When you’re writing fiction, you have to make the same grammatical mistakes that your characters would make. As in, the same mistakes that human beings make when they’re talking. When you’re narrating in first person from a character’s viewpoint, there are a lot of mistakes you have to consistently make.
Seems simple enough to me. Pay attention to conversation around you, listen to what people actually say as opposed to what’s correct, then mimic that. Not precisely, there are a lot of “ums” and pauses and started-and-restarted sentences in real life conversation. It’s unreadable. You have to clean it up so it all makes sense, but sounds like people might say it. How people talk in movies or on TV is a better example of what to imitate, but it still pays, in my opinion, to eavesdrop in public and pay attention to your own conversations with others to get the right flavor.
People speak a wonderfully grammatical mix of misunderstood words, coloquialisms, regionalisms and over-applied rules, like people who put a “T” at the end of every words that ends with an “S,” turning “chess” into “chest” every time they say it, or people who insist on saying “Barnes and Nobles” instead of the real name of the chain, “Barnes and Noble. ” The book “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker is a wonderful read for those interested in language the way I am. (Or as one friend absolutely insists on calling him, Steven Pinkerton.)
That being said, I still find it mind-blowing that when I self-published my book more than ten years ago, a pretty decent handful of people told me it was “ungrammatical,” or that they found a lot of “grammatical mistakes” in it. One girl opened the front cover, shook her head, closed it, and said “I can’t even read this there are so many mistakes in it!”
What mistakes? I read that first page twenty times trying to find the “mistakes” she was complaining about. I even said, “show me where.” She shook her head and put me off, so my guess is she was . . . I don’t know. Lying? Seeing things? So wrapped up in her own drama that she didn’t want to read my book and used the “mistakes” as an excuse?
At any rate, “In the Dark” is told in first person from the perspective of Ian, who is 23 years old. She’s a drug user, a club-goer, and a little bit of a slut as well as being sweet, funny, caring and friendly. Of course she doesn’t speak grammatically correct English. What 23-year-old does? Normal ones, I mean. There are third-person scenes told from Sebastian’s perspective, and those are scrupulously grammatical. Sebastian is old and crusty and stoic, and his speech patterns are precise. Ian says “towards” Sebastian says “toward.” Ian says “I wish I was,” Sebastian says “I wish I were.” Ian says, “I ain’t doin’ it!” Sebastian says, “You will if you want to survive this night.”
I mostly just ignore people who say the book is full of grammatical errors. But every now and then, it bothers me. I just want to smack my own forehead and say “Duh!”
After all, who the hell wants to read an action-packed adventure story that is precisely grammatical in every way? Sounds like a boring way to spend an afternoon to me.
