Member-only story
Creativity and rules don’t always blend well.
Break the rules and you may find yourself labeled a troublemaker.
Intuitively we know this from a young age. Especially a middle child like me.
Middle children are the proverbial peacemakers. Yet we often break rules. Quietly subversive, we don’t flaunt our rule breaking. We are not rebels or attention seekers. We are poets and writers. We are creators.
But rules are not the same thing as laws.
Rules are guidelines created by others mainly for the sake of their own convenience. You can challenge rules, guidelines and the expectations that others have of us.
You can break the rules.
In March I broke all my writing rules to date.
- I wrote twice a week, instead of my usual 4–5 times per week.
- I published directly on my profile page instead of via publications.
- I stopped translating my Haiku into Japanese.
- I didn’t recycle or adapt any of my earlier writings.
As a writer, time is my most precious commodity. With a full time job and side hustles I cannot afford to do things that have a low return on…
