Grammatical Intuition - #amwriting #craft #grammar #ForWriters

Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a fellow author say, “I’m not good at grammar.” I might even be able to afford a trip to Eroticon next year! Seriously, it seems that many writers find the entire question of conventionally correct grammatical structure intimidating. Some of them simply give up, relying entirely on their editors. Others try to convince themselves grammar doesn’t matter, that a reader who’s thoroughly seduced by their great story (or aroused by the amazing sex) won’t notice the blunders.

Alas, I think this is far less true than these authors would like to believe. Even if a reader doesn’t recognize an error as such, she’s likely to have a vague feeling of discomfort, a sense that “something’s wrong” with the sentence. Worse, a grammatical faux pas may end up confusing the reader, pulling her out of that zone where she’s connected with your characters to wonder exactly what’s going on.

Grammar is not just something dreamed up by high school English teachers to torture their students. English (as well as most other languages) relies on syntactic structure to convey meaning and resolve ambiguities. Consider the following example:

Rick couldn’t believe how good it felt to drive his big rod into the brunette’s pussy. It has been so long since he’d had a woman. Now he had two! The blond bombshell massaged his balls as he fucked her harder and harder.

This is adapted from a book I recently edited. The paragraph pulled me up short. “I thought he was inside the dark haired woman, not the blond,” I thought. “And how could the blond be fondling his balls at the same time that he’s screwing her?”

Of course, re-reading the paragraph made it clear that there was a problem with a pronoun reference. Pronouns should refer to the most recently mentioned noun with matching gender and number. That’s not the case here. The problem could be fixed by swapping the clauses, so the blond gets mentioned after the pronoun instead of before:

Rick couldn’t believe how good it felt to drive his big rod into the brunette’s pussy. It has been so long since he’d had a woman. Now he had two! He fucked her harder and harder, while the blond bombshell massaged his balls.

Another solution would be to replace “her” in the original structure with a noun phrase, e.g. “her girlfriend”. Now “her” does refer to the most recently mentioned noun (the blond bombshell).

The point is that by the time I figured out what the paragraph was trying to say, I’d lost the thread of the scene. The heat had dissipated. This is definitely not what you want if you’re an erotic author!

I’m sure that some of you authors reading this post are rolling your eyes. “Pronoun reference?” you may be thinking. “Matching gender and number?” You’re being assailed by visions of fat, grouchy Miss Mackleswain from tenth grade, the nasty old witch who made you diagram sentences ad nauseum and memorize the names of all the different tenses and constructions. “I couldn’t make sense of it all then, when I was young and smart,” you’re thinking. “I certainly can’t remember all those rules now!”

Relax. Take a deep breath. I have some good news for you.

Grammar is not about rules. It’s about relationships.

If you’re an editor or a pedant (and I’m something of both), it’s nice to be able to apply the correct term to a particular construction. However, that’s not necessary in order to write grammatical prose. You can produce beautiful, perfectly grammatical sentences, one that would make even Miss Mackleswain weep with delight, without having any idea of the so-called rules governing the structure.

In fact, so-called grammatical rules are nothing but abstractions developed after the fact to try and make sense of the way language is actually used. That’s one reason why there are so many exceptions! Grammarians and high school teachers like to present grammar rules as prescriptive (that is, as iron clad expressions of what you should do), but in fact grammar is descriptive, an attempt to systematize the complexities of linguistic structure.

And why do I say that grammar is about relationships? Because that’s what most constructions are trying to convey.

Consider the concept of independent versus dependent clauses. An independent clause expresses a single idea that can stand alone.

Louisa was desperately horny.

Louisa’s boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week.

English allows you to use the conjunction “and” to combine two independent clauses:

Louisa’s boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week and she was desperately horny.

This compound sentence states two facts of supposedly equal importance, leaving the reader to figure out why they’ve been conjoined. In this case, you might expect a further sentence explaining the situation, for instance:

Normally, they met for sex every Tuesday and Thursday.

A dependent clause, like an independent clause, has a subject and a verb, but the idea it expresses has some logical relationship to another clause. The nature of the relationship depends on the words used to join the two clauses into a single sentence.

Louisa was desperately horny because her boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week. (Causality)

By the time her boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week, Louisa was desperately horny. (Sequence)

Louisa was desperately horny long before her boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week. (Also sequence, but with a somewhat different meaning.)

Louisa was desperately horny even though her boyfriend Jim had been in Hong Kong for a week. (Contrast/conflict)

This last, somewhat peculiar, example suggests that maybe Louisa has somebody on the side, but that she hasn’t been able to hook up with him or her!

Verb tenses are another example of grammar constructs that are used to establish relationships, in this case relationships related to time. You don’t need to know the names of the verb tenses to understand the temporal relationships in the following sentence:

(1) Genevieve was still a virgin, even though she had slept with several men.

The whole narrative is in the past, but it’s clear that the sleeping with several men occurred before the time of the story.

It would mean something different to say:

(2) Genevieve was still a virgin, even though she slept with several men.

This is also grammatically correct, but implies that Genevieve continues to sleep with the men at the time of the story, that it’s an ongoing state of affairs.

Contrast the previous examples with the following:

(3) Genevieve is still a virgin, even though she has slept with several men.

In this case, we’ve pulled the story into the present, but the time relationship between the events hasn’t changed from sentence (1). Her experiences with men still occurred before the main time of the story. However, we have to use a different tense to express that relationship, because we’ve changed the first clause from past to present.

To extend this further:

(4) Genevieve is still a virgin, even though she has slept with several men. Her mother had told her to keep her pajamas on until she was sure she’d found the right guy to be her first lover.

Now we have three points in time, neatly signaled by the verb tenses:

Present: Genevieve is a virgin.

Past: She has slept with several men.

More distant past: Her mother had given her instructions about staying dressed in bed.

Actually, this example actually includes a fourth, more complicated point in time, the hypothetical time when Genevieve is sure she’s in bed with Mr. Right. As far as we can tell, this event hasn’t happened yet. English has clear ways to grammatically mark this sort of hypothetical statement. (Not every language does.)

If you’re a native English speaker, you will have no difficulty understanding the relationships in sentence (4), despite its complexity. Furthermore, you’ll know something is wrong if you read a sentence like this:

Genevieve was still a virgin, even though she sleeps with several men.

The relationships in this sentence don’t make sense. The first clause already happened, while the second is happening now.

The key to writing grammatical prose resides in that feeling that “something is wrong”. You don’t need to know the grammatical terminology or the rules, but you do need to develop your grammatical intuition. You need to learn how to evaluate your sentences based not only on the basic content, but whether the relationships are sensible and have the intended meaning.

How can you do this? By paying closer attention when you read, both your own work and work by other people.

Try to notice when you get that niggling feeling that something’s not quite right. Reread the sentence or paragraph that’s bugging you, considering the implied relationships between clauses, sentences and events. If you can’t figure out the nature of the problem, ask for help, but don’t just ignore that slight discomfort so you can get on with the story. (Don’t be lazy!)

Furthermore, you can strengthen your grammatical intuition by reading authors who produced really clear, well-structured prose. I recommend reading works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Literate prose from that period is often far more complex than would be appropriate for modern readers, but Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, Edith Wharton and Henry James were grammar virtuosos. Educate your ear to the nuances of tense, the layering of logic. Notice how a sentence with five or six clauses can still be immediately comprehensible. You don’t have to study the structure, or figure out how it works. Just allow these exemplars to sink into your brain.

Don’t worry about the rules, just the relationships.

Of course, you also need to practice improving the grammar of your own work. Learn to recognize the mistakes you commonly make. Sensitize yourself to grammar gaffes. Finally, don’t become discouraged. Improving one’s writing craft is a lifelong process—one that can bring great joy and satisfaction.

In Praise of Grammar -- #grammar #amwriting #amreading

I recently reread a favorite book from my youth, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Originally published in 1868, it is considered to be an early classic of detective fiction. An unscrupulous British officer stationed in India plucks the Moonstone, a massive diamond, from the forehead of a Hindu idol and carries it back to England. Misfortune, reputed to be the effects of a curse, dogs the man until his death, whereupon the gem becomes a bequest to his niece upon her eighteenth birthday. On the very night Rachel receives the stone, however, it disappears from her bedroom. Broken engagements, assaults, scandal, madness, illness, despair and death follow, as the mystery becomes increasingly tangled.

The first time I read The Moonstone, I was caught up in the story. That was long before I began my career as a writer. During this more recent reading, I found myself at least as conscious of Collins' style and craft as I was of the plot.

The novel unfolds in sections narrated by different individuals, each of whom (according to the framing conceit of the tale) has been asked to report on the events he or she personally witnessed relating to the loss of the diamond. Some of the narrators are major actors in the mystery, while others are peripheral. Collins does a magnificent job giving each one a distinctive voice. The various sections not only propel the plot, reveal clues and cleverly misdirect the reader's attention, they also create surprisingly three dimensional images of the characters – their motivations, prejudices and peculiarities. My pleasure upon this second reading of the book came as much from appreciating these unwitting self-portraits as from the gradual unraveling of the secrets of the stone. And much of the richness of these vignettes derives from the characters' differing use of language.

The experience started me thinking about the wonders of English grammar. Victorian prose tends to be far more complex grammatically than what you will find in modern novels. Sentences are longer, with multiple clauses, adverbial modifiers, rhetorical questions and parenthetical asides. Of course, some authors of the period produced sentences so pedantic and labored that they're painful to read. A more skilled writer (like Collins) uses these linguistic variations to express nuanced relationships that would be difficult to communicate with shorter, more direct sentences.

Consider the following passage, chosen more or less at random. The narrator (Franklin Blake) is a young gentleman, educated in Europe, and hopelessly in love with Rachel.

I might have answered that I remembered every word of it. But what purpose, at that moment, would the answer have served?

How could I tell her that what she had said had astonished me and distressed me, had suggested to me that she was in a dangerous state of nervous excitement, had even roused a moment's doubt in my mind whether the loss of the jewel was as much a mystery to her as to the rest of us – but had never once given me so much as a glimpse of the truth? Without the shadow of a proof to produce in vindication of my innocence, how could I persuade her that I knew no more than the veriest stranger could have known of what was really in her thoughts when she spoke to me on the terrace?

Complex indeed! We have both simple past (“I remembered”, “I knew”) and past perfect (“had said”, “had astonished”, “had suggested”). Blake is describing a past conversation with Rachel, in which they discussed another conversation that occurred the day after the diamond disappeared (a time previous to the first conversation). Even more intricate are the connections between facts and the counter-factual or hypothetical, both in the simple past (“might have”, “could I”) and more distant past (“could have known”). The tense inflections and adverbial modifiers elucidate relationships not only between different stretches of time but also different degrees of reality.

How many of us could pen a paragraph so complicated and yet so clear?

As an exercise, I tried to translate the passage above into simpler, more modern prose.

I could have told her I remembered every word. But I doubt she would have believed me.

I could have said that she astonished and distressed me. She had been in a dangerous state of nervous excitement. I had even wondered whether she really knew more about the loss of the jewel than the rest of us. But when we spoke, she hadn't given me the slightest hint of the truth. Since I had no proof of my innocence, there was no way I could convince her that during our conversation on the terrace her accusations were as much a mystery to me as they would have been to a stranger.

Even this reworking requires the past and past perfect. There's no way to get around them, since the distinction between the first and second conversations is crucial to the sense of the paragraph. I didn't manage to completely remove counter-factual expressions (“could have”,”would have been”), either. If I had, significant chunks of meaning would have been lost. As it is, I feel that the translation doesn't begin to compare with the original in terms of expressing subtleties of both logic and emotion.

Authors today have a tendency to view grammar as a necessary evil, a set of incomprehensible rules designed to trip them up as they proceed in telling their story. I look at it differently. Grammatical structures (and punctuation) exist in order express linguistic distinctions. As writers, we're fortunate. English is capable of communicating a bewildering variety of such distinctions, in wonderfully precise ways.

By comparison, I've been studying a foreign language where there's no grammatical difference between present and past tense, or between singular or plural, a language without articles or grammatical mechanisms for indicating that something is contrary to fact. Native speakers manage to understand one another, but I find the language frustrating in its lack of specificity.

I'm sorry to see the changes that are stripping English of some of its grammatical richness. One rarely sees the subjunctive anymore, even in written communication. Semi-colons are practically extinct. Indeed, one of my publisher's house style prohibits them, along with parenthetical asides.

Since I began publishing, my own writing has followed the popular trends. I've learned to limit subordinate clauses to no more than one or two per sentence. I've been trained to avoid long passages in the past perfect and to eschew adverbs. I won't say that my writing has necessarily suffered; my early work definitely tends to be overly prolix. Still, I sometimes feel like rebelling against the starkness and simplicity of modern prose.

When that happens, I sometimes write something pseudo-Victorian. Here, for instance, is a passage from Miranda’s Masks, ostensibly from a Victorian woman's secret diary:

I scarcely know how to begin this account of my adventures and my sins. Indeed, I do not fully understand why I feel compelled to commit these things to writing. Clearly, my purpose is not to review and relive these experiences in the future, for in twenty minutes’ time these sentences will be invisible even to me. Perhaps in the years ahead, I will trail my fingers across the empty parchment, coloured like flesh, and the memories will come alive without the words, coaxed from the pages by my touch like flames bursting from cold embers.

I have a secret life, another self, and that secret has become a burden that I clutch to myself, and yet would be relieved of. So, like the Japanese who write their deepest desires on slips of rice paper and then burn them, I write of secret joys and yearnings, and send that writing into oblivion.

Let me begin again. My name is Beatrice. The world sees me as poised, prosperous, respectable, wife of one of Boston’s leading merchants and industrialists, mother of two sweet children, lady of a fine brick house on fashionable Mount Vernon Street, with Viennese crystal chandeliers, Chinese porcelain, French velvet draperies, and Italian marble fireplaces. I devote myself to the education of my dear Daniel and Louisa, the management of my household, works of charity, cultural afternoons. In sum, the many and sundry details of maintaining oneself in proper society.

Though I have borne two children, I am still considered beautiful. Indeed, with my golden locks, fair skin, turquoise eyes and rosy lips, I am often compared to an angel. How little they know, those who so describe me. For in truth, I am depraved, wanton, and lecherous, so lost that I do not even regret my fall.

Ah, the glorious grammar!

Am I the only one out there aroused by this structural intricacy, as artful and constraining as shibari?

Instruments of the Devil

They're infernal machines, designed to drive us mad with frustrated desire. No sooner do you have one than you're craving more. The price you pay - well, let's say that it's not just money. Once you're hooked, you find yourself losing your time - your sanity - perhaps even your soul.

I'm talking, of course, about computers.

The past few days have been particularly bad. My four year old Asus Eee PC netbook, which I use for e-reading and travel, both for writing and connectivity, is aging. The battery has long been burned out, or so it seems. Now the wireless networking, previously a marvel of ease and functionality, has ceased to work.

Now, I'm a bit of a geek - I make my living as a software engineer - so I spent a good three hours yesterday on the web, browsing wikis and forums, trying to discover the source of this new problem. I tried all the suggestions I found, all without any success. Finally, as a last resort, I used the DVD that accompanied the machine to restore it to its factory settings. Alas, this procedure caused me to lose all my customizations and additional installed software, but I figured that would be a fair price to pay if it solved the wireless problem.

It did not, of course.

So this afternoon I have plans to trudge over to the computer mall and see if I can find the Asus service center. I'd much rather be working on my current story, but what can you do? Will they be able to make more progress than I did? Only experience will tell.

Meanwhile, last night over dinner my husband and I had a major fight over computers. He accused me of harping on all the problems of the Eee PC because I really wanted to buy a new laptop. In his eyes, I was trying to push the little netbook beyond its capabilities, making it fulfill functions that hadn't been in my original specifications.

I protested, assuring me that I had no such hidden agenda - not that I haven't been eyeing the recent crop of netbooks with a certain degree of lust (not to mention flirting with the fantasy of buying a tablet), but I recognized that our finances currently couldn't support such a purchase.

He's been battling issues with his own, much more recent and powerful netbook.(Yes, I admit I'm jealous. Lust AND envy.) He pointed out that while I've been sitting there, whining and swearing, he's been suffering in silence. Basically his position was, put up or shut up.

You see what I mean? Computers have driven a wedge between us! This morning all is forgiven - we both apologized for our angry words - but I see now the dangers of these diabolical devices.

Beware of techno-lust. Don't let it spoil your life and your relationships!

Now, why isn't my sound card working?