When you start writing, teachers start telling you about the rules. They tell you the difference between their and there. They tell you to watch out for commas, fragments and run-on sentences. They tell you about apostrophes, it’s and it is. They also tell you not to start a sentence with an “it”, an antecedent. But what they forget to tell you is that once you’re good, you can break these rules once in a while. It’s okay to be unruly, to avoid rules of grammar, to start a sentence with “it”. You have to be good enough to break the rules. As long as you are aware of your violation, it’s okay.
I like breaking rules. The one time in the day that I get to be unsafe, candid, open, unruly and carefree is when I write. When I put my words on paper. When I try different things, different styles, different tones and words. It’s like I’m suddenly brave. I can write anything I choose, anything from the past, from the present moment as I sip my tea, or from the future that often times is too scary to mention. And I know that sometimes I violate the rules of writing carelessly; I become so involved in what I want that I neglect what I’ve been taught and miss the possibility of having a great piece. But, then it doesn’t matter because I feel that it is by retaliating and experiencing that you become better. In a way, it’s like a self-teaching style; you learn from your mistakes, from your bad choices. You read that sentence with the fragments and the inappropriate repetitions and you realize it needs to be polished, that it needs work, that after all, it should have been avoided. You learn to catch bad sentences that don’t quite sound right, that don’t ring, that don’t flow. But if you are always safe, and never taking a chance at breaking a rule here and there, you never learn on your own. Instead you become dependent on others to guide you, to show you the way, to bring your point to an end. You are too timid to change your style, to play with words, to look at other synonyms, to open up about how you really feel, about what you really want to say.
So maybe I am careful when I live my life everyday, from the moment I get up ’till I fall asleep. Maybe I take the same routes because I know them, because they are familiar. Maybe I avoid things I don’t know well, for reasons of my own. But I can’t be told how to write, not anymore. When I write for myself, I want to be free and out in the open. That way, I can escape from all the rules I follow during the day. That way, I can be myself, my own guide.
It’s okay to take a chance and not write what they tell you. It’s okay to write a sentence that is too long to read under one breath because maybe it was meant that way and cutting it could have killed what you really wanted to say.