by Marisa Wright

Created on: June 25, 2007

Whenever writers get together to critique work, you'll hear alleged "Rules" being mentioned. Rules are dangerous things: get too caught up in them, and they can stifle your creativity and make your writing sound stilted. It's important to get them in perspective. To do that, you have to understand them.

The truth is, if someone gives you a clearcut rule, chances are it is wrong. Real writing guidelines are more subtle than that. Below I give some examples of the "rule" and the guideline behind it.

"Rule" 1: never use words ending in "-ly". This comes from a guideline that says "always try to find a descriptive verb, rather than use a plain verb with an adverb". So you would say "he sprinted to the corner" instead of "he ran quickly to the corner", or "she whispered" instead of "she spoke softly". But there are times when you can't find a good descriptive verb, and in that case it's fine to use an adverb. And the guideline has nothing to do with other situations where you use "-ly" words. So you don't need to change "occasionally" to "sometimes", for instance!

"Rule" 2: never use words ending in "-ing". This comes from guidelines about not using continuous past tense or misplaced clauses.

You can hear that "I was walking" sounds slower and has less impact than "I walked", so to keep your prose snappy, you should avoid using the "I was walking" structure. But sometimes you need it, because you want to show that while you were in the process of doing one thing, something else happened, e.g. "I was climbing Everest when the avalanche came". If yu write "I climbed Everest when the avalanche came", it could mean you climbed Everest after the avalanche. Readers may not be able to put into words what's wrong with the sentence, but they won't get a clear picture.

Being able to cover two actions in the one sentence is useful when we want to describe a character's actions succinctly, e.g. "Carrying her coffee, she walked through to the dining room". It's also gives us an easy way to vary our sentence structure when we're writing a one-character scene and want to avoid starting every sentence with "She"! And that's where the trouble starts: because it is so easy, it often gets over-used, and ultimately misused.

As we've seen, "doing one thing, I did the other" means both actions are happening AT THE SAME TIME. But inexperienced writers will often write sentences like, "Entering the room, she laid the gun on the table", or "Brushing her hair, she left the house". In both these

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