Do the wrong things right

There are no rules in writing, but if you break them… Here’s a thing. There are certain ways of writing, certain ways of doing all sorts of things really, that are frankly naff and yet there are people who do them well. I would tell you, for instance, that the sole way I can stomach reading a narrator is if they are lying sods who are out to fool me and preferably along the way are also kidding themselves. Unreliable narrators, can’t get enough of them. Regular narrators, forget it. A regular narrator is just the writer unable to dramatise plot exposition. But then you get Frank Darabont’s screenplay for “The Shawshank Redemption” and you might argue that the narrator isn’t fully in control of what he’s saying, but really, no, it is straight, ordinary, regular narration, yet it works. It is somehow human. Break it down sentence by sentence, consider the performance as well as the writing, and I don’t think you can reasonably conclude anything other than this should not work but it…