Thanks to Billie A Williams for the guest post. Follow Billie on Twitter.

Learning all the rules so you can break them to write your own truth and expand your knowledge, imagination, and interpretation of the life around you.

Wide lines on wide ruled paper are what you used when you first began to write so that you had room to make tall and short letters. Of course, you were expected to stay between the lines. Then when you mastered the letter form and size, you chose narrow ruled paper to show how controlled and grown-up you were.  You were able to follow the rules and stay between the lines so well, you were proud—your teacher gave you an A and everyone was happy.

Now, you consider narrow thinking, following all the rules, staying within the lines. So you went back to wide ruled paper. While you still wrote narrow rule sized letters, you use wide rule paper because someone whispered, “Read between the lines.” So you wrote the narrow minded, according to the rules, alphabet perfect stories to please the teacher while you secretly wrote the ‘real’ story between the lines.

The beginning is a nice polite thesis stating your premise in perfect, narrow, between the lines grammar, and sequential thinking.

“Dick and Jane were brother and sister. They loved each other. They helped each other with chores every day. Mother was very happy with them. She hugged them and kissed them and read them fairy tales at bedtime, all with happy characters and happy endings. Dick fed and cared for his dog Spot. He played with him every day. Jane fed and cared for her cat Puff. She played with her every day. When baby Sally came along everyone was happy and cared deeply for the new baby girl.”

Yada yada add nauseam.

You present a mediocre middle where you enlarged on the premise. We have Dick and Jane with a new family member all cooing and sweet. Playing patty cake with the new baby Sally and helping mommy with all the chores. Dick and Jane fully engage in the nicety of the day. Smiling all the while.

Meantime, between the lines, Bonnie and Clyde are terrorizing neighborhoods. They found, as a team, they could let modifiers dangle, split infinitives, and even toss in a fragment of a sentence to yell “danger!” or obscenities at the perfect sentence.

Then comes the stark and perfect ending. Dick and Jane, Spot and Puff, Mommy and Daddy and baby Sally live happily ever after doing all the nice, perfect sentence, perfect grammar, perfect penmanship, staying between the lines living a family can do.

While between the lines, you do your Martin Short impression of “On the Wild Side.” You burst at the seams and scribble maniacally, obliterating the fine lines between good and evil, right and wrong. You dare to write an unhappy ending; you dare to challenge the authority that said that you had to stay between those lines. The grammar was true and good. The sentence structure is terse and bright. The story was aflame with passion for the written words. You wrote between your own lines, but in the bigger spaces where the real story lies.

Billie A Williams, Multi-published, award-winning author of mystery suspense and more. Visit her at http://www.billiewilliams.com

Author of Writing Wide, Exercises in Creative Writing available from Filbert Publishing.

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