If you walk into Barnes and Noble, you're bound to see a whole selection of "How To Write" books where old men with grizzly beards teach you the importance of characterization and plot and the whole nine yards. Some of these writers may not have a book or a play or a screenplay to their name, but I don't think that discredits them in any way. After all, Simon Cowell isn't a singer, but his credentials in being able to scout talent make him perfectly viable to judge singing reality shows. We can assume the same thing abut storytelling, and decide that if someone has dedicated their life to studying a craft, they probably know a good deal about it.

In most of these books, you're going to see a plot structure arc that looks like a roller-coaster. The inciting incident has to happen here for instance, followed by a climax marked off with a big flashing star or something. There's bound to be samples of characters questionnaires to get your mind thinking of the meat, skin and bones that make up who your character is. This all might seem patronizing, and well, maybe it is a little. There's something funny about all these grizzly old professors saying the identical thing and expecting to make money off of it. But my issue isn't with the writers with these books at all, whom I commend for their effort. If you've spent your whole life studying a subject, you probably know enough about it to be taken with credibility. Then again, our president denies climate change, so it may be more of a matter of being loud and angry and rich to get what you want. If you don't fall into that category, I guess the best you can do is crack open a book and hope somebody listens to you.

But my issue here is more with how people react to these books, rather than the books themselves. In the last one-hundred years of storytelling, we've finally had the opportunity to see breathing, moving pictures come to life on screen. We've seen characters move with a fluid pulse and craft a narrative, something that would have seemed like magic one-thousand years ago. But like any craft, I feel like we reach a rut where we're waiting for the next big thing; where we're so focused on the conventions and tropes that work that we stop experimenting with other options.

Here's the thing, writers and artists and everything in between. It's okay to suck. It might be hard to suck, but it's comforting to do so in the company of the thousands of other people who suck just as much. There's so many books and seminars that tell writers to think and craft stories in a specific way. This isn't an issue, because it certainly produces a tangible story, but what happens when we eventually hit a rut?

What happens when we've exhausted the possibilities that can arise from a certain avenue of expression, and we're just rehashing the same techniques?

Let's look at a Broadway play that won the Tony-Award this year, entitled The Humans. At first glance, the setup of this play is pretty traditional. A family comes to a duplex apartment in Chinatown for Thanksgiving and erupts into conflict as they henpeck each other. It's nothing out-of-the-ordinary, but the last fifteen minutes of this show are so otherworldly and so effective that I was left speechless. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that a very supernatural element comes in that's completely open to interpretation. After an hour and a half of sitting through a completely naturalistic play, you're disarmed with something that's dark and unsettling and hard to piece together. If this had been examined beforehand by one of those how-to book authors, they would have denounced The Humans for not falling into a conventional structure. But here's the thing; the author of this play took a leap and a risk. They tried something completely different, and it was like anything the audience had ever seen before. When everyone was walking out, there was confused chatter at first; it wasn't rejection of the piece by any means, but more of a failure to contextualize. The audience had never seen anything like The Humans, and they weren't even sure of how to react to it. To me, that's art. Marilyn Manson once famously said that art "is like a question mark" and I agree whole-heartedly in tearing down familiar walls.

Is everything you do going to work? No, of course it isn't. A lot of the experimental art produced is just that; it's experimental, and doesn't crack itself up to be anything ground-breaking. But that's the thing; it's at least trying to do something different, and offer an experience different from what we've seen before. I'd rather see a confusing play that made me feel something than something manufactured and repetitive.

It disturbs me to see so many writers visiting the how-to section and deciding, 'Now that I have this, I know what I'm doing." There's nothing wrong with studying craft - hell, you'd be self-righteous not to - but we have to wonder how many ideas are lost in the process. When people are scared of embarking on new ideas, how many are discarded because they just don't "communicate" effectively? They shouldn't be tossed aside, but analyzed and toyed with until they finally work.

There's nothing wrong with trying something and having it not work.

It's no detriment to what you can create, and it's nobody saying that you don't have talent or potential. In fact, I enjoy failing more than succeeding. When what you create is universally accepted, are you learning anything in the process? What do we have to say about the world if we're not trying anything new and engaging in some controversy?

Here's to sucking. Go out and break down some walls.