Like a lot of people who grow up to make their living by writing words, I began writing as a kid; I wrote my first story when I was probably eight years old or so, prompted by a classroom assignment. When I started reading books (The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, most notably) that sealed the deal — I wanted to write stories, and that was all I wanted to do.
Yes, I was an extremely cool kid. Who needs money, athletic ability, or dashing good looks when you can write a story?
Anyways, as a kid I wrote via instinct, blatant plagiarism, and wild abandon. I never worried about whether my work was original, or whether it followed some set of rules about fiction. I just made shit up and had fun doing it. And to a large extent I’ve continued that tradition as an adult. Sure, I am more conscious of what’s happening in popular writing right now, and I avoid the level of outright idea theft I once engaged in, but I’ve never understood why so many aspiring writers pause to ask permission about their ideas.
Mother May I
You see a lot of this on writer’s forums and in-person at conferences and such, questions that begin with “Can I …” and end with some writing technique or decision. Some common ones are “Can I use real locations as settings?” or “Can I use different POVs in one story?” or “Can I have a lot of characters in a relative short story?” Sometimes, of course, the question is formatted differently; asking “How many characters can I have in a 10,000 word story?” is pretty much the same question.
The answer to all these questions, of course, is sure! If you can pull it off.
The frightening thing about writing is that it’s wholly creative. You start with nothing and you make a story out of thin air, characters, setting, conflict, plot — all out of thin air. That’s also the great thing about it, but it can be intimidating; rules give us structure, they put bumpers on the sides so you can’t jump the lane and crash.
Don’t ask permission. Go ahead and crash. If you try to write a story and fail, so what? You start over. You try to figure out why it didn’t work. You hone and revise and tinker. Asking other writers whether or not you’re allowed to do something will just get you a wide range of answers, because writers each have their own limitations, their own private rules with no guarantees that they will map well to your own inclinations. Trust me; just by going ahead and writing whatever terrible trash you’ve got in mind, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t, which is way more important than what’s allowed.
Except when it comes to pantslessness. Trust me when I say asking whether you’re allowed to take off your pants is not only polite, it’s often quite advisable.