Post by account_disabled on Jan 6, 2024 9:04:04 GMT
Every rule is created to be broken. Nobody likes rules, but we all want others to respect them. Today we see which rules much proclaimed in writing manuals can be circumvented, broken, forgotten. By reading, you understand many things. Above all, we discover new ways of narrating, different from ours, from those we are used to, and every now and then we also discover authors who go beyond the canons, who are real voices out of the chorus. We have a lot to learn from these authors. I have therefore selected 5 rules, let's call them that - also because they are not all real writing rules - which have been broken by some authors I have read. I couldn't think of any others, but you can report them in the comments if you know others. 1 – Point of view I don't want to go into the merits of the science of PdV - for a good article on the point of view I leave you with a guest post written by Alessio "LiveAlive" Montagner - because to me words like homodiegetic and heterodiegetic mean nothing at all and I've never been bothered the trouble of going to understand what they mean.
I know for a fact that I would never be able to connect those words to concrete concepts. But they say that you must always maintain a point of view in history, at least that's what I've read from many places. But the good George Martin shows us that we can ignore this rule and use even twenty different points of view in the same Special Data novel. In the novels of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga , Martin uses a different point of view for each chapter, because each chapter has its own specific protagonist and the events narrated are seen through the eyes of that character. If I'm not mistaken, the point of view used by Martin is that of the externally focused heterodiegetic narrator . Do you confirm? When to change point of view? I don't think the technique Martin uses is suitable for every type of story, so if I ever had to choose it, I would think about it a lot. Also because it involves extra work: the narrator must take on the role of a different character each time. 2 – Show, don't tell The eternal dilemma of telling or showing.
Which is also told when it is shown. In my opinion, this rule is too extremist: there are points in the story where we can do nothing but narrate and not show. By showing everything, in my opinion, a sort of tension is created in the reader and the whole narrative can become monotonous, as in the opposite case, when nothing is shown. I now remember Rowling's novel The Vacant Seat – which Lisa didn't like, just as she won't like what I'm about to write – in which there were several parts explained, almost commented on by the external narrator. But there was also action, so a good amount of it shown. I didn't find them annoying or boring to read at all. But they were obvious, yes, because I noticed them immediately. 3 – Grammar Even though I consider myself something of a grammarnazi , I have not always respected grammar. Here I have spoken several times about Twain's beautiful novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , narrated in the first person by Huck himself, a semi-illiterate boy. How should he have written? Grammar is therefore one of the myths of writing , as I wrote some time ago.
I know for a fact that I would never be able to connect those words to concrete concepts. But they say that you must always maintain a point of view in history, at least that's what I've read from many places. But the good George Martin shows us that we can ignore this rule and use even twenty different points of view in the same Special Data novel. In the novels of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga , Martin uses a different point of view for each chapter, because each chapter has its own specific protagonist and the events narrated are seen through the eyes of that character. If I'm not mistaken, the point of view used by Martin is that of the externally focused heterodiegetic narrator . Do you confirm? When to change point of view? I don't think the technique Martin uses is suitable for every type of story, so if I ever had to choose it, I would think about it a lot. Also because it involves extra work: the narrator must take on the role of a different character each time. 2 – Show, don't tell The eternal dilemma of telling or showing.
Which is also told when it is shown. In my opinion, this rule is too extremist: there are points in the story where we can do nothing but narrate and not show. By showing everything, in my opinion, a sort of tension is created in the reader and the whole narrative can become monotonous, as in the opposite case, when nothing is shown. I now remember Rowling's novel The Vacant Seat – which Lisa didn't like, just as she won't like what I'm about to write – in which there were several parts explained, almost commented on by the external narrator. But there was also action, so a good amount of it shown. I didn't find them annoying or boring to read at all. But they were obvious, yes, because I noticed them immediately. 3 – Grammar Even though I consider myself something of a grammarnazi , I have not always respected grammar. Here I have spoken several times about Twain's beautiful novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , narrated in the first person by Huck himself, a semi-illiterate boy. How should he have written? Grammar is therefore one of the myths of writing , as I wrote some time ago.