Grammarly

[Bramblethorn]

Let me ask it this way: what, specifically, is different? As I pointed out in my post, the basics of grammar and usage are the same for all written English. One wouldn't want to follow a manual for college essays slavishly to write fiction, obviously, but the basics are the same -- essential punctuation, knowing verb tenses, noun-pronoun agreement, etc.

Here's a passage from Charles Dickens that illustrates a couple of differences:

If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. The very air of the best parlour, when I went in at the door, the bright condition of the fire, the shining of the wine in the decanters, the patterns of the glasses and plates, the faint sweet smell of cake, the odour of Miss Murdstone’s dress, and our black clothes. Mr. Chillip is in the room, and comes to speak to me.

The second "sentence" there isn't actually a complete sentence, just a fragment. Fragments are frowned upon in non-fiction, but commonplace in fiction.

In the last sentence, Dickens transitions to the historical present tense: that is, even though he's describing past events, he uses present-tense verbs like "is" and "comes" to describe the action. Historical present is acceptable in some cases for non-fiction, but it has much wider scope in fiction. You wouldn't read a newspaper using present-tense verbs to describe an event that has already occurred.

 

[SimonDoom]

Here's a passage from Charles Dickens that illustrates a couple of differences:



The second "sentence" there isn't actually a complete sentence, just a fragment. Fragments are frowned upon in non-fiction, but commonplace in fiction.

In the last sentence, Dickens transitions to the historical present tense: that is, even though he's describing past events, he uses present-tense verbs like "is" and "comes" to describe the action. Historical present is acceptable in some cases for non-fiction, but it has much wider scope in fiction. You wouldn't read a newspaper using present-tense verbs to describe an event that has already occurred.

Those are two good examples, especially the mixing of tenses. That's a tricky thing to do effectively. Dickens can pull it off because he has an extraordinary feel for the language. If I recall he starts Bleak House with some sentence fragments as well.

I'm trying to think of more instances where the "rules" (I use the word advisedly) for fiction depart from those for nonfiction. I'm having a harder time thinking of instances than I thought I would.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Those are two good examples, especially the mixing of tenses. That's a tricky thing to do effectively. Dickens can pull it off because he has an extraordinary feel for the language. If I recall he starts Bleak House with some sentence fragments as well.

I'm trying to think of more instances where the "rules" (I use the word advisedly) for fiction depart from those for nonfiction. I'm having a harder time thinking of instances than I thought I would.

Yeah, I also found it harder than I expected. But But now that I've had time to think some more, here's a passage from Nick Cave's "And The Ass Saw The Angel" that breaks non-fiction rules of spelling and grammar:

'And I know why our friendship must be kept a secret. Or they will kill You like they killed You in the Bible. And then we could not be together. If not for them we would live in this valley together. As best friends. But we must be careful, Jesus. I think I would die if anything happened to You...' - she cried ah think, for ah could hear her little sobs as she spoke - '...just close my eyes and die.' And she let fall a heavy tear, and it passed through the slats and exploded upon mah face, just below the right cheek. And as the droplet began to roll, ah caught it with mah tongue. And ah was shocked momentarily by that tear's sweetness, having known them only as bitter things - only bitter things - always bitter things.

In that story Cave's narrator is a seriously disturbed boy named Euchrid. (In that passage, he's been mistaken for Jesus.) Even outside the quotes, his narration uses what Cave describes as "a kind of hyper-poetic thought-speak not meant to be spoken, a mongrel language that was part Biblical, part Deep South dialect, part gutter slang, at times obscenely reverent and at others reverently obscene."

Cave uses non-standard spelling and grammar to put the reader into the head of his narrator: "mah" and "ah", three sentences in a row beginning with "And". It doesn't entirely work for me, perhaps because I know Cave first and foremost as an Australian singer, so when he writes "mah" I think "Australian mimicking a Deep South accent". But it's more permissible in fiction than it would be in non-fiction.

Interesting to compare it to Iain M. Banks' "The Wasp Factory". Both stories are told from the perspective of a homicidally disturbed child in a rural backwater. Banks goes the other way with his protagonist's language; Frank is articulate and well-spoken, which makes passages like this even more disturbing:

"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through."

But Banks does break the rules occasionally, to remind us that Frank is still quite childish in certain ways:

Poor Eric came home to visit his family, only to find (Zap!Pow!Dams burst!Bombs go off!Wasps fry:ttssss!) that things had changed considerably.

I've made some edits to that quote to avoid spoiling a major plot twist, but the parenthesised bit is unchanged. Again, not something you'd see in non-fiction!

Self-quoting now:

"I don't want to hurt you, but I've done something stupid."

"If you're not interested in me, please say so." Please don't.

"You, um. When I met you, I had a boyfriend." Uh-oh. "We'd been together three years. I broke up with Luke on New Year's Eve."

There, I've used italics to denote the narrator's thoughts. By my understanding, CMoS advises that thoughts should be punctuated as quoted speech. If I was to follow that rule, I'd have to do something like this:

"I don't want to hurt you, but I've done something stupid."

"If you're not interested in me, please say so." But I was thinking, "Please don't".

"You, um. When I met you, I had a boyfriend."

"Uh-oh," I thought.

"We'd been together three years. I broke up with Luke on New Year's Eve."

To my mind, the second version feels much clumsier. It takes more work to disambiguate the speakers in what's now a three-way dialogue, and it changes the rhythm. So I ignored the CMoS rule on this occasion, and I think the story's better for it, because CMoS wasn't written with that kind of scene in mind.

 

[ElectricBlue]

There, I've used italics to denote the narrator's thoughts. By my understanding, CMoS advises that thoughts should be punctuated as quoted… So I ignored the CMoS rule on this occasion, and I think the story's better for it, because CMoS wasn't written with that kind of scene in mind.

Agree this, quotations around the thoughts cause more confusion, I think. I've occasionally taken it one step further - I always write plain text, never use italics, so in a case like this, where there is a character's thought, I rely purely on context to make it clear it's a thought. It only works with an omniscient, and very close, narrator though - it can have the effect of pulling the reader right in, almost as if it momentarily becomes first person. It is has to be quite deliberately used, I find, so i reserve it for a scene where intensity is building - so well on the way to sex, usually

 

[sr71plt]

One thing that bugs me about Lit. readers is that those who have not gotten past the high school mind-set (and there are a lot of them) comment that stories need editing that don't need editing. They are good to go as commercial fiction grammar wise. They just don't cut it as high school themes grammar wise.

 

[SamScribble]

One thing that bugs me about Lit. readers is that those who have not gotten past the high school mind-set (and there are a lot of them) comment that stories need editing that don't need editing. They are good to go as commercial fiction grammar wise. They just don't cut it as high school themes grammar wise.

Pilot! Please! Grammar wise? You're better than that.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Ten years ago I argued here that grammar are unofficial conventions enforced by anal editors like L*****. My revelation made no friends here but are the thinking of real editors at real publishing places.

Unmarried school teachers invent grammar rules.

 

[sr71plt]

Ten years ago I argued here that grammar are unofficial conventions enforced by anal editors like L*****. My revelation made no friends here but are the thinking of real editors at real publishing places.

Unmarried school teachers invent grammar rules.

Having been a real editor at real publishing houses (what's a "publishing place"?), I give you the horse laugh. You wouldn't know the "real" anything in publishing if you fell over it stumbling out of your trailer.

"grammar are"?

 

[sr71plt]

Pilot! Please! Grammar wise? You're better than that.

No, I is not.

 

[SimonDoom]

To my mind, the second version feels much clumsier. It takes more work to disambiguate the speakers in what's now a three-way dialogue, and it changes the rhythm. So I ignored the CMoS rule on this occasion, and I think the story's better for it, because CMoS wasn't written with that kind of scene in mind.

You've come up with some good examples. Changing the spelling of words to mimic an accent is a tricky thing to do well; Twain did it brilliantly in Huckleberry Finn, but if it's done poorly the writing begins to take on a comical quality. I still go back and forth about the right way to handle interior thoughts and unspoken dialogue. Does anyone know of a good essay or usage manual that discusses effective ways to do this?

I can think of some other examples where fiction usage deviates from nonfiction usage:

1. Choosing not to use commas. Cormac McCarthy and William Faulker do this a lot -- joining phrases and clauses with multiple "ands" rather than commas. It gives the prose a different feel. An example from McCarthy: "They’d had their hair cut with sheepshears by an esquilador at the ranch and the backs of their necks above their collars were white as scars and they wore their hats cocked forward on their heads and they looked from side to side as they jogged along as if to challenge the countryside or anything it might hold.”

2. Creative use of words. Great creative writers invent new ways to use words. Cormac McCarthy, again, is an example of an author who does this, as with his nonstandard use of the word "footed" in this phrase in All the Pretty Horses: “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

You couldn't get away with this sort of thing in a nonfiction essay, but it works in fiction.

 

[sr71plt]

I still go back and forth about the right way to handle interior thoughts and unspoken dialogue. Does anyone know of a good essay or usage manual that discusses effective ways to do this?

If you are writing fiction in the U.S. publishing system, your authority is the Chicago Manual of Style (subject to your publisher's own style guidelines).

CMS 13.41 on Unspoken discourse/thoughts: "Thought, imagined dialogue, and other interior discourse may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context of the writer's preference."

The examples given show that the slugs ("she thought") indicate that it's thought.

Some publishers prefer what was once permitted but no longer is include by the CMS--using italics for unspoken discourse/thoughts. So, the CMS guidelines are double quotes around it (U.S. style is always double quotes at the first level, single as the next level) or just regular font, in either case making clear in the slug that it's interior discourse, unless you have a publisher giving other options.

 

[SimonDoom]

If you are writing fiction in the U.S. publishing system, your authority is the Chicago Manual of Style (subject to your publisher's own style guidelines).

CMS 13.41 on Unspoken discourse/thoughts: "Thought, imagined dialogue, and other interior discourse may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context of the writer's preference."

The examples given show that the slugs ("she thought") indicate that it's thought.

Some publishers prefer what was once permitted but no longer is include by the CMS--using italics for unspoken discourse/thoughts. So, the CMS guidelines are double quotes around it (U.S. style is always double quotes at the first level, single as the next level) or just regular font, in either case making clear in the slug that it's interior discourse, unless you have a publisher giving other options.

Thanks! This is good to know, in part because it's more or less what I do already. I prefer to avoid italics. My difficulty is deciding whether to use quote marks or not. I prefer not to, but then I have to be careful to distinguish interior dialogue from narrative.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Having been a real editor at real publishing houses (what's a "publishing place"?), I give you the horse laugh. You wouldn't know the "real" anything in publishing if you fell over it stumbling out of your trailer.

"grammar are"?

Irregular plural.

Happy to help.

 

[sr71plt]

Irregular plural.

Happy to help.

Bullshit.

Happy to unmask you.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Bullshit.

Happy to unmask you.

SR71PLZ sux the same cock twice and says he sucked cocks. Or cooks a pot of soup, has some now and more later but its all the same soup not soups. No clue of irregular plurals. Loojk it up Einstorm.

 

[Beco]

I use Grammarly at work, as my current job involves a lot of nonfiction writing. It's helped me learn to avoid certain pitfalls in my writing, but I'm not a slave to it. It might be good to to try for a month; it's a good refresher on basic grammar and style. However, it doesn't always catch everything, and sometimes its suggestions are flat-out wrong.

I use the free version of it for quick corrections to my fictional stories. I see nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's me, but I like good sentence structure, commas where they belong, etc. etc. One can tell a writer that can actually write. Such as F Scott. I like it clear, powerful and compellling, which isn't always the case with amateur writers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thanks! This is good to know, in part because it's more or less what I do already. I prefer to avoid italics. My difficulty is deciding whether to use quote marks or not. I prefer not to, but then I have to be careful to distinguish interior dialogue from narrative.

Yes, same page.

Context is key - I've just written a small piece of dual interior dialogue - it works because I'd previously established each character each with their own key phrases, so when those phrases are repeated as interior thoughts (no italics and no attribution), the reader should see it and know whose thoughts are whose. Unless they're asleep at the wheel or skim reading, in which case the meaning will pass them by.

But there's only so much spoon feeding you can do - I assume a competent reader who can keep up.