In the last few years, I’ve run across discussions in classrooms, bars, and online forums on various controversial writing topics: Whether an author can, or should, write from the point of view of a gender or ethnicity not his own. Whether certain stories belong to certain people or groups of people, and are off-limits to all others. Whether a writer has the right to impose a structure of his or her choosing on the work, or if the work alone knows its true form. Whether a writer can or should write about places and times and people outside his or her own experience and knowledge. Whether a writer owes it to him- or herself to try to write “quality” fiction, or can “settle” or “sell out” by writing genre or popular stories.

I have no problem with debating thorny issues. Love it. What’s begun to disturb me, though, is the underlying tone I sense in many of these discussions – a need to establish an authoritative consensus, as if we can determine, once and for all, The Rules that we all have to abide by. And more than that, I’m disturbed by encounters with writers who are subtly apologetic about what they write even as they defend it, or who are half-consciously looking for someone to tell them if it’s okay to write mysteries or romance, to outline or not outline, to question the status quo or to “merely” entertain.

I have one thing to say to all writers everywhere, from the professional to the most beginning wannabe: You can write about anything you want to write about. Really. Truly. Without apology. And you can approach it in any way that you see fit.

That may seem obvious. But I’m constantly surprised and dismayed by how many places I find messages telling writers that they can’t do that. As if the Writing Police are lurking around every corner, waiting to arrest you if you Do It Wrong.

What’s up with that?

Here are just a few examples that I’ve encountered recently:

- A well-known writing teacher (not the only one, by the way, just the latest) who praised a writer extravagantly for saying that his poem “turned out to be about” whatever it turned out to be about, and said that she cringes whenever a student states ahead of time what their work is, or will be, about.

I understand, I think, what she’s getting at. I’ve experienced those moments where you start out to write one thing, and it turns into something else – something truer and more powerful than what you started out to write. No teacher wants to see a beginning (or not-so-beginning) writer shut out those moments by being too focused on his initial impulse. But is it any better to convince a writer that the topic that’s been nagging at her, that she really needs and wants to write about, isn’t her “real” topic just because she knows it’s there?

- An MFA thesis defense in which the writer was discussing her journey to find the appropriate form and structure for her book, while her thesis committee was telling her it was better to “burst out of all structures,” and insisting that she shouldn’t have concentrated on structure at all. (Ironically, a section of the manuscript that her committee praised for being “unstructured and free-flowing” was one which the writer had carefully structured to achieve exactly that effect.)

- Heather Sellers, in the otherwise fabulous book Page After Page (one of my favorite books on living the writing life), who says “We all get to write about whatever the heck we want to write about,” and yet in the very next paragraph goes on to say:

I am always telling my students to write about their actual real topics, the things only they can tell us about...I tell Wendy to write about her family’s convenience store in St. Regis Falls, New York. I want Dana to stop writing about London (where she hasn’t actually ever been) and to write about her apple orchard, and her wild and terrible year as a nanny in Switzerland.

Note to Dana, whoever you are: Write about London. Write about it as much as you want. No one can stop you.

The sad thing is, far too many writers do let these messages stop them. I’ve known writers to question and abandon pieces and approaches that felt right to them, just because someone they see as a writing authority told them, essentially, that they’re not allowed to do what they’re doing. And writers are so, so vulnerable to all this. It’s really hard to get published, and many hopeful writers seem terrified to do something “wrong” – something that will offend the ogres guarding the gates to publication and ruin their chances forever.

Don’t misunderstand – I believe in studying craft and learning about what’s been done before (successfully and unsuccessfully). I believe in understanding what you gain or lose by adhering to or ignoring conventions, traditions, and market trends. There is such a thing as bad writing – and writing well takes work and practice. It’s important to have trusted readers and teachers to critique our writing and help us improve. What I have a problem with is giving other people – however well-intentioned – the power to allow or disallow our topics and processes.

So fly, little writers. Be free. Sneak away to your writing rooms with your computers or your fountain pens or your lead pencils. You’re alone there; it’s just the two of you. Have (ohmigod, really?) fun. Write a poem about London, a story about traveling to Mars, a bastardization of somebody’s mythology. Thumb your nose at Those Who Know. Write from the point of view of an evil dictator or a Hottentot or a pet rock.

Just write.