Rules in Fiction

I've been editing for a friend as well as for myself recently, and I just realized, as I rewrote a sentence for probably my eighteenth time that I'm probably being too hard on myself. As I was editing for my friend last night, I didn't stop and question every sentence of hers over and over to see if she should perhaps use the word "or" twice in a sentence or rewrite it to use "of" because "of" sounds nicer (this is sentence specific). In fact, there were huge swaths where I didn't feel the need to change much of anything aside from a punctuation mark or join two paragraphs into one, because I was more interested in the story. But of course, I know my own story, so Every Tiny Sentence is life or flippin death.

The main conclusion I drew from editing another person's work was that I was willing to fall for anything so long as it fell within the rules of the book. It seems like such a simple concept, but when you're reading about a girl so smart she's got extra genius just lying around waiting to be used and she channels it into telekenesis, and it's got Roald Dahl as the author, you don't even realize that he's using this rule. You just think "Well, hey, it's Roald Dahl, he can do whatever he bloody wants!" And then as a beginning writer you have a character who's an imaginary talking octopus, and a surly parental one at that, you just think "What the fuck why would anyone ever fall for it?" completely forgetting the rule of Rules in Fiction apply to you just the same as they do to Roald Dahl. So it's nice to edit for a girl who's got a character who can rewrite the peramiters of her world by simply speaking it, and this character has to watch her mouth at all times less she undo reality, and find that as a reader it's So completely plausible within the rules of the book.

So here I am, editing up a storm, and I just finished up the scene in which my main character traumatizes her only friend's parents by dropping a dead bird on their feet, and you know what? I'm perfectly fine with that. And I know that later on, when I have to delve into the horrors of human taxidermy (and why it's So not okay, kids, and it doesn't even work so don't try it) I'm going to be okay there, too. I've set up my rules, and all of their little loopholes, and I look forward to exploiting them to their fullest extent.