# Learn the Form Before Breaking It

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 94 · Part 10: Completion and the writing life

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> Learn the conventions of a form before breaking them on purpose.

A convention broken by a writer who doesn’t know it exists produces a deviation the reader can’t tell from an accident, while a writer who never deviates, out of caution, tends to produce competent copies. This practice asks for knowledge of the form and says nothing about who may break it. To learn a form is to understand what its conventions do for the reader, what they cost, and what the Work would lose by dropping them. That may not take years of apprenticeship in sonnets, and the break can be small, a scene with no visible conflict, a memoir without a controlling thesis, a play whose last act is a silence.

In May 1924 Virginia Woolf read a paper to a Cambridge society, later printed as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (the essay Practice 12 quotes), in which she compared a literary convention to a social one. A hostess, she said, mentions the weather to an unknown guest because generations of hostesses have established it as a subject in which everyone believes, and so bridges the gulf between strangers. A writer needs the same bridge to an unknown reader, and must begin from something the reader recognizes. It is an odd thing for a champion of new fiction to say, and it is the strongest argument against breaking rules carelessly. A convention is an offered hand, and refusing it communicates something only to a person who knows a hand was offered.

In the same paper she argued that the tools of the Edwardian novelists Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy were wrong for her generation, and compared asking them to teach you to write a novel with asking a bootmaker to teach you to make a watch. Yet she also called their books of great value and even necessity, since there are seasons when boots matter more than watches. She had examined their tools closely enough to say exactly what they were for. Her own record runs in that order. Her first two novels, *The Voyage Out* (1915) and *Night and Day* (1919), are often described as conventional in form and narration, and *Jacob’s Room* (1922) as her departure from them.

T. S. Eliot, in the *New Statesman* in March 1917, gave the clearest technical statement of the mechanism. Free verse, he argued, is not free; the ghost of some simple meter should lurk behind the arras even in the freest verse, and freedom is truly freedom only against the background of an artificial limitation. He concluded that the supposed division between conservative verse and free verse does not exist, because there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos. We read the claim as one about the ear. A line that departs from a pattern carries information only if the reader has heard the pattern, and where nobody has, the departure is just a line.

Invention doesn’t always follow knowledge, though. We think a writer can stumble on a form through ignorance of the rule, with a result that may be good, and that conventions can be gates. A writer from outside a dominant tradition may need to learn two sets, the one readers expect and the one the Work comes from, and nobody should pretend the first is neutral. In some media there is no stable rulebook to learn, and learning means reading and watching widely and noticing what audiences expect. The order can even be inverted, so that the convention is broken in a draft to see what happens and the rule learned from the result. The knowledge has to be present when the choice is published, not when it is first attempted.

**Practice.** Make a convention card for one deviation you are making or considering. It has four lines: what the convention does for the reader; what the Work loses by keeping it; what the Work gains by breaking it; what on the page will tell a reader the break is deliberate. Then write a conventional version of the passage in about 150 words and set it next to your own version. Ask one reader to read both and say which reads as intended, and why. If they can’t tell the break was chosen, the fault may lie in the signal rather than the idea. The whole exercise takes forty minutes, plus the reader’s.

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