Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Yeah, I'm with you. I'll break the rules for flow. And yeah, I like that site too. It depends what you're writing. But for fiction perfect grammar can kill flow. (Not often, mind you, but it can and when it does it gets the boot in favor of flow. Every time.)
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Just to be clear--I never meant that DIALOGUE by characters has to be "grammatically perfect." It has to be readable, and not get in the way. I abhor dialect, for example, when an inexperienced writer feels compelled (historical romances set in Scotland spring instantly to mind) to inflict "dinna" and "ken" and whatever on the reader, rather than dropping it in early and allowing the reader to "hear" it in his/her head as the narrative goes.
The sentence that you, Gregg put in front of us is one of those sentences; yes, it's (apparently) internal dialogue, but when it's internal dialogue, I generally want it to be at least
not grammatically incorrect in such a way that I instantly notice it. For example, if a character continuously says "Bert and me," (rather than Bert and I, when needed), of course I expect him to THINK that way. It would be discordant if he didn't.
But to me, that's different than the sentence that started this discussion/thread. To me, the original sentence was simply wrong. It would have distracted me.
It's also pretty typical that writers are very staunch defenders of the idea that "grammatically perfect" writing = bad. It's certainly something that I see at our office, and an idea that I hear repeated constantly at the KDP Boards. Of course, that's where the infamous thread about how ellipses were for abrupt breaks in dialogue and emdashes meant "trailing off," too, so...y'know. Take that for what it's worth.
Hitch