Thou shalt have no commandments

The stubborn ram in my nature bristles whenever I hear directives like must or can’t or don’t or need.

Don’t write a flashback in present tense.
Every story needs plot. (LOL.)
Every story must have a single protagonist.
Don’t write prologues or epilogues.
Non-english words must be in italics.
You can’t move between minds in a single scene. Who do you think you are, Virginia Woolf?

This sort of black and white advice might be well-meaning. Or is it sinister, an attempt to quash a writer’s ambition and keep them in their place, bound within the confines of the western tradition, an automaton pumping out the kinds of stories that some market-driven authority believes are most commercially viable?

Well, for the moment, let’s assume this counsel comes from a good place. Fact remains, it’s all nonsense. There are no rules for good writing. There are only guidelines which will serve you 75-95% of the time. Proof: for every “rule” there are a million exceptions. Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter includes flashbacks masterfully written in present tense. The forthcoming debut by Jamaluddin Aram - Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday - is brimming with point-of-view characters instead of a single protagonist. Importantly, I think, Aram’s storytelling style is distinctly non-western, which is to say the narrative is communal and indirect, without anything so dull as a clear moral lesson. When we throw out the rule book, we make room for other modes of storytelling, a wider breadth and diversity of literature, and frankly, more interesting tales. Even commercial fiction (for our purposes here, I mean fiction that sells well and makes a lot of money and is generally more concerned with telling a gripping yarn than, say, the poetry of a sentence) is full of broken “rules.” Louise Penney is a great one for mind weaving within a scene, within even a paragraph.

Writers, go forth. Write the story you want to write. Tell it the way you’d want to read it. And then, in revisions, yes, consider the guidelines. Is the prologue spoiling the ending? Is the epilogue trying too hard to leave your reader with a particular message? Is the rotating point-of-view confusing? Are the polyphonic voices fragmenting the story? If yes, is this what you intend? Approaching a draft with curiosity - asking yourself questions and holding yourself to account - is a better, more interesting, approach than burying a work-in-progress under arbitrary commandments.