some writer snob somewhere: Do not start sentences with But or And because doing so is grammatically incorrect.
me, writing my fic: But I don’t care. And you can’t stop me.
To my beta’s profound dismay.
Okay, writeblr, I have a genuine question: I understand the logistics of why this makes sense. That being said, the last ten critically-acclaimed books I have read do this on the regular – and that is not an exaggeration.
Am I missing something? Is this one of those “rules” (emphasis on the air quotes) that everyone unanimously decides to ignore? If so, should I follow in the others’ examples or should I follow the rules? The rule follower in me wants to die every time I see someone do it…but it also feels right?
If anyone tells you not to start sentences with “but” or “and” in creative writing, they’re full of shit. If you’re writing an academic paper, sure, avoid starting with and or but because that makes them incomplete sentences (though I majored in English, did this regularly, and got great grades in my papers, so it depends on your major too).
But with creative writing, as long as it’s like… coherent, do whatever the fuck you want. You’re trying to establish a character’s voice, not win the Most Grammatically Correct award. People don’t talk or think in perfect English and neither should your characters.
If you see a rule that’s being picky about grammar rules like this, assume it’s meant to apply to academic/professional writing only. Applying it to your creative work will not only bring you pain and suffering but also make your narration and dialogue stiff and awkward.
Speaking as a fiction editor, being a petty little grammar pedant is rarely useful outside of academia. As a writer you want to create something that flows, that engages the reader. Not sound like you were stunned over the head with a copy of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”, which by the way, is a terrible book. Don’t read that. The author is an elitist snob, and they might know how grammar works, but that’s the extent of their skill.
Basic grammar, yes. Good. Smashing.
But you can safely ignore anyone that tells you “said is dead”. Said is not dead, said is undead and wishes people would stop trying to replace it when it’s a perfectly good word to use.
@thebibliosphere, could you possibly expand on that last paragraph? I mean I get what you’re saying, but….well, as an amateur writer I find that when I write and use “said” all the time it feels…redundant, for lack of a better word. Like I’m repeating myself over and over and over again in a glaringly obvious way.
Is this just that I’m writing it and thus more exposed to it? Because I don’t notice this phenomenon in other writing I didn’t take part in.
This whole issue is one I’ve struggled to understand >.<
You’re likely noticing it more because you’re the one using it, and also because you were likely the victim of teachers with no actual writing skill telling you not to use the word because it was dull boring and repetitive. (It’s a universal problem in the English speaking world I’ve noticed, I can’t comment on other languages)
Which if used with no variance or descriptors, yea sure. Anything done badly is done badly.
But I’d rather read a million and one he said, she said, they said, than ever be subjected to prose like “he ejaculated loudly” when what the author (in this instance, JK Rowling herself) meant “said loudly and with heartfelt feeling”.
Growing up, I was told from many sources (books, tv, parents, teachers, inspirational quotes) that you should never half ass anything. That in everything you do, you should give your all. Honestly, that’s a recipe for misery and burnout. You need to half ass most things so you have enough ass left to give your whole ass to the things you care about. Or at least I do.
Executive function is absolutely a thing. But there’s a lot of things that are Done Better if you do them carefully, and doing them badly ends up being a spoon drain. The trick is learning to figure out which ones…
also asking yourself occasionally, “does this deserve my whole ass?” because quite often the task deserves about 28% of the left cheek
I think you could do a whole academic study on Sailor Moon as a character vs Sailor Moon as a cultural icon.
And I mean, not even getting into Sailor Moon-the-Icon over the decades around the world, especially Japan, which is way, way bigger and more complicated than what had in mind when I made this post. I’m just thinking of Sailor Moon-the-Icon as she’s appeared in the past few years as the face of Millennial nostalgia.
There’s the canon Sailor Moon. Fourteen years old, crybaby, reluctant hero, loves to eat and sleep, loves her friends, loves everyone unconditionally.
But there’s also been this surge in 90s nostalgia, combined with a rise in Millennial Aesthetic, resulting in a Sailor Moon who is somehow very detached from her canon self, and yet still immediately recognizable. The tattooed, pierced, witchcraft-wielding, motorcycle-riding, sexy femme ass kicking Sailor Moon. We’ve all seen her all over, not even just on Tumblr. There’s tons of artists who have done their own variations. Lots of cosplay with these edgy, grown up twists. There are multiple burlesque troupes now doing Sailor Moon-themed numbers.
And yet I’ve never seen one complaint from the fandom about how completely un-Usagi-like this version of Sailor Moon is, because I think we all recognize that this isn’t an attempt to change our beloved character. It’s representing the icon that people have grown up with. In a way, it’s showing how the image of Sailor Moon has grown up in people’s minds, beyond the character herself. People who felt represented by her when they were young are reimagining her as what she represents to them now. And it’s just neat how much that is solidly in the spirit of Sailor Moon.
Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because they’re funny. They might be rubbish at most things but as long as their banter is flowing, we put up with it.
These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.
Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?
If you labour the point that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.
Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.
I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.
It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.
Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip.
He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.
Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.
I went and checked the original source and it’s worse. While most of the comments get the problem (the lying, not the eggs) some of them just cannot see that this shit is actually a big honking warning sign for bigger shit. A loving person is not capable of doing this.
He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it?
She can’t trust a word he says and he doesn’t give a shit about her needs. It’s not about the *eggs*.
Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that “a loving person is not capable of doing this.” That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages — the words feel good in my mouth. How you’ve said it is just so right.
I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:
“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”
→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.
“Yes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”
→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.
“I’m starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.”
→ The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.
Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.
The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”
It’s fucked up, is what it is.
…deviled egg lady, if you’re truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. It’s literally the least he can do.
Can we please talk about how the Despair Faction email makes it sound like a cult. Especially that second paragraph about recruiting valuable additions. Yikes.
*cult voice* “Give us $39 so you can save 10% on a ‘special’ $40 t-shirt once every three years.”
GOD. YOU’RE SO RIGHT. I mean it’s kinda bullshit but the good little cultist in me also wants to point out you can just sign up now without buying shit, you just don’t get the card unless you do.
And also that I did buy the shirt because this year’s is way better than last year’s and instead of being mad about it I’m just giving these assholes more of my money.
I enjoy our weird cult, honestly. I love having my band fanclub cards in my wallet and getting exclusive merch. Is it necessary? Not at all. But it makes me smile when I see my membership card and get emails for new weird merch.
… and honestly AFI has a surprisingly small amount of my money compared to some.
Chartreuse Abstruseness Export 