She won a £30,000 award for 'A Girl is a Half ...' and 'got away with it' despite it being a debut novel. Can't say I enjoyed it.
Dialect does not need to be restricted to dialogue. And I can think of at least one American novel that doesn't use any symbol of punctuation more than the full stop. The Road by Carmac McCarthy. It's grammar is as striped and sudden, as blunt and as decidedly weird as the world the novel is set in. The fact it is up to the reader to put the commas into the sentence if they want is not a typical rule first time novelists are supposed to follow. Now I know McCarthy is an established writer, so what about Mark Z.'s House of Leaves? It's practically a James Joyce novel in the way it casually breaks the rules of writing, and that was a debut novel. What about Gertrude Stein? I don't like Stein's work very much, but it has it's fans. The OP mentions rules of composing an English sentence, and I don't think any of the rules he suggests are wise ones to break without serious thought. But it can be done if you know what you are doing, and it can be published in a debut novel, like House of Leaves shown. It might not be wise, unless you are some kind of linguistic, Steinian genius I would advise against it, but it's hardly impossible. An example of a Stein, prose poem:
It would be very difficult to pull off. I'd imagine you would need to be some sort of linguist genius to pull something like that off. The inconsistency would drive readers mad otherwise.
I think the whole point of being writer is to go beyond the point of normal storytelling and experiment. Like instead of: "These trees look dead." Instead something really odd like: "Instead of leaves, we get plastic bags waving in the wind, deformed and ripped to ribbons. Oh boy, what evolution do we have next?". But there's far more past that point I've just mentioned.
Maybe I've been reading the wrong things of Gertrude Stein ( Tender Buttons - anyone? ), but I don't get all the hub-bub.
I don't either, to be honest. Personally I found Alice B. Toklas dull and self serving, and Tender Buttons redundant, pretentious nonsense. But there is an audience for that sort of stuff ... apparently, somewhere. I'm glad they aren't anywhere near me, though.
I can cite several examples where the author breaks the "traditional" rules of writing. However, it's important to note that these rules are being broken because they serve some purpose. Rarely are the rules being broken because the author feels like it (I suppose the only exception here is the use of quotes for dialogue). If you do break the rules, I'm sure you'll get the publisher's attention, though it might not be in a good way. It really depends on the editor(s) who reads your manuscript. Most editors tend to be conservative about this sort of thing. When in doubt, follow the traditional rules. They've been in place for a long time because they work and make things easier for readers.
The question is: Why would you? Just for the sake of breaking the "rules", or for a specific purpose? Like someone said, I think these rules you're referring to are there for the reader's sake, not yours. If you write a story about something that matters to you, wouldn't you want whoever reads it to enjoy it the way you want them to? To get the message you're trying to get across? If they're distracted by all this rulebreaking from the author part, maybe they'll put the book down and miss what you're trying to convey. Wouldn't that be a pity? I don't think there's any virtue, anything specifically "artistic" about writing it "as it comes to you", there's nothing sacred about your unedited words that would get lost if you followed the "rules". The reader doesn't care about how the story comes to you or how much you've edited or not at all. They just care about what you make them feel, what they take away after they've finished reading. And if their only reaction is irritation and confusion I think you've lost more that you've won.
No hubbub, just commenting on the pat answer, 'any and everything is OK'. The OP question: I don't interpret that as, 'suppose you are a literary genius and you want to break all the rules and put some unique prose on the page'.
As above, it depends on what rules. I have a rebellious streak, and I decided to write my debut novel 'without rules' my main character, had no motivation and I had no plot, I just wrote as I felt. If a character had blue eyes in chapter 1, by chapter 2, they were brown. It switched from 1st person, to third. It was reality based, with moments of fantasy and then switching to time travel, but without explaination. Yeah, I broke the rules, and it broke me. 25k in, I realised it was 'a piece of work' in the most negative sense. Yet, I'm glad I attempted, all those rules I thought I could do without, I realised exactly why they were there. I learnt from experience.
There are tools, not rules . Mentioned above are tools to help convey meaning to the reader (in this case really were just talking about the English language.) Unfortunately the sentiment in your post has some truth. I too often wonder about this forum, and the regurgitated "do whatever works for you," which means, ultimately, just ignore the tools that have been working for centuries, if you don't feel like them learning them.
Rules are there to make language and words work in harmony. Why make your life - and the readers' lives - difficult?
dOyouseethispo?stdoyou?doyourealize how annoying itscanBto read thislololo/Imeanmygodyou should probably have the first grasp of a basic senstense in what language you speak in. I hope I don't offendmeow but if you want to write book in whatteber language yah vant, you gotta have rethpeckt for teh language, ya? Even DAbby Wuck would say dat ith dithpicable if you donth reypetch teh langwage. TL;DR/'Good God, what the hell are you saying, Link?!' Version: It would be very difficult to pull off and still make it readable and enjoyable.
What would be the value of this? I could declare that it's "conformist" to cook food using knives and cutting boards and spatulas and pots and pans, and I could cook it by smashing things with golf clubs and roasting them by putting them in shoes and cooking them on car radiators. But that wouldn't make the resulting food creative. There's nothing conformist about using well-known tools.
Depends which rules you mean. Are you talking about the rules of punctuation, grammar and sentence structure or the rules as per Elmore Leonard which state: Never open a book with the weather. Avoid Prologues. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. Never use and adverb to modify the verb "said". Keep your exclamation points under control. Never use the word "suddenly" or the phrase "all hell broke loose". Use dialect sparingly. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Same for places and things. Leave out the parts readers tend to skip. A quick gloss over the above and it would be easy to say 'I don't think so, I'll write it my way' and to a point, I can contradict every rule but it depends on how you interpret each rule. Personally speaking, I hate these kinds of rules, I have a story to tell and I will tell it the way I want to but I can't help thinking that he got some things right. By all means, start with the weather (The ground underfoot was hard from the January frost which was beginning to thaw in the places where the early morning sun shone) but not with "It was a dark and stormy night ..." I'll leave you to think about the rest. xx
You can find published examples of people breaking all sorts of 'rules' individually (or tools, or techniques or guidelines or whatever you like to call them) But all of them at once? That sounds to me as if you'd end up with an unintelligible mess, and if anyone could manage to interpret it they wouldn't find a compelling story. (Because some of the rules are focussed on making an interesting story and some are focussed on making an intelligible story.) Normally if a good author intentionally breaks rules, they'll know the advantages of the rules and be able to compensate. But following no rules? I don't think they'll have much they can use to compensate that couldn't be identified as a rule.
You mean I might have to redraft my short story? Prologue Chickens fell from the sky and Arthur asked Jeffrey to close the window. "Close it yourself!" Jeffrey pontificated. "I closed it last time!" Arthur fabricated. "That was two weeks ago!" Jeffrey elaborated. Suddenly all hell broke loose as the twins passed the window. The twins had button noses, pointy chins, weak elbows, long necks, flappy ears, banana feet, long hands, and pale eyes. “We’ll close the window,” they collaborated. “Or we could just take care of the chickens a different way!” Arthur decapitated. “You’re not qualified to do that!” Jeffrey underrated Suddenly all hell ceased to break loose as the last of the chickens fell. “We’ll be back!” They terminated, unflinchingly.
