I applaud your anonymous enquirer! Questions of craft are a huge self-indulgent interest for me, and I love seeing what any given writer thinks is important, what comes to mind first as the lessons or epiphanies that have stuck with them. And of course I've been reading your work for a long time, and it's very easy to assume you arrived fully formed with your talent already in bloom.
Unfortunately, by the time I started truly paying attention, my internal defaults for sentence structure had mostly set. I still struggle to break my habits and remember that lines and phrases are more resilient and accommodating than my 'intuitive' arbiter of grammar seems to think. Betas and casual readers who encountered my earlier fics with their idiosyncratic comma usage and infatuation with semicolons and parentheses must have itched to take those stories over their knee and give them a good red penning.
For that matter, I still don't know the answer to many of your interrogatives, and I will often not have the slightest clue that I've committed a syntactical gaffe.
I have a friend who's been writing stories all her life but who grew up (in a commune) with even less exposure to grammar than I had, and zero guidance in spelling on top of that. I've been mentoring her for years now, and it was fascinating watching her at first resist the hard work of grammar, then struggle to memorize and apply it, and then have her eyes opened to how powerful the effect is on her writing and how vast the array in terms of small but crucial choices at every step. She found it daunting for a while. Still does, actually. But now she wants to make those rules her own so she can do the things she sees other writers doing.
(Argh. I am stupidly, stupidly tired, and I still have to get up in the morning to work, so I'll have to post my response in stages. Expect another ramble once I have a moment to myself and can do more than blink blearily at the monitor.)
no subject
I applaud your anonymous enquirer! Questions of craft are a huge self-indulgent interest for me, and I love seeing what any given writer thinks is important, what comes to mind first as the lessons or epiphanies that have stuck with them. And of course I've been reading your work for a long time, and it's very easy to assume you arrived fully formed with your talent already in bloom.
1. I had very little training in grammar and rhetoric, and it took forever to dawn on me how much can be done simply by learning what holds a sentence together, how it can be taken apart, how parts within a sentence influence each other, how sentences build rhythm and mood and emotional beats via paragraphs, and so on. So I completely agree with you. It's not just about versatility; it's about having the tools to find your authorial voice, or control the voices within the story. It's the competence cliché. Once you master a set of skills, you can create things previously out of your reach, but it means you bump up against how many more things there are to learn, things you didn't realize until the new skills brought those possibilities into view.
Unfortunately, by the time I started truly paying attention, my internal defaults for sentence structure had mostly set. I still struggle to break my habits and remember that lines and phrases are more resilient and accommodating than my 'intuitive' arbiter of grammar seems to think. Betas and casual readers who encountered my earlier fics with their idiosyncratic comma usage and infatuation with semicolons and parentheses must have itched to take those stories over their knee and give them a good red penning.
For that matter, I still don't know the answer to many of your interrogatives, and I will often not have the slightest clue that I've committed a syntactical gaffe.
I have a friend who's been writing stories all her life but who grew up (in a commune) with even less exposure to grammar than I had, and zero guidance in spelling on top of that. I've been mentoring her for years now, and it was fascinating watching her at first resist the hard work of grammar, then struggle to memorize and apply it, and then have her eyes opened to how powerful the effect is on her writing and how vast the array in terms of small but crucial choices at every step. She found it daunting for a while. Still does, actually. But now she wants to make those rules her own so she can do the things she sees other writers doing.
(Argh. I am stupidly, stupidly tired, and I still have to get up in the morning to work, so I'll have to post my response in stages. Expect another ramble once I have a moment to myself and can do more than blink blearily at the monitor.)