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Hi @taylorclogston,

Thank you for your insights.  I do know the rules having studied them, graded for them, bought books on them, and practiced them, but I do know there are some stories that do deliberately break the rules and stumble into new pastures.  Not many of them but some notable few.
I think audiences have changed in how they approach literature over the centuries because of what the public wants.  I think of Aesop’s fables being moral stories that teach lessons were popular in their day.  Many children’s books clearly are didactic and teach a virtue.  But people become more wary of stories clearly designed to teach, especially if the teaching is overt, as they become more aware of their own need to control their personal destiny.  A child is not as cynical as an adult.  They look at the world with wide-eyed wonder, while we see the world as out to get us, full of darkness and it terrifies us, makes us angry and may make us overly critical.  There is not much in life we truly revere anymore.
Every story, if the writer is worth his or her salt, should have a MC with a character flaw that will be weathered and exposed through story, and hopefully acknowledged and responded to if not fully resolved by the end of the story:  A character arc.  If you’ve read Poe’s “The Tale-Tell Heart” you know that sometimes, the teller of the story may be revealed, at the shocking conclusion, to be the true diabolical fiend in the story, and the reader should be careful in whom they trust to give the account.  Now I say that, but there are exceptions.  If you’ve seen any of the “Back to the Future” movies, you know the franchise was popular and successful enough to generate two sequels with desire enough for a fourth, but you really do not see much of a character arc in Marty McFly, do you?  He’s pretty much the same, though the circumstances around him change.  No major life lessons garnered except in perhaps the third where he chooses not to be bated into the street race because he was called “Chicken”.  Not a dramatic character arc, but at least a token nod to the traditional rule of character.  Yet we cannot deny that the story had appeal and popularity.

It is interesting to me that if I write something questioning the rote path of first learning writer craft, before attempting to practice it, our didactic instincts kick in and suddenly the very thing that we say authors do to harm their stories, our didactic does to keep us from wading into the pool of writing without first learning to swim.

May I submit the possibility that if one does not first develop the joy of playing about in the water, what does the exercise of learning to swim accomplish if they, in turn, come to hate and avoid getting wet?

I see this happening in universities and colleges all the time.  Literature teachers and professors who once may have been fair good writers, become so caught up in honing and refining craft, that they lose their ability to write anything that may have been popular.  There is an imbalance.  They lose practice because they judge themselves too critically when attempting to write.  That is in part what happened to me.  I became so self-critical that I did not let my work see the light of day, trashed stuff I should have kept, and became obsessive about the rules in such a way that I squelched creativity.  There are rules, and they are important and critical to heed, but like faith, if your Christianity only becomes about following the rules, you will become embittered and cynical and give no one else the grace to fail.  That is why, as in everything, it is primary to begin first with relationship.  That is what God seeks with us.  That is the connection that empowers us to find ourselves being lifted by Him up to exemplary standards.  Yes, there are craft rules, but if you don’t first fall in love with story and writing, you will lose that relationship with writing.  You have to begin with the doing.  Like a child taking those first falling and wobbly steps.  Never quit in the doing.  Then add practical craft to refine those wobbly steps, so that you can proceed to running.  Jesus led by practical example coupled with teaching the commands of God.  Let’s be clear I am not saying throw out the rules and only write.  What I am however saying is find natural unrefined and raw delight in writing first, and then you will seek and become attuned to learning the sharpening of your craft because it will have relevance in what you are doing.