JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #37
January 21, 2021
This week I want to talk about grammar advice such as the kind I gave in the previous two Ruminations. Much grammar advice for writers is just plain wrong, and to some degree, anyone reading my previous treatises on verbal aspect and how best to represent action in prose should hold on to their doubts. Even if I’ve made a strong case in those essays to support what I insisted was the better grammatical construction, the truth is that you can write your prose any way you want as long as it works. Use the passive, dangle those participles, split all the infinitives, write every verb with a continuous aspect, rely entirely upon the "would"-habitual--as long as you achieve what you want with the prose.
The point is not to write according to some extrinsic standard provided by a style guide or my rambling musings, but to create a reading experience that is captivating and emotional. No grammatical construction is more captivating than another, none more emotional. I used to tell my students that the only reason to revise a sentence is if you’re trying to fix a specific problem. There are hundreds or thousands or infinite ways to phrase a fictional depiction, and the only reason to choose one over another is because one achieves your intended effect upon the reader better than another. The key to writing, to selecting the grammatical constructions that comprise your prose, is to know what the prose must achieve in that moment of the story.
In addition, the only way to know what each sentence needs to achieve is to have a guiding principle for your writing. In fiction, I often borrow John Gardner’s mandate that the prose should create a "vivid and continuous dream" in the reader when they read. This dictum will guide your grammatical choices. Likewise, insisting that fiction concentrate on dramatization rather than summary, on the specific rather than the general, on individualized character rather than representative stand-in, will each offer their own nudging guidance for the forms of our sentences. These guiding principles offer the reasons we have for revising our sentences, for selecting one formulation rather than another.
I hope that in my previous Ruminations I’ve offered a convincing argument for why we might prefer the simple past over the continuous in certain cases, or the perfective rather than the habitual in others, but that doesn’t make it correct or right. We have to ask of our prose the right questions to discover how it might be written to achieve our intentions. So, when we ask ourselves how to rewrite a sentence, it’s important to remember that there are no correct answers in writing, only the right questions.