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FlickrWell-Tempered versus Well-Made
or: Tyler States the Obvious
I have a curious relationship with grammar.
On the one hand, grammar is part of the package of rules and skills by which I currently pay the rent on my apartment. If there weren't rules I'd have a much harder time in this line of work. (Whether or not that's a bad thing is an entirely different topic.)
On the other hand, in my own writing...I sometimes have trouble staying within the lines. Sometimes nouns want to be adjectives; sometimes sentences need to end halfway through. Sometimes I will sense that in a list of items, they need to go in a certain sequence that has nothing to do with any logical way of ordering it. Recently someone told me a section of Not Providence looked wrong, and I fixed it by shifting one sentence up a paragraph, against all laws of grammar or the order in which things would have happened in the world of the book.
This is not to say I hate grammar. I love grammar. I need grammar. Not only does it pay my bills, but sometimes bad use of punctuation marks is precisely what's wrong with a crippled and ugly sentence. And it happens quite often the rules of grammar are all at the separates me from flogging your eyeballs to death with a legion of semicolons and commas.
But sometimes literature feels like poetry, regardless of how many zombies or over-angled horrors are in it. Sometimes Kerouac is right. Forget the well-tempered sentence; I'll settle for one that's well-made.
I have a curious relationship with grammar.
On the one hand, grammar is part of the package of rules and skills by which I currently pay the rent on my apartment. If there weren't rules I'd have a much harder time in this line of work. (Whether or not that's a bad thing is an entirely different topic.)
On the other hand, in my own writing...I sometimes have trouble staying within the lines. Sometimes nouns want to be adjectives; sometimes sentences need to end halfway through. Sometimes I will sense that in a list of items, they need to go in a certain sequence that has nothing to do with any logical way of ordering it. Recently someone told me a section of Not Providence looked wrong, and I fixed it by shifting one sentence up a paragraph, against all laws of grammar or the order in which things would have happened in the world of the book.
This is not to say I hate grammar. I love grammar. I need grammar. Not only does it pay my bills, but sometimes bad use of punctuation marks is precisely what's wrong with a crippled and ugly sentence. And it happens quite often the rules of grammar are all at the separates me from flogging your eyeballs to death with a legion of semicolons and commas.
But sometimes literature feels like poetry, regardless of how many zombies or over-angled horrors are in it. Sometimes Kerouac is right. Forget the well-tempered sentence; I'll settle for one that's well-made.
Labels: writing process
posted by Tyler at
10:21 AM
3 Comments:
Interesting post. I know there are plenty of times where I'll use "poor" grammar in favor of style. For instance, I'll use fragments because, at times, I feel that a full stop works better than a comma's pause. E.g.:
"You may think I'm crazy, but I'm not." The 'right' way.
"You may think I'm crazy. But I'm not." My 'preferred' way (sometimes).
Alex: I use fragments in a similar way: commas are a short pause, just a breath, periods are for longer pauses. Useful for tension and repetition in descriptive sections, and for heavy emphasis or very staccato speech patterns in dialog. "Have, a good, time" sounds very different than "Have. A good. Time."
Please do. Go with the well-made, I mean. You have been and, having read a considerable amount of your writing, I would heartily agree with the choices you've been making in the last couple of years with regard to punctuation and periodic pauses/stops. Interest-stoking in the extreme for the reader.
I would also (smilingly) point out the oddity of language in the fourth paragraph of this post. "Are all at the separates me..." Interesting how we all knew exactly what you were intending to write and, at least in my case, didn't even notice the oddity until the second read.
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