{"id":2110,"date":"2012-04-11T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2012-04-11T11:00:26","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T16:00:26","slug":"grammar-one-novel-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2110","title":{"rendered":"Grammar: One Novel at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>At some point in my life, I\u2019m sure I was taught grammar. It seems like it would be one of those things teachers are required to impart as you are funneled through the scholastic system. To be honest, other than gerunds in sixth grade, I don\u2019t remember any of it. I\u2019m not even sure what a gerund is, but that\u2019s because we killed him off.<\/p>\n

What I know of grammar, I learned from reading, so if I do it well, it\u2019s because the authors I read had a firm grasp on it–or a really good editor. It\u2019s why I like to believe that I can write with\u2014fairly\u2014decent grammar, but couldn\u2019t begin to tell you what part of speech a word is. Other than the obvious ones like verbs and nouns. Over time, I learned to trust my natural instinct when it comes to sentence structure. So long as I don\u2019t overthink something or make a typo, I\u2019m likely to get it right on the first try. I\u2019m pretty good at pointing out when something is wrong, but I\u2019d never be able to tell you why. It just is.<\/p>\n

My novels were my grammar handbooks. They were my dictionaries. They were my writing textbooks. To this day I\u2019m sure I pronounce all sorts of words wrong, because I sounded them out in my head when I came across them and nobody ever bothered to correct me. It would likely be a problem if somebody did, because that would mean somebody was in my head listening to what I had to say, and it\u2019s a bit of a scary place in there. I have a tendency to understand the meaning of a word, but wouldn\u2019t know where to begin actually defining it. I\u2019d probably tell someone to go look it up in the dictionary.<\/p>\n

Through reading I learned to recognize when stories worked\u2014and more importantly, when they didn\u2019t. I began to realize how stories were put together, that \u201crising action\u201d and \u201cdenouement\u201d weren\u2019t just words Lit teachers bandied about to torture their students. My passion for reading meant I went through hundreds of books, frequently rereading them until they fell to pieces in my hands. The best books were always the ones that I could gain some new understanding of on each reading, either that or the books that I couldn\u2019t see the plot twists coming from the end of the second chapter.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, the number one failing of YA fantasy is how predictable it is. Don\u2019t get me wrong, it\u2019s my genre of choice for both reading and writing, but it\u2019s annoying how formulaic it can feel. Maybe it\u2019s because I\u2019ve read so many books that I\u2019m able to pick up on the subtle, or not-so-subtle, hints that are dropped. I hate when I can predict early on in a book what is going to happen simply based on what happened in other books. I don\u2019t want anybody to roll their eyes at my books the way I do when I find out that the love interest is actually, possibly, maybe the heroine\u2019s brother. So when I write my own books, I try to figure out what the reader is going to assume will happen. Then I try and do the opposite.<\/p>\n

Grammar. Story construction. Don\u2019t be predictable. That\u2019s what I\u2019ve taken from all the books I\u2019ve read.<\/p>\n

Now, if you\u2019ll excuse me, I need to go learn some more lessons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At some point in my life, I\u2019m sure I was taught grammar. It seems like it would be one of those things teachers are required to impart as you are funneled through the scholastic system. To be honest, other than gerunds in sixth grade, I don\u2019t remember any of it. I\u2019m not even sure what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[469,523,866,1291],"class_list":["post-2110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-grammar","tag-how-to-write","tag-predictable","tag-ya-fantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}