A few writing “rules” that could / should be broken – occasionally

 

Show don’t tell

Yes of course, we all know that one. It’s a lovely tool for editors, creative writing teachers and for critique group members.  ‘Show don’t tell.-  you’re  telling us and you could be showing  us.’   Except that sometimes you need to tell otherwise you’re stating the obvious.  Showing absolutely all the time really slows your pace. The advanced skill is knowing when it is acceptable to tell rather than show. And don’t forget: story tellers tell all the time.

 

Write what you know

OK. So, what about fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction?  So, modify that one: write what you know in order to find out what you don’t know. Write about how the human will feel and act in a world where magic is the norm, in a futuristic world that has done away with money and in a world where there is no water on tap.  

 

Young adult novels are always fast-paced

Except they’re not all of the time and in fact they include several narrative elements that slow the pace right down:

• a lot of “show don’t tell” because you’re writing for a reader who has less experience of life
• a lot of emotional closeness as this reader often reasons with their emotions  rather than the area of the brain that houses common sense
• a lot of interior monologue
• The narrative voice anyway is often first person where the narrator is talking to a trusted friend and they haven’t really figured out what’s going on yet.

You lift the pace again by creating very high stakes, plenty of tension, cliff-hangers and some action scenes with very short sentences.

 Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Always write in full sentences and with correct grammar

I’m quite a stickler for this in fact when I mark, edit or critique work. If work is tightly written it is easier to sell to multiple markets.  You should only break these “rules” if doing so will render your work more effective than the correctly written text.  And that is the point. You need to appreciate the norms so that you can measure whether your bending of the rules is effective or not. In particular you need to work out when to ignore “Fragment, consider revising”.

 

Stay with one point of view

Well Dickens didn’t. Neither did many of his contemporaries and those that wrote novels before him. However, we’ve grown to dislike head-hopping and we favour a first person or close third person point of view.

It is in fact more comfortable for your reader if you only change point of view for whole chapters and most modern readers still prefer the close point of view even when that changes.

Take care also of zooming in and out too quickly.  Modern texts work better if you keep the distance between the protagonist and the reader the same throughout.

However, the omniscient author is currently making a bit of a comeback and one or two writers are zooming successfully.  Again, though, you have to know what you’re doing to do this successfully.

Don’t use too many adjectives and adverbs

But use a few and be discerning. Consider the difference between “walking quickly” “hurrying” and walking briskly”. Can you find something better than “big”, “small” and “quiet”?

 

Avoid the imperfect

No, don’t. “She sat” is NOT the same as “She was sitting” and certainly very different form “She used to sit” / “She would sit” – other versions of the imperfect.  The imperfect exists in every language for a reason. Why waste the richness of our language?

 

Avoid the pluperfect

Again, don’t.  It refers to one stage further back in the past and is useful in pinpointing when action took place. I admit, I tend to have one or two and then go to a perfect of imperfect. E.g.

“He had finished dinner and had cleared the table. He was now stacking the dishes in the dish washer. The television was already on.”

 

So there you have it.  A few justified broken rules. Would you care to suggest some others?  

The Imperfect Tense

I know my grammar. I was a language teacher for over twenty years and I learnt my first two languages via the "grammar grind" method.  Plus I did Latin in the first year of Grammar School.  Latin grammar is pretty comprehensive. I also argue fiercely that acquiring knowledge of the grammar of the language is a short cut to mastery of that language. Grammar is the backbone. It allows you to know who is doing what to whom, when and how.

I'm with Naom Chomsky on there being a universal grammar. There are certain things we need to say in whichever language we're using and every language will have a way of doing that.    

I'd like today to explore the imperfect tense. It seems to have gone out of fashion a little in English and is mistaken often for passive language. I argue there's still a difference between the imperfect, the past and the preterite though different languages allow an overlap of these three.

The name says it all. We are talking about an unfinished or an imperfect action. There are two main uses for it. It can be used for a continuous action or a repeated action.

 

Continous action

We often see it as "was …. ing" in English:

He was sitting in the lounge, reading a book.

They were playing badminton outside.

It was raining heavily.

This is the one that is frequently mistaken for passive language. Actually, though, there is a world of difference between "It was raining heavily" and "It rained heavily." The latter is a completed action. The former isn't.

 

Interrupted action

"Was … ing" comes into its own for interrupted actions.

He was eating his supper when the phone rang.

She was loading the car when a cyclist stopped and asked for directions.

He was just about to put the kettle on when lights went out.

 

Repeated action in the past

We cheat here a little in English and don't use a verb form as such except "was" and "were".

e.g.:

He was a very rich man.

They were poor.

I was happy then.

Otherwise we often use "used to" or "would" e.g.:

He used to cycle to school every day.

She used to live in a hovel.

They would put the milk bottles out every night.

Sometime we use the normal preterite with extra words to indicate that the action is repeated:

He took her to school every day.

In the summer he took two weeks off work.

Every time they crossed the road he took hold of her hand.

 

A couple of quirks in other language

French has a special form of the preterite it only uses in literature – the past historic. In conversation it uses the simple past – i.e. "I have seen" etc.

In German the preterite and the imperfect are the same.

Why we should care

The imperfect offers a nuance of meaning. We lose out if we dismiss this as "passive" language.       

   

 

For the love of grammar

The Grammar School

Yes, I went to a grammar school. It raised my expectations considerably and now I realise what an incredibly apt name it had. We had six lessons of English a week in our first year. There were two lessons on English literature, one on composition and three on grammar. In addition we learnt Latin and French through the Grammar Grind method. We thoroughly deconstructed language.

Grammar as a tool

The analysis is interesting and understanding how language works is very useful. I recognise a run-on sentence when I see one, though it is difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t have the terminology.

I also really understand what my computer means when it says “fragment – consider revising”. It’s telling me I’ve produced a piece of writing that does not contain a finite verb.

What’s a finite verb? A verb that has a defined tense, voice, person and mood. Pardon? A verb that is working, if you prefer.

What grammar does

Grammar is the backbone of the language. It shows who is doing what to whom. Without grammar what does this string of words mean: broken chair window caretaker mend. There are several possibilities. Grammar sorts it out.

No hard and fast rules

Surprisingly there are not except in those languages where there is some sort of authority looking after it. How grammar works differs from language to language. In the end it is about clarity. Interestingly, English is allowed to be fluid and evolve. It has no authority insisting on certain qualities. The OED advises us about words and Fowler about how we string them together.  Both, however, bow to usage.

Many people still frown on split infinitives but we now tend to boldly split them. And many frown upon sentences starting with “and” or “but” yet sometimes it can be quite effective. We were always admonished for using “different to” – it should be different from – but this is being more widely accepted now. 

The misunderstood imperfect tense

This is what prompted me to write this article. We are beginning to lose the sense of difference between “He was sitting.” and “He sat.” The former is imperfect, the latter preterit (though often used in an imperfect sense). He was sitting when the next action came along. He sat there may be over a protracted amount of time but the action is over and done with. “He used to sit” or “he would sit” imply a habit, all three conveyed in many other languages by what we call the imperfect tense. The action is not yet over. It is “imperfect”.

Knowing when to break the rules

This depends a little on knowing what the rules are in the first place. Then it’s important to ask the question “Is my change really effective?” It often has less impact than you might think. A copy-editor will pick this up. If they’ve used “track changes” to edit it may be worth hiding those changes and only putting them back on when you think any passage has lost its impact and even then consider whether  you can still keep the impact but keep to the rules and just rephrase.       

If we all understand what the writer means, what does it matter, we might ask.

Well, firstly, American publishers expect correct grammar. We all want our work published both sides of the Atlantic, don’t we?   

Secondly, grammar brings clarity and we want our texts to be as clear as possible. As English is a widespread first language, though its usage differs considerably form continent to continent, and the first foreign language for many people, we need as much clarity as possible.

Worth getting to know grammar, then?    

Proofs

Proofs for two of my novels came yesterday. I’ve already started reading them. It’s amazing that at this stage one still finds mistakes – of the copy editing variety. Have the gremlins got into the computer programmes and reverted the text to what it was before the copy edit began? Or am I having an argument with the copy editor?

It’s all about “dad”. I maintain that when it’s used as a name for a particular person it should be “Dad” e.g. “Come on get a move on,” said Dad, or “Eh, Dad, can I watch TV now?” However, when it’s generic, even if you are referring to a specific person’s dad, it should be “dad”. E.g. “All the mums and dads were waiting outside the school gates. Robbie’s dad had a battered old car.” But my text seemed peppered with idiosyncratic mixed examples of these. And I’d swear the copy editor and I had corrected them all before.

That aside, it’s exciting and scary at the same time getting final proofs. You get a sense of how the book is going to look. The text in this format seems slightly strange to you – you have seen it so often before in Word, on screen or hardy copy, but anyway double-spaced and ragged right. Now it’s single or 1.5 spaced and justified right. The pages are smaller. In addition, it’s a while since you saw it. You’ve forgotten things and you’ve actually probably moved on as a writer.

I’m reading Kiters at the moment, a fantasy for 9-11 and possibly the most literary novel I’ve written to date. That infernal inner critic was mumbling something about “Beautifully written, but will 9-11 year olds really appreciate it. Isn’t the main character a bit too old to be interested in kites?” The answer: “But the teachers will probably appreciate it. And the children who like to read about people Robbie’s age probably do still like kites.”

It is a material fact – especially in my case – that writers do move on and change. And often what we’ve written before makes us cringe.