Back when I taught creative writing, I begin each semester with a paradox. “Over the next fifteen weeks,” I told my students, “we’re going to put into practice a set of rules that will elevate your fiction/poetry/non-fiction.”

“And the first rule,” I added after a dramatic pause, “is that there are no rules about writing except that you can do anything you can get away with.”

To reconcile these seemingly contradictory statements I’d then project a pair of images on the screen:

Just about all my students would recognize the second painting as a work by Pablo Picasso. But which artist was behind the first painting? After another dramatic pause, I would tell my students that this work of conventional realism also belonged to Pablo Picasso.

And taken together, these paintings illustrated the paradox that I introduced to my students. Picasso got famous for rejecting all the rules of realist art. But before he could break the rules, he had to master them first.

As we launch the series of posts that will make up this free resource of craft advice, we want to begin with the same advice I once offered my students. The best fiction often challenges convention and bends the rules of genre and form, but just like Picasso, you can’t subvert all those rules and conventions before you learn what they are.

Or, put another way, knowing what you can get away is the thing that will allow you to do anything you want as a writer.