When I was a kid, my aspirations for my future ran to having a Broadway career. As much as I loved writing and was forever composing poems and such, I was sure my future would be on stage. This may help explain why, at around nine years old, I one day decided out of the blue to write a play.
During the summer that followed, while I was at camp, the drama counselor asked if any of us campers happened to have written a play. My hand shot up and waved wildly. And so it was that my play was put on later on in the season for the younger campers.
When the drama counselor was casting the show, I naturally wanted to try out for the lead. The drama counselor dissuaded me. “You can’t write the play and play the lead, too,” she told me.
“Why not?” I challenged her.
“It just isn’t done,” she said, as if that settled that.
It didn’t. Why did I have to do things the way other people did? “It just isn’t done”? Then wasn’t it about time that someone did it, so we could bust up that silly old rule? Why should the fact that I was the playwright disqualify me from playing the lead? It wasn’t fair!
There were things my mother said “weren’t done,” as well. And I railed against those rulings mightily too. They weren’t being done because nobody was doing them…and that gave all the more reason why I needed to do them, in my opinion—to break the curse of the silly rule.
At my current advanced age, I’m still battling against convention and the rules that some amorphous “they” make that enjoin people from behaving in certain ways. Just yesterday, in editing a manuscript for a publisher, I found that the writer had used a lot of “interrobangs”—conjoined exclamation points and question marks. Technically the term interrobang refers to a question mark with an exclamation point overlaid, but loosely the term is applied to a question mark followed by an exclamation point. “They” say you should end a sentence with one punctuation mark only, so make up your mind whether you want the exclamation point or the question mark. I say I like interrobangs. I find them very expressive. And I tend to leave them in when I find them in manuscripts I’m editing. (I have allowed other forms of “creative punctuation” as well in the course of my editing.) Up to a point I will follow the rules laid down by the Chicago Manual of Style, the editor’s “bible,” but there comes a point where I refuse to kowtow to what “they” say.
It isn’t done? Hogwash! Watch me—I’m about to do it!
That’s true of many things in my life. I’m not a total rebel, but I’ve always marched to my own drummer. I don’t play by all of “society’s” rules—just the ones that make sense to me. Important to me are common courtesies and concern for other people’s rights and feelings. Rules that play into these issues have my utmost respect and devotion. Rules that seem silly or arbitrary and are predicated solely on custom or such reasons as “It’s always been done this way” or “That simply isn’t done”? Not so much.
The rules for writing have changed over the years. It used to be that journalistic reportage was supposed to begin with a “5 Ws lead,” telling who, where, when, what, and why. Then came New Journalism, and creative and iconoclastic writers began utilizing leads straight out of fiction techniques. Now you can pick up almost any newspaper and find stories, even front-page articles, with leads such as, “The house sits on a windswept hillside, far from the clamor of city traffic that was once the background soundtrack to all of Mary Spofford’s days.”
Until New Journalism came along, “they” said you couldn’t write nonfiction leads like that.
It just wasn’t done.
But somebody—and eventually a whole bunch of somebodies—broke that rule, and now it’s done all the time. Was anyone or anything hurt by breaking this convention? Resoundingly no…and journalism is much better off for it.
In whatever you do, whether you’re writing, baking, doing woodwork, arguing law, or simply observing the social graces, don’t be bound by what “they” say, and don’t be inhibited when “they” tell you, “But that simply isn’t done.”
Gleefully answer, “Well, it is now!” and go ahead and do it…provided, I say, that whatever it is you want to do, you aren’t harming or hurting anyone (including Mother Earth) by doing it.
“They” say, “It isn’t done.” I say, Ask yourself why not. And if there’s no valid reason except for custom or habit or a totally baseless rule, go ahead and do it!