Breaking the grammar rules of writing. How far is too far?

[Crono91]

We all know people who write novels break a number of rules. One, because novels should read almost the same way as we talk. For instance:

I want to go home. But I want to stay here

Obviously, that should be one sentence, and the second sentence isn't a full sentence. But it looks, and reads better.

So my question--what are some rules writers should NEVER break, and what are some common rules writers break?

[shadowwalker]

I don't know that I agree it either looks better or reads better. And I'm not sure where this idea that "novels should read almost the same way as we talk" came from. Seriously, I have never heard that before - and I definitely disagree with the "should".

Narrative should be grammatically correct. Dialogue (or narrative if in first person) should reflect the speech patterns of the speaker. And note, I say 'reflect' and not 'duplicate'. Grammar rules allow people to read and understand what the writer is saying, without having to decipher it.

[mammamaia]

yup!... all of that...

[TerryRodgers]

You can only go so far with the way people talk. I read a novel once, can't remember which one because it was that bad, where the writer took the way people talk too seriously. The slang was constant throughout the entire novel and made it hard for me to really enjoy the story. While we can use words like, "ummm" and "gotta" sometimes, we can't get go far overboard that the novel takes on an ebonics feel.

I believe the great novels of today hold true to form with clean grammar except for where the author knowing deviated to get his or her point across.

[James A. Ritchie]

We all know people who write novels break a number of rules. One, because novels should read almost the same way as we talk. For instance:

I want to go home. But I want to stay here

Obviously, that should be one sentence, and the second sentence isn't a full sentence. But it looks, and reads better.

So my question--what are some rules writers should NEVER break, and what are some common rules writers break?

I don't think it looks better, or reads better. And how do you know people talk this way? We don't use punctuation when we speak, so it's usually very difficult to know whether someone says this as one sentence or two. Those two sentences call for a comma or a dash, depending on how long you want the pause to be. Or, while technically incorrect, even an ellipsis works better than a period. I don't know if this will make sense, but when a person says those two sentences, they say them the way you punctuate them. Sometimes you can trust your ear, and sometime syou can't.

It's like thinking people say "should of" when they really say "should've". Those with poor ears start writing "should of" because they think that's what they heard.

Writers break almost every rule there is, but good writers always do so for just cause. I think the first rule is never break a rule accidentally. You have to actually know a rule before you're allowed to break it. The second rules is that you can only break a rule if you have a good reason. If you do know the rule inside and out, and if you have a very good reason for breaking it, then no rule is inviolate, but not knowing a rule is never a good reason for braking it.

Having said this, yes, novels should be written just as if someone is speaking them. But who? Probably not the average person on the street, but, yes, as if a real person is speaking every word. A big mistake new writers make is trying to sound "writerly", trying to put down words no human ever said, or ever will say, because they think it sounds better. It doesn't. The moment an editor thinks, "No one actually speaks this way", or, "This character would never speak this way", or "This narrator would never speak this way", the story is dead.

In dialogue, the only concession to real speech should be removing a bit of the garbage. Not all of it, not even most of it, but enough to make it read well on the page. And often none of it because not everyone speaks the same, and not everyone fills their speech with garbage. This is a complete myth.

This is the thing. Just because a novel should be written the way people really speak, both in dialogue and in narrative, doesn't mean you can write a novel the way you really speak, or the way the mechanic down the street really speaks. But it should be put down the way the narrator you choose to tell the tale would really speak, were he alive and you met him walking down the street.

It's tricky, but even in third person limited, the narrative should not be far removed from the dialogue of the central character. A novel with narrative that sounds like an Oxford professor, but that has Joe Blow mechanic as the central character, probably isn't going to read well at all. Unless, of course, it's a first person novel, one the Oxford professor is telling about Joe Blow. Think Sherlock Holmes here. The stories are about Holmes, but they're told by Doctor Watson, and sound just like him.

Anyway, I can write a novel that sounds exactly like I talk, and I have. But more often than not, I write novels that sound exactly like the way my characters talk. This works very well, too.

Now, in a third person novel, grammar usually should be grammatically correct, but many don't know grammar well enough to know what is and isn't a violation. They confuse rules of formal writing with rules of grammar, and doing so makes for poor, and usually boring, narrative. There is, for instance, no rule of grammar that says you can't use slang. Nor does any rule of grammar say you can't use contractions in narrative. There is no rule of grammar that says you can't split an infinitive, regardless of what your English teacher told you. The split infinitive rule comes from Latin, and makes no sense at all in English. And as Winston Churchill, a wonderful writer, supposedly said about ending a sentence with a preposition, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

Worse, too many think grammatically correct automatically means a sentence reads just fine. This isn't true. Some of the worst sentences ever written have perfect grammar, and some of the best sentences ever written break a number of grammar rules.

Really, I think the Golden Rule of writing, the First Commandment of writing, is Thou Shalt Not Bore the Reader.

After this, however, it's all about how good your ears are. Rules matter, and a writer should know them all, but a writer who follows them all is probably going to remain unpublished. You do have to write the way real people talk, but you have to realize not all people talk the same way, and so you have to choose your narrator carefully. But anyone who has read Huckleberry Finn knows better than to say you have to use perfect grammar anywhere. And anyone who has read many hard boiled mysteries written in third person knows the narrative does not follow the same rules of sound or grammar that you find in a Hemingway novel.

Anyway, learn the rules, all of them. But do not blindly follow any of them. You ear is what writes a good novel, and your imagination is what gives you a great tale to write about.

[janemaldives]

I recently read an article on this very subject and the upshot was that only deviate from grammatical rules if there is a very good reason for it. Characters should be able to reveal themselves by the way the present to the world of the novel - by what they mean to say, and by what they do. I'm really not certain that at our stage we should we mucking around with characters' speech patterns. And it is (I just broke a rule but on purpose!) much harder to read dialogue that is written in some sort of quirky accent. Having said that, Agatha Christie occasionally let Hercule Poirot speak in his quaint way but that added to his characterisation. Ms Christie could afford such deviations because it was part of HP's way of getting information - plus she was/is a highly successful murder mystery writer. I find I 'naturally' break rules (as in starting a sentence with 'and') when writing in the first person, eg, The nurse said that when I arrived, I behaved badly. And she told the others when they came in. That was not right. To me (rightly or wrongly) this is how people "self-talk" - imperfectly. You could just indicate, eg, Tom had a Belfast accent which was musical - even comforting.

[updog]

It's like thinking people say "should of" when they really say "should've". Those with poor ears start writing "should of" because they think that's what they heard.

My sister , a former Midwesterner with a strong Czech dialect, gives riding lessons on the west coast. One day, a woman from Oregon was struggling with her horse, and my sister said, "Turn her." The lady ignored the command, even though my sister repeatedly told the woman to turn her horse. Eventually the poor woman, near tears by then, shouted, "I don't know what you mean by turner!"