Rules: Who needs them, anyway?

Unfortunately, I've recently noted that my literary education consists primarily of gaps. In an effort to remedy this painful situation, I started reading a collection of works by Dostoyevsky last week. Though I've only made a dent in Notes from Underground, I have successfully placed several excerpts and short stories in my repertoire.

I actually bought this modest collection several years ago. The impetus behind the purchase was a recent acquaintance; I'd met an upperclassmen in the Wind Ensemble who happened to be carrying a copy of the text in the inner pocket of his scholarly blazer.(Which, by the way, was complete with corduroy elbow patches.) He was quite honestly the epitome of the English major; he lived a dreamy existence in which he spent hours composing poetry and later reading it to his necessarily patient friends. I know it sounds cliche, but I was very impressed by the passion with which he discussed literature in general. I figured that if he liked Dostoyevsky enough to cart him across campus in his jacket pocket, the book had to be good.

The first story in the collection was "White Nights." (Incidentally, it was the inspiration for the recent quasi-indie film, Two Lovers. Who knew?) The initial description of the narrator's lonely walks through St. Petersburg, punctuated by his amiable conversations with houses, was captivating. After tearing through the first ten pages or so, I stopped short when I realized that the next forty pages were comprised almost entirely of dialogue.

This wasn't pithy dialogue, either. Entire pages went by with the narrator speaking to his new friend and secret love, Nastenka. Of course, she occasionally got to tell her own story in a nearly identical epic style. Imagine my shock when I realized that the great Dostoyevsky had habitually broken a cardinal rule espoused by creative writing teachers everywhere: never use dialogue as exposition! What is more, the interactions between the narrator and Nastenka practically screamed artifice. And to think of all the time that I spent worrying about the realism of my own attempts at dialogue.

I can think of at least a dozen books that I've closed forever because the characters were wooden mouthpieces, the structure was inconsistent, or the plot was ill-conceived. (Who publishes those things, anyway?!) Yet somehow, I couldn't put it down. I read the whole story in one sitting. (I'm notoriously restless.) Despite the fact that the story itself broke nearly every unwritten rule about writing, it was defiantly engaging. No, Dostoyevsky did not create a world that I could truly believe in. His characters were far too long-winded. He did, however, pen a story that stayed with me. On some basic level, one that is far more intangible than plot, characters, or dialogue, it resonated in my heart and mind.


So, to bring us back to Prose--I suppose that the only rule in writing is that there are no rules. Good writing is not based in any kind of formula, but rather a very loose set of guidelines that can be bent and twisted to suit our purposes.