Breaking the Rules

As a writer, you have lots of rules to learn and apply to your writing. Spelling, grammar, etc. You spend a lot of time in school learning all these rules. But one of the first things that I learned in writing is that these rules are made to be broken. You learn these rules so that you can actually break them with style. Now please don't get me wrong. Spelling and grammar are very important. If you're running around spelling everything wrong and leaving out the punctuation, you're going to look like a five-year-old that started banging on the keyboard. But there are times when breaking these rules will convey a stronger message than it otherwise would and make your writing better.

Take, for example, the first paragraph of my book:

     Shapes and shadows. White light pierces into my eyes. Tall figures loom over me. No, trees. Damp ground. It presses against my back, soaks my clothes, tickles the back of my neck. Leaves rustle like parchment being crumpled. A dull throb fills my temples. I take a sudden gasp of wet, salty air. My head feels too heavy to lift. I let out a soft groan. Where am I?

A couple of incomplete sentences. Not that big of a deal, right? But sometimes it makes a big difference in the scene. I used incomplete sentences and somewhat vague imagery because the protagonist was just waking up after being hit on the head. If I would have said:

     White light pierces into my eyes and casts deep shadows beneath the tall trees. Damp ground presses into my back...etc.

It doesn't really sound like she's just waking up. She seems pretty aware of what's around her. But just by reconstructing a few things and adding a few *gulp* incomplete sentences, it conveys a totally different message. If you ever read the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, I think you'll find that she does this quite often.

Here's an example from my book that shows this done in dialogue. The protagonist is just waking up after nearly drowning in the river and being saved by one of her friends (Shale):

     Indistinct voices begin to make sense. I see Carnen speaking frantically to Shale, "Let...take her..."
     Shale shakes his head over and over, "I've got her I've got her..."

A word missing. A period missing. Again, what's the big deal? Well, if Carnen had said, "Let me take her," he wouldn't sound all that frantic. And it wouldn't convey the fact that the protagonist is still trying to catch up with what is going on. It's the same with the missing period. Had Shale said, "I've got her. I've got her," he wouldn't sound like he's exhausted, like his brain has just gone on automatic.

In my opinion, you can go too far with breaking the rules. It will make you look unprofessional and ignorant. But using it in the right context can certainly strengthen your writing. If you keep in mind the message and feeling you want to convey and try to show that in the strongest way you possibly can, people aren't going to be freaking out because you used an incomplete sentence or left out a period. We learn these rules so that we can break them with style.



     (Thank you for listening to my ramblings. If you have any questions or would like me to talk about a certain subject, please comment.)