10 Myths About Grammar

Grammar. Everybody's favourite most-hated topic. It's back in the news this week with yet more proposed changes to the education system. Everybody's pitching in to have their say on how (and even if) it should be taught to children and at what age and why it's an outdated and irrelevant concept and why it's still one of the most important parts of anyone's education and so on and so on.

Matt Haig has written an interesting blog post on the subject, 30 Things to Tell a Grammar Snob. I enjoyed this, smiled at the funny bits, and agreed with a lot of it. But I started thinking that, just as it isn't healthy to adhere slavishly to the 'rules' just because somebody tells you to, it isn't healthy to ignore them purely because you can. In other words, it's no better to be a grammar slob than a grammar snob.

I wondered if it was a question of perspective, so I asked:

@matthaig1 Is the problem that some see grammar as a straitjacket to squeeze language into, others as the skeleton upon which it's built?
— Dan Purdue (@DanPurdue) May 17, 2013

I didn't get a reply, but I was interested to see that Nick Harkaway joined the debate, summing up his defence of grammar using much the same terminology as I did. So, encouraged that I'm not alone here, I'd like to attempt to bust a few myths about grammar:


1. Grammar is a straitjacket to squeeze language into.
Grammar should never be thought of as something that works from the outside, constricting language and stopping it growing. It's not like a crab's shell, something that has to be abandoned if you want to take your writing onto bigger and better things. It's better to think of it as working from within, like a skeleton, with language as the flesh. Skeletons change over time - mine's different to when I was a baby, a child, or an adolescent. Bone responds to usage, becoming harder and more resilient when it's heavily loaded, or fading away where it's not used so often. It can be broken and heal into new configurations, but it always does the same job.

2. Following rules means everything ends up the same.
Saint Paul's Cathedral, the works of Antoni Gaudi, and the New York Guggenheim couldn't be more different, but they all follow the same rules of physics. Their designers and architects have used their understanding of the way materials behave, how stress is transferred, how gravity affects steel beams or blocks of stone, in order to come up with wildly different solutions to the question of how to build a structure. The B of the Bang, a £1.4m sculpture commissioned to mark the 2002 Commonwealth Games, didn't follow the rules. It looked great, but it was fundamentally flawed. It couldn't support its own weight, and was dismantled a few months after it was unveiled as its immense metal spikes started falling off. Sometimes understanding the rules can save you a lot of bother.

3. Grammar is boring.
This, I'm sorry to say, says more about the person making the claim than about the topic. If you're not interested in the use and history of words and language, maybe a career in writing isn't a sensible aspiration for you. Who genuinely doesn't enjoy learning, or discovering something new? I did the BBC's grammar test a couple of days ago and got 9 out of 10. The question I didn't know was about gerunds. I'd heard of them but didn't know what they were. I now know. I feel good about this, and hope they crop up in a pub quiz sometime soon.

4. The internet and texting is changing language anyway, so there's no point getting bogged down with old-fashioned stuff.
While this is true, who wants what they write to date as quickly as a tweet (or a blog post!)? Fashions in social media come and go, and there's an acceptance that whatever's there is disposable and fleeting. There's nothing wrong with this, but I can't imagine anybody being won over by a novel with writing like this:

Brian LOL'd. "That's the funniest joke ever," he said, ROFLing.

"I know," Sandra replied, "When I heard it I was all like :-D"

Jane looked unimpressed. "Whatever." #sarcasm

5. As long as your readers get the gist of what you're saying, that's close enough.
Context is key here. Getting the wrong word from the their/there/they're triumvirate in a Facebook status is pretty harmless. Being ambiguous in the operating manual for a kidney dialysis machine or safety guidelines for a nuclear power station, not so much. Sometimes a precision of language is absolutely essential.

6. Grammar is a way for the intellectual elite to lord it over the rest of us.
It may be used that way, but it's the absolute opposite of the point of grammar. Anybody who's felt themselves sinking into a whirlpool of notwithstandings, hereforths, and aforementioneds in a legal document knows that sense of language being used as a barrier. A knowledge of grammar gives you the tools to dismantle those barriers, and extract the meaning (or lack of meaning) from this kind of document. If everybody understood the subtleties of language use, it would be a level playing field. If the majority of the population shys away from grammar, the elite have free rein to trick and befuddle us with their wily ways with words.

7. Shakespeare lived and wrote in a time before there was any notion of 'fixed' grammar and he's done alright for himself.
Shakespeare also lived in a time when people emptied their bedpans in the street, the average life expectancy was around 40 years and women weren't allowed to vote or own property. Let's not get too misty-eyed about the good old days. Also, does your typical person on the street understand (or even get the gist of) everything Shakespeare wrote? I bet you a pound they don't.

8. "Alright" is not a word.
Yes it is. See, grammar can evolve.

9. Grammar is a barrier to self-expression.
Often, because dialects appear to bend or break the rules of grammar, it's said that grammar is an attack on regional variation in the way people talk, a way of forcing everybody to speak and write like they were on the BBC in the 1950s. But I don't think this attitude withstands much scrutiny. There aren't many sayings that actually fly in the face of generally accepted grammar. It's mainly a case of different words being substituted, or the order of words played around with. Embellishments or abbreviations, not whole-hearted rejection of the underlying principles.

As an aside, I really don't like the use of "while" meaning "until", in the sense of "I won't be able to repay you while next Wednesday", and I'd be happy if I never heard it again. But, though I wouldn't want to ban anybody from using the word that way, are they really expressing anything different to saying the same thing with the word "until" in its place? I don't think so, but I'd be interested to hear an argument to the contrary.

10. Correcting somebody's grammar means belittling their efforts and humiliating them.
This is the biggie, and I suspect it's the main driving force behind Matt Haig's post. It is, of course, utter hogwash. Firstly, let's get away from the word "correcting". It's arrogant for anybody to think they are correct when it comes to grammar. And it's very counter-productive to try to make somebody learn something by telling them how wrong they are. If I'm critiquing somebody's work and there's a grammatical issue, I'll try to phrase my response along the lines of, "There's a couple of ways of interpreting that; which of them do you mean?" or similar, not "Oh, you used a split infinitive, you utter cretin!". If you can't help somebody with their writing without shattering their confidence and bigging yourself up, that's not grammar's fault, that's you, being an arse. Stop it.

Striking a Balance between Writing and Being A Writer

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A writer writes, right? Well, yes, of course. In an ideal world, that's how it would work. Writers would be left alone to do their thing and publishers would make their words into wonderful books and everyone would buy them and fat royalty cheques would arrive and everybody would have a lovely time. I doubt it's ever really worked like that, though. And it's certainly not the way things are these days.

I've been thinking about how I spend my time recently. After a couple of months with no real routine, the freelance day-job has settled (temporarily, at least) on a more regular arrangement, and it's made my writing time feel a lot more precious and finite. It's been a bit of a wake-up call, to be honest. I've found it difficult to work on my novel at the same time as producing new short stories for competitions. On top of that, I've been thinking of new ways to promote Somewhere to Start From, as well as trying to ensure that my output on this blog, Twitter, and Facebook are actually of interest to other writers and, ideally, readers.

It would be easy to look at all that and say, It's too much, something has to give. But saying it's the easy part. It's not just a question of priorities; I can't say I'll work on my novel at the expense of everything else, because I know I don't have the stamina or dedication to devote all my time to just one idea. My mind wanders, seeks out new challenges, and in the end I get so disillusioned with it I have to shut it away - I know this because it's happened already. I had to put it aside for well over a year before I could even think of working on the damn thing.

I don't want to give up on the short stories, either, because I enjoy writing them, and because I know that using short fiction to test out new ideas and play about with styles has made me a better writer. I'd also like to enter the Scott Prize this year, as I didn't have enough material of sufficient quality to submit a collection last year. That means I have to keep producing and submitting the short fiction: trying, failing, learning, and - I hope - improving as I go.

So, if I can't cut back on the writing, how about the Being A Writer stuff? Is the self-promotion justified? Is a "platform" genuinely important for a writer without even a completed manuscript to his name? The truth is, I don't know. What I do know is that this blog is a good 'signpost' to have for people looking to find out more about my writing, that Twitter has introduced me to a huge community of writers and that many of them have been terrifically supportive and helpful, as well as making me feel like I have something to offer, too, and that promoting the anthology has resulted in sales to people who I've never met, which is ace. Facebook, I'm not so sure about. In fairness I don't use my author page that much and I'm still trying to work out exactly what it can do that other places can't. I'd love to know about any author pages that work really well.

The question of whether a platform is necessary is impossible to answer. Whenever I read an article or interview with a newly published author, there's always some mention of how much promotion writers have to do for themselves, even when they're backed by a big publishing house. I doubt an agent or publisher would ever decide whether or not to take on an author based on how many Twitter followers they have. But, all else being equal, I can imagine an author with a great book and a legion of engaged, supportive fans will stand a better chance of getting a contract than somebody who would have to start from scratch. I've never heard anybody say the publishing industry is actively looking for complete unknowns.

So, as somebody writing with the aim of being published, what's the answer? I'm going to try being more disciplined, to keep doing all the stuff I do but to keep better track of time and try to ensure Writing always comes before Being a Writer.

What's your approach? How do you prioritise your time? I'd love to hear any tactics you have for making sure you're always working on the thing that matters most. It can be done, I'm sure!

The End of the Start - or Just the Beginning?

That's it, then - the "Start" flash fiction competition is over, the winners have been announced, the prizes have been awarded, the stories will be up on the Erewash Writers' Group website in the next few days, the bunting's coming down and the Champagne corks and sausage roll crumbs are being swept away.

I was very pleased to be involved with the competition, and judging it was a real pleasure. My judge's report is on the Erewash site, so I won't talk about my reasons for picking the winners here. What I will do is offer my congratulations to Tony Oswick, to whom I awarded first place, Jenny Long, who was runner-up, and Fiona Faith Ross, to whose story I awarded an honourable mention. Well done, all of you! And I hope you enjoy the book, Tony.

Being a judge is a mixed blessing. You can make someone's day - and I was thrilled to read Fiona's response to getting that honourable mention (I even get called "the internationally renowned short story writer, Dan Purdue", which is a very generous exaggeration, whichever way you look at it). But of course the flip side to that is that you have to trample on the hopes of all but a few of the writers on the shortlist.

Being shortlisted for something you don't win can sometimes feel worse than getting nowhere at all. If your entry sinks without trace, you can always assume it was lost in the post or, if you entered online, the organisers' printer ran out of ink just as it got to your story, so factors beyond your control took you out of contention. There's no such luxury when your name's up there on the shortlist. I follow Formula 1, and I've heard it said that finishing fourth, just shy of the winners' podium, is the most disappointing result for a driver. I guess it's probably true of all the Olympic events, too, and many more besides. It's that thing of almost being good enough to break through into the prizes, but not quite. Somehow, being that much closer to the top of the heap can make it seem even further out of reach.

Of course, the proper way to look at it is to think in terms of what you have achieved, rather than what you haven't. Wherever you end up in the results table, you've written a story, followed the rules, and got it finished in time. Huge numbers of people don't even get that far.

So, for this and any other competition, take confidence from the fact that you're potentially mixing with the literary superstars of the future (hey, who knows? - everybody has to start somewhere), reassure yourself that nobody who enters competitions gets a result all the time (with the possible exception of Hilary Mantel), and use each one as encouragement to push yourself and make sure your next story is the best one you've ever written.

The First Cut is the Cruellest

I'm about to begin reading the shortlist for the Erewash Writers' Group Flash Fiction Competition. I'm excited about this, and looking forward to reading the stories and seeing how all the different writers responded to the "Start" theme. I'm wondering how hard it will be to pick a winner - will there be a clear favourite, right from the first read-through, or will it be a process of erosion, with "lesser" stories gradually falling away until the eventual victor stands alone, all-conquering?

What it also means, is that I won't be reading any of the stories that didn't make the shortlist. Different competitions work in different ways - sometimes the judge will read all the entries, sometimes just the longlist, sometimes (as in this case) just the shortlist. Debbie and the Erewash team have selected the 20 best stories from an overall pool of over 130 - which is a great response - so the vast majority of entries have fallen at this first hurdle.

I want to offer a note of encouragement to anybody whose story didn't reach this point. I know free contests are a popular place to make your short story competition-entering début, and it can be very disheartening when your entry appears to sink without trace. It's easy to take this as a kick in the teeth, to think that your story must have been rubbish, even that you are a rubbish writer. It's easy, but it's the wrong way to look at it.

The main thing to bear in mind is that the odds are against you. This is the case with any writing competition, it only gets worse as you move up into bigger and more prestigious contests, and it's something you just have to accept. In this case, only the top 15% get onto the shortlist. In terms of the numbers alone, the odds of any particular story winning the competition is less than 1%.

No writing competition should ever be a lottery, of course, but there are a huge number of factors over which you have no control that'll determine whether your story goes forward or not. So much of writing is subjective: subject, style, genre, pace, point of view, even which tense it's written in - all of these can influence whether a particular reader thinks a story is any good, and it all boils down to personal taste. The stories I'll be reading are those that appealed most to the Erewash Writers' Group readers, and whichever one of that selection appeals most to me will be the winner. I have no idea how well my tastes and those of the Erewash crew overlap, but it's entirely possible that if I had read all the stories I would have chosen one of the 110 stories that have already dropped out.

However, this isn't meant to suggest the system is unfair and you can assume your story was perfect. It may well be, but if you haven't made the shortlist, consider it as a prompt to re-examine your work. There will be a (hopefully small) proportion who were disqualified; usually this is down to a small error - going over the word count limit, leaving your name on the manuscript (I did that myself recently and it's absolutely gutting), or some other lapse of concentration that means your story couldn't be considered. I know at least one writer scuppered their chances by publishing their story online.

If you got everything right, from a basic administration point of view, it's time to take a good, honest look at your story. Often, just having a bit of a break from the story while you're waiting for the result will to the trick. Ask yourself: Does it begin in the right place? Does the ending resonate? Is the structure you've used the best way to tell the story? Are the characters as strong as they can possibly be? Is your dialogue realistic? Does the plot make sense? Does it take at least one of the characters from one place / state of mind to another? Look hard, be brutal, and chances are you'll find something crying out for editing. And then, send it somewhere else. Good luck!

Review: "Dot Dash" by Jonathan Pinnock

Jonathan Pinnock has appeared on my blog a couple of times - I interviewed him about being "between books" here, and he wrote a guest post about the weird world of competitive writing here. I've recently read his Scott Prize-winning collection of short stories, Dot Dash. Here's what I thought of it:

Image: Salt Publishing

After ploughing through a string of four over-long and largely disappointing novels, Dot Dash turned out to be just what I needed. It's quite a slim book, weighing in at a shade under 200 pages, but it contains 58 stories. As implied by the title, these are arranged in sequence, with "dots" (very short stories, many of them small enough to fit the 140-character limit of a tweet) alternating with "dashes" (more traditionally sized short stories). The "dashes" tend not to extend over more than four or five pages, so - if you so desired - you could gulp down the entire selection in a relatively short space of time.

I've enjoyed many of Jonathan's stories online in recent years, and so it wasn't a surprise to find myself enjoying this book too. There were some old favourites - such as rZr and Napoleon, The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife, and Advice re Elephants - but the majority of the stories were new to me. I have to say I got more from the dashes than from the dots, on the whole - microfiction is interesting (and I've tried it myself with varying results), but even when it's done particularly well it often seems more like a demonstration of the writer's skill and/or imagination than a genuine story with real depth. That said, there are some impressive examples throughout the book, and having them interspersed with the longer pieces produced an interesting effect - whenever I got to the end of a story, it proved almost impossible not to read the microstory that followed it, and more often than not I would then find myself reading the next story as well.

Reading this collection, I found myself thinking of Adam Marek's Instruction Manual for Swallowing, as there is the same sense here that you can never predict where the author is going from one story to another, and the only answer is to give in and follow wherever he leads. Neither author pays any attention to the invisible boundaries between genres, and the resulting collection is much richer, more varied, and interesting than the 'variations on a theme' you get with some anthologies. However, where I found Marek's stories had a frustrating tendency to peter out towards the end, Pinnock keeps a tighter hand on the reins and ensures the endings do justice to the leaps of imagination that get the story off the ground in the first place. There is plenty of humour, in both dots and dashes, but Jonathan's prose is equally sure-footed when tackling poignancy (see Return to Cairo or The Guitarist's Inheritance) or horror (the unsettling Nature's Banquet, for instance). Many of the stories occupy a curious middle-ground, funny-but-disturbing, sad-but-hopeful, stubbornly resistant to classification.

When you get to the end (and particularly if you're a writer), it's worth reading the Acknowledgements section, where the publishing and/or prizewinning history of the stories is revealed. Almost all have earned their stripes in competitions, anthologies, magazines, and online publications, and it's easy to imagine Dot Dash becoming a set text for any writer looking to address the tricky question of exactly how you go about getting a judge or editor to notice your story among everybody else's. Jonathan Pinnock's answer appears to be simple: Write - write whatever and however you like, about anything that interests you. Don't worry about being one type of writer or another, don't let genre be a constraint, and - most importantly - don't forget to leave the reader grinning like a lunatic.

Last-Minute Larry

The Erewash Writers' Group Flash Fiction Competition closes on 21 March, so if you haven't entered yet and you like the sound of it, you'd better get a move on!

If you're here for the first time and don't know what I'm talking about, this is a free flash fiction competition I'm judging, in which the story must have a theme of "Start" (interpreted however you like). The maximum word count is 500 (there's no minimum). Up for grabs is a copy of my anthology, Somewhere to Start From, which I'll gladly sign and dedicate for the winner if they like. Additionally, the winning story will be published on the EWG website for all the world to see, and the winner and runner-up both get a free entry to the open competition later in the year, which has cash prizes. I listed a few tips on how to make your story stand out, HERE.


I've often wondered if there's an optimum time to enter a short story competition. Sometimes I think it might be best to be among the first entries a competition receives, so that if the judge is reading them as they arrive yours gets read while he or she is still fresh, before any similar plots crop up which might make yours seem less original. Or perhaps it might be better to be amongst the last entries, so that the judge reads yours towards the end of the process, giving it more chance of sticking in their mind as they come to make their decision.

But what if the stories are printed out as they arrive, and being first in means your story ends up on the bottom of the stack, with the last one received right at the top? Is that good or bad? Maybe it's best to aim to be in the middle ... or will that halfway-through stage be the point at which the judge is feeling overwhelmed and thinking they'd be quite happy if they never saw another short story in their lives and wondering why they ever agreed to this?

The thing is, there's no way of knowing what's best from one contest to another. Each one is organised differently and each judge will read the stories according to their own preferences. When I judged a competition last year, I wasn't able to set a big block of time aside to read all the stories in one go, so I looked at how long each one was, and read them according to whether I had 10 minutes or half an hour free, totally ignoring the numbers they'd been allocated by the organisers. Other judges might choose to read in alphabetical order according to title, or just pick from the pile at random, or any one of countless possible ways of organising the stories.

In the end, you have to go with what works best for you. There are super-organised writers out there who like to get an entry in weeks before the closing date. I'm a Last-Minute Larry, partly because it often takes the pressure of a looming deadline for me to fully focus on a particular story (usually I have two or three at various stages of completion at any one time), but mainly because if I send it off too early I really struggle to resist the temptation to look back at the story and - without fail - spot areas that could be improved.

It doesn't matter how much editing I've done beforehand, it doesn't matter how perfect I think the story is when I seal the envelope or press "send", there will always be something that'll leap out and make me wish I'd held off sending it for just one more day. It's a guaranteed way of convincing myself I've wasted the entry fee and making me feel dejected and annoyed. So, in the main, my rule is to send it during the closing week of the competition, so that the gates close behind it much sooner. I find it much easier then to consider it completely out of my hands, and I don't feel the same urge to look at the story again until after the results have been announced.

This can be taken too far, though. I've found myself on more than one occasion clicking "submit" with crossed fingers at 11.59pm on the day of the deadline, and it's a horribly stressful experience.

So, if you're feeling inclined to START writing an entry for the flash contest, don't worry that you've left it too late, but then again don't leave it any longer...