Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This isn't about a sudden inspiration or that it just dawned upon me. In fact I've been thinking about it for many months, about as long as I've been thinking about taking a serious shot at professionally writing fiction. I've been long interested in writing, for years now, thinking that beginning a writing career after retirement from my "day job" would be a good means to occupy my time, amuse myself, and satisfy my thirst and need of having a creative outlet. I'm a creative person, and it garfs up my mind when I have no outlet for pent up creativity. It must come out and my only choice is to use the creative energy in a constructive or destructive manner.
As I have said in other posts I have been enjoying reading books for a long time—since the 4th grade actually—but it has been in only the last decade or so that my interest has been piqued enough to seriously consider focusing my creative energy on writing. During the last decade I've been working out and analyzing plotting, character development, character and plot arcs, plot twists, intentionally misleading readers for dramatic purposes, even devices such as chopping a section out of the middle of a novel and using that as a prologue to start that novel off with a bang! This is a particularly effective device if your first chapter starts out slow. There can be no doubt that any novel that starts out slowly invites the readers to put it down and move on to the next novel.
In recent months I have been increasingly focusing on lower levels of the work product—the sentences, paragraphs, writing style, narrative and dialogue presentation styles. And I have come up with an interesting observation!
Authors do not follow the rules! Of all the great novels I've been reading, all of them are filled with intentional grammatical "mistakes" which are not mistakes at all since it has been abundantly clear to me that they weren't mistakes, they were authorial style! As I pondered this revelation it occurred to me; what if all authors followed all the rules of grammar perfectly? I concluded that it would be a disaster! The books would be all the same, different only in plug-in plots with plug-in characters. Take a plot and give it a few twists, throw in some misleading clues, then grab a few pieces at random and shuffle them around: instant novel.
But you know that can't be good. Writers are individuals and as such there are almost as many writing styles as there are authors. Actually there are probably more writing styles than authors for the same reason there are probably more authors than writers: some writers employ the device of writing for different genres and using different noms de plume to focus readers of that author's various genres rather than confusing them by writing all their novels no matter what genres under a single name. But I digress; real authors do not follow the rules! I am certain they fully understand all the rules of grammar, they are violating the rules to inject their own style, in much the same manner as hand made food or hand made crafts differ from others in their categories, and it is the individuality that adds to the character of the works.
Do I mean that writers should just throw grammar out the window? No, of course not! Every master writer must know the rules of grammar perfectly. The art of individualism as applied to writing style implies that the author is intentionally violating the rules in a calculated way in order to create their own unique writing style. As I read and compare my various favorite authors this has become abundantly clear to me. They would all provide examples as poor grammar use, but do not, because they are not poor use of grammar. They are intentionally creative abuses of grammar to create a specific and unique writing style.
This is why my favorite authors write differently! Each has chosen a style, a schema of intentional violations of grammar! And as abundantly successful authors it is clear that their creative misuse of grammar is working!
I have learned a writing lesson! Writing with perfect grammar is not good writing, or at least it is not good authoring. Write your short story or novel and make it grammatically perfect and you have probably doomed your project; it will have no texture, no individuality, no style. You must of course have a perfect (and I do mean perfect) understanding of grammar! Accidental authorial style does not happen, or at least I doubt it happens. Rather, I think it starts out with a person who wants to write, and then is influenced by their personality, life views, their personal experiences, other authors works they have been exposed to—and then they (probably intuitively) put all of that together to form their own individual writing style.
So if you accept my premise that authorial license implies intentional misuse of our language, of our grammar, then you'll accept my conclusion that good authoring does not equate to the use of perfect grammar, but rather, authorial style depends on a systematic, intentional misuse of grammar, what I call authorial style. And I think that is a good thing to understand!
Yah. Mrs. SW reads lots of mysteries, & recently discovered a British author, a woman, that she likes. She read the one, it was great. She found a collection of the writer's earlier work, now catching on & reprinted. The book was full of typos of various sorts.
We discussed it, & I thought that if the author's suddenly on fire in the market, someone bought the reprint rights & rushed the thing into print. We took it up with the Collections person @ our local library, who looked up a couple of reviews, which noted the same problem. One reviewer said that some cheap print house bought the rights - but not the tape or CPU file (this is a recent print) for the books - & so, to save money, they bought a physical copy of the books, hired some kid, & had him/her run each page through an OCR scanner - & apparently didn't bother to run the Spellchecker/Syntax checker, nor have a living, breathing, literate person check the output.
Rush the vomit to market, & voilà : if you can outrun its reputation, you can make sales - for a while. The reviewer was @ pains to point out that the author is an excellent writer - but that the printing house should die the death of a thousand paper cuts. & so it goes ...
The concept is analogous to determining fine art. There are a few primitive painters like Grandma Moses. She got away with painting in her own idiosyncratic manner. With those artists, the consistency of their output comes from within - they paint as they perceive. We get insights into the workings of their minds from their art. With the fine artists, such as Picasso or Kandinski, they absolutely know the standard rules, have produced notable works that follow those rules, but then have gone beyond them, exploring new space. (Personally, I find Kandinski brilliant in his art and his development of an entire value system to support it.) In contrast, the beginner or hack artist has no consistency, no knowledge to inform the art, and no vision or insight to convey. They might have an occasional decent looking painting, but because of the lacks in understory there is little value.
SW, yes that can be a problem. I myself have a cache of ebooks of dubious origin which were obviously full of consistent scan faults. They were very obviously scanned from the printed works and posted on the usual copyright violating file sharing sites. But what to do now? Throw the collection away? An ethical dillema for Lovehound, particularly since one of my own works was reprinted in an anthology even after the publisher requested permission and I wrote back I would give permission for free use but only if they promised to send me a single copy of the hardcover result. They simply ignored me, included my work and that was the end of it. They realized it would be too expensive for me to sue them than any money I would recover in court.
I like that! "Die a death of a thousand paper cuts!" Very poetic!
Harry, thank you very much for validating my premise! And as I said, I am referring to intentional violation of the rules of grammer. Accidental violations don't count, even if successful. Or perhaps there is a subliminal but consistent means of achieving what I describe—I don't know—but you can't base success on accidents.
By the way, the works I based my essay upon have all been recent releases (last 10 years up to mere weeks ago) either purchased from Amazon or delivered by Amazon via library rentals through Overdrive Media Console. None of the violations I refer to were accidental. All were systematic violations and very obviously intentional! All the authors were NYT best sellers.
footnote: The pivotal works crucial to my formation of intentional, systematic violation of the rules of grammar as an almost necessary part of authorial success were formed as I was reading the works of J. R. Ward and her Black Dagger Brotherhood very successful urban romantic fantasy series. Nobody could seriously doubt her literary credentials.
I wish I could but the books are returned, and I haven't noticed any big departures in the present novel I'm reading. I'll keep an eye out for such literary license and post some examples in the future. I'm sure I'll find them, and in fact I might go back for a second read of one of J. R. Ward's novels since she is such a good example for me and my writing, and obviously I thought enough of this topic to write the essay.
I intend to give a shot at publishing a novel and I never takes my pursuits in anything but all seriousness. I will succeed, or at worst will spend 3-4 months giving it my best effort. (No, not 8 hours a day!)
And yes, of course, dialog demands grammatical violations because real people don't speak proper English, and anyway a cast of characters with identical speaking styles would be boring. I doubt a book like that would be likely to be published.
I'm serious about writing and serious about this topic, and I will be back with examples.
OP, can you give some actual EXAMPLES of when a published author ignored the rules, but it was done well?
I don't think I've seen it done intentionally except with dialogue (and of course with dialogue it makes a lot of sense).
I have one, which I've mentioned on another thread before, after which Lovehound imperiously informed me that I was off-topic.
So, I'll say it again. It's the use of the pronoun "he" in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. She uses "he" to mean Thomas Cromwell, but without ever first using "Thomas" or "Cromwell" to identify that this is whom to she refers.
The reader must pick up that "he" without a prior identifier always refers to Thomas Cromwell.
The rules of grammar are like tubes of paint are to a painter. Any painting has to follow some visual rules, but a good painter who knows those rules can use them in completely distinctive ways. The painting looks radically fresh, but the rules still applied.
So it is with writing. A writer can use perfect grammar and still write a very compelling radical book. A good example is Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" which is extremely correct in its grammar. Nabokov used some slang very intentionally, and in other works, was intentionally freer with his grammatical mistakes, but those mistakes were intentional.
And in "Lolita", his very prim and proper grammar only amplified his protagonist. That was intentional, too, or Humbert Humbert would not have been such a vivid villain.
I think the main thing when writing creatively is to stay true to your own writer's voice. If the narrative is strong, no matter how bad the grammar is, the story will work.
But it is sure better to know the rules and how to apply them than breaking them without understanding them in the first place. Like the tubes of paint, some colors will always be used much more often than others, because they're the essential ones, and grammar is just the same. Some rules simply can't be broken and result in good writing because they are essential.
Banjomike, I think that was the OP's point -- that the authors he admires clearly KNOW the rules of grammar, but feel free to break them.
Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to tell since he gave no examples -- just wrote a very long OP about how great it is that so many authors break the rules of grammar. He ended with this: "authorial style depends on a systematic, intentional misuse of grammar" -- but of course, "authorial style" ( at that rather pompous phrasing) does NOT always depend on a systematic, intentional misuse of grammar. A lot of published writers write beautifully WHILE using correct grammar.
I get the OP's point, as I have myself intentionally "broken" rules -- but it was clear from my writing that I KNEW the rules, I was just ignoring them to make a point. So I definitely appreciate it when authors do that, especially authors who clearly KNOW the rules.
HOWEVER, my problem with all of this is that so many self-published writers (e.g., who publish on amazon's platform) are SO easy to spot because their writing is, well, terrible. It's not that they are breaking rules to make a point -- it's that they don't seem to KNOW the rules to begin with.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801
I have one, which I've mentioned on another thread before, after which Lovehound imperiously informed me that I was off-topic.
So, I'll say it again. It's the use of the pronoun "he" in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. She uses "he" to mean Thomas Cromwell, but without ever first using "Thomas" or "Cromwell" to identify that this is whom to she refers.
The reader must pick up that "he" without a prior identifier always refers to Thomas Cromwell.
Thanks for the example, Mightyqueen. I also read the blog post. Honestly, I suspect that I would get frustrated with the Mantel's writing style pretty quickly; I think clarity (e.g. in knowing to whom "he" refers) is a GOOD thing.
I wish I could but the books are returned, and I haven't noticed any big departures in the present novel I'm reading. I'll keep an eye out for such literary license and post some examples in the future. I'm sure I'll find them, and in fact I might go back for a second read of one of J. R. Ward's novels since she is such a good example for me and my writing, and obviously I thought enough of this topic to write the essay.
...
I'm serious about writing and serious about this topic, and I will be back with examples.
Yah, easily the most famous would be James Joyce - Ulysses, Dubliners, Portrait of the artist as a young man, Finnegans wake. e e cummings comes to mind in poetry. & then there's a whole raft of Theater of the Absurd playwrights - Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Stoppard, Albee ...
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Caveat emptor
