Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

One of the curious things about writing is the way ‘the rules’ fade away with experience. After a while, writers ‘just know’ how to do things. And good editors know they know.

That also means that an experienced editor doesn’t tick off an experienced author for what, on the face of it, seems to be a noob mistake. Chances are that the sentence beginning with a conjunction is intentional, or a dialogue tag-as-action has been deliberately added. ‘Fixing’ these things usually destroys the deliberate intent of the author (‘Mr Kerouac, I’ve fixed On The Road for you – you obviously don’t know about paragraph breaks.’)

The ‘rules’ are there for one purpose: to ensure clarity of meaning and quality of result. But they are not the sole arbiter of quality.

Of course that doesn’t mean that beginning authors can just blaze away and make all the mistakes under the sun and…