Break the rule on purpose

The last line of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree: "his hounds tire not; fly them, fly them." You don't fly hounds — you fly airplanes; you flee people. McCarthy chose fly anyway, and the wrongness is exactly what gives the line its power: it makes you look twice, and it hangs in your ear after the book is closed. Hand that sentence to an AI and it flags a grammatical error and smooths it right out. That's the difference.

How it works

Great writers don't only follow rules; they break them with a specific effect in mind. But the order matters: learn the rules first. A chef learns the techniques before inventing a dish; a musician learns the scales before bending them. Only once the rule is yours can you break it deliberately, purposefully, to make the reader see something the correct version couldn't show. Shakespeare's sonnets follow a rigid form and wrestle against it, straining to say something the form alone can't contain — and that wrestling is a human energy the reader can feel in the language.

Why it matters

An AI is a teacher's pet: it follows the rules always, because it's a pattern-recognition machine, a parrot. So you never get from it the sublimated energy of a mind straining against a constraint — one of the things that makes writing feel alive. A rule broken on purpose carries the trace of a person deciding, and that decision is not something the averaged, always-correct output can fake. Only you can break the rules in ways that matter.

Try it

1. Learn the rule you want to break well enough that breaking it reads as a choice, not an error.
2. Break it for a reason you can name — emphasis, strangeness, rhythm, a double-take — not for novelty.
3. If a tool would "correct" your best line, that's often a sign the line is doing something human; keep it.

Common pitfalls

Breaking rules you never learned, so the result reads as a mistake rather than a move — the effect depends on the reader sensing the rule behind the breach. The opposite error is never breaking any, writing so correctly that the prose is indistinguishable from a machine's: clean, and dead.

Great writers don't just follow rules. They break them with specific effects in mind. And that's something AI cannot do.

WILLIAM · THE 5 WRITING SKILLS AI WILL NEVER REPLACE · 2026

A musician learns the scales before bending them. Learn the rule, then break it on purpose.

Drawn from

• William, The 5 Writing Skills A.I. Will Never Replace (Writer Science, 2026).
• Cormac McCarthy, Suttree (1979) — "fly them, fly them." Amazon →
• Related: Voice is lived experience, not word choice, Out-human the machine.