethnic, multicultural and predominantly female audience. She very clearly describes her online reader as a woman challenged by the demands of the workplace and raising children.
Salesses' essays are good, however, to understand why so much of enshrined advice clashes with what I actually like in storytelling.
And I don't think I am alone.
The 'huh?' can come from being raised as a reader on genres outside literary fiction, on literature with a culturally-driven different narrative structure, on your ethnic or racial identity as a storyteller.
Salesses gears towards answering the questions:
Do I need to learn to write by the rules of Western fiction if it doesn't come natural/feel all that great to me?
Am I actually losing my craft by adopting the craft in a narrow sense the craft is taught in the West from Aristotle onward?
Why so many of the ''but why can't I do that?' questions receive a canned answer a-la, 'we just don't do that, Doms. It's bad in English.'
For me, the jury is still out on what the solution is for me, as I belong to a rapidly disappearing cultural subset that has been discontinued. I'm going to work my way through the practical part of the book that works on the major rules of craft taught in the West, and think.
If that sounds interesting, check the book out and let's talk.
A word of caution: I only recommend reading this when you have desire to soul-search and resilience to self-doubt. It raises plenty of painful creative questions.
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