There's a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn't that incorrect?
- Isn't that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn't that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn't that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn't you fix your contractions? You don't want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it's this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
Rules are Whatever Educated People Say They Are
The author and Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis, received a lot of fan mail from children, and in between his writing, teaching, and meetings with the Inklings, he somehow made time to reply to them. Very admirable. Will you write to your fans when you are famous? Or has blogging replaced fan mail letter writing?
Anyway, he sent one such letter to a young, budding writer on the subject of language. He says:
About amn't I, aren't I and am I not, of course there are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. “Good English” is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another. Amn't I was good 50 years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren't I would have been hideously bad in Ireland but very good in England. And of course I just don't know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don't take any notice of teachers and textbooks in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say “more than one passenger was hurt,” although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was!
C.S. Lewis had personal experience on the evolution of language. At Oxford, he taught Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and if you've ever read the Faerie Queene, you know how much different the language was in the 1500s.
But Did you catch that? C.S. Lewis basically said rules, in language, do not exist (except, perhaps, as some sort of illusion created consciously or subconsciously to control the uneducated). Rules in language are whatever educated people say they are. If you can break the rules and still sound smart doing it, you're set.
I think one of the reason we give Stephenie Meyer such a hard time about not following the rules is because junior high girls are reading her, so she must not be very smart.
Cormac McCarthy, on the other hand, can break every rule in the book, but because he's so smart we don't know what he's saying half the time, it must be okay.
Is This Unfair?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I'd like to proclaim freedom over all of you to break the rules when you want, but I don't think that will help you get published or read. Instead, let's create a new rule, based on Stephenie's experience:
If you're writing books for smart people, break the rules. If you're writing books for junior high girls, don't.
PRACTICE
Let's do some free writing today.
Write about whatever you want (your day or your feelings about “the rules” or work on your work in progress). Write for fifteen minutes. When you're finished, post your practice here in the comments section.
And don't be afraid to break a few rules.
I am putting on my anthropologist’s hat here, so please bear with me for a moment (and yes, it’s a pith helmet).
It isn’t the same thing to say, as you quote C.S. Lewis, “there are no right or wrong answers…’Good English’ is whatever educated people talk;..” and conclude from that statement that:
“C.S. Lewis basically said rules, in language, do not exist (except, perhaps, as some sort of illusion created consciously or subconsciously to control the uneducated).”
A closer interpretation might include that the rules are real but vary across place and time. Consider, for example, driving regulations. In California, we drive on the right. It’s a very firm rule. In Fiji, one drives on the left. It’s a firm rule there, too.
Different places, different rules. Not the same as no rules.
I had a writing professor in college who insisted that to earn the privilege of breaking the rules (as they existed in that time and at that place!) one had to first demonstrate that one knew the rules. Implicit in his policy was the fact that once one understands the rules and the purposes (of rhetoric, clarity, emphasis, and so on) they serve, one can then decide when and how to break them to good effect.
I hope this sounds like engaged discussion and not like snarky argument, because I don’t mean to be snarky nor to argue. I only wanted to offer a different perspective.
That said, may I add: I am the editor at my place of business and I sometimes run into interesting understandings of what “the rules” say. My favorite: A sentenced edited from.
“Enclosed please find your agreement and deposit instructions and a copy of….”
to
“Enclosed please find your agreement and deposit instructions & a copy of….”
because “You can’t use the word ‘and’ twice in the same sentence–you have to use the ‘&’ for the second one.”
Honest.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I love engaged discussions, Sheila (almost as much as Liz loves to mock inconsistencies like the hilarious one you showed us here).
Yes, I think you could say rules exist but evolve. The real question here is WHO is making the rules. In Fiji and the US, there is a governing body who regulates driving and creates rules that everybody is expected to follow. If you don’t, you are fined.
However, in the realm of language, CS Lewis seems to be saying that the regulating body is much more informal and loosely made up of the educated elite. That regulating body can still fine you, the writer, through their system of reviews and the establishment of education: schools, colleges, and universities. The fine comes in the attention they pay you or remove from you.
One opportunity I wanted to present here though, and could have done more clearly, is that the highest elite in the establishment, the university professors who teach writing in grad schools, were teethed on rule breaking. They all had to read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and those other rule breaking modernists. Ironically, to get there attention, you almost have to break the rules (but like your professor said, you do sort of have to know the rules first or you sound like an idiot, which is the point of CS Lewis’ quote).
Here’s the other side of this, though:
Who decides who the elite is?
In our fractured, postmodern culture, those informal regulatory bodies are becoming a lot more informal, a lot smaller, and way more scattered in their understandings of the rules and regulations of language. Do you think the next generation is going to give a crap what the Chicago Manual of Style says? With the way things are going, I think there will be a dozen manuals of style, maybe a thousand, maybe a million.
So in this environment, why shouldn’t you create your own?
Sure it should be consistent. No &’s mixed with and’s (unless that’s in your style guide). But it definitely doesn’t need to be approved by some fictitious regulatory board with increasingly less power.
Yes, that’s an excellent concept and point you make. There is tremendous power in deciding what is acceptable and what is not, what gets taught and what doesn’t (whose books? which events in history? what languages?).
It’s exciting to watch these changes, and a little unnerving sometimes, too.
Some things, I think, remain true across time and space.
English rules don’t constitute one of those things, though.
But the French do have their Academy…
Right. The victor always writes the history books, and I think there’s a fight going on in the culture about who gets to teach. Is it Wikipedia (and by that I mean everyone), or is it the accredited colleges and universities which are becoming more and more out of the price range for the average American (not to mention world citizen) every year.
Wikipedia seems to be slowly gaining ground, and that IS unnerving. It’s also an incredible evolution in education and our race itself.
What a wonderful conversation! Thank you both.
The distressing part for me is the propensity on the part of at least a few young adults I know to take “I found it on the internet” as a reliable indication of truth.
It seems so gullible, but I hear it too often.
Yes, that is disconcerting. Like with all tools, the internet needs to be used responsibly. Still, I think that claim isn’t going to go away, and on a more hopeful note, I think as the internet evolves, it will be less and less disconcerting.
Well, amn’t I something!
Whew! What a relief! I never could remember all those rules anyway!
Well, as usual C. S. is right! And I agree with both you and Shiela’s points.
A couple opinions:
1. I’m not sure where the “rules” originate from, but I do suspect that “grammar Nazis,” as they are called at times, perpetuate a lot of the silly ones and seem to take satisfaction is cheap shots, including making a point of pointing out typos.
One college professor of writing pointed out in a lecture that we writers needs to know our grammar, but grammar won’t make us good writers. I agree whole heartedly with that. Some professors get it right.
2. Notice in the C.S. quote above the word “logic.” Many so called grammar rules it seems to me are based on logic. It’s not logical to end a sentence with a proposition because a preposition needed an object to complete it’s meaning (never mind that the object might be implied!). Coordinating conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence show that the two main clauses should be joined. And are split infinitives really fair to the infinitive?
Language is a human function. Human beings are not purely logical, not even rational all the time, like Spock. We’re not nearly as objective as we think we are, certainly not consistently so.
I will push my luck and issue one more opinion. And I have on my virtual pith helmet.
I am not a fan of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. On the one hand, I concede that Strunk made a few good points, but there is a lot of bad advice in that book. I am continually mystified by writers that I admire who praise it. Have they actually read it? Without getting too derogatory, let me just say that frequently the text in its compulsive terseness approaches incomprehensibility (sorry, long word, I know).
The principle of making every word count is a good one, as long as the writer does not take it to extremes. Is the best writing, writing that achieves a machine like efficiency. I think not. Of course, cutting the fat out of our writing is a good idea and can often, even surprisingly, improve it considerably. But I hear so many good writers advising such moves in the extreme.
And I once owned the book. I bought it in a lovely, hardback commemorative addition. I read it. I was disgusted at the writing in it. Really. I had my daughter sell it online.
I love this comment, Bill, in all it’s complexity.
rules, keeping them, breaking them, following them religiously, creating a crack in the rule. I am more inclined to poetry when I think of rules rather than good English grammar and language in prose. Why? Because I was taught old-school grammar and language, not only at school which was horrific enough but at home, on vacation with my aunts, weekends with my grandmother. The only place where you could say, “me and you,” without the retort, “It is you and I, Susan” was on the streets. Or perhaps the use of a double negative, quelle horreur in my family. Every aspect of the words I chose to use came under scrutiny, goodness, when I think of times I stupidly asked “Can I leave the table?” So I know I break the rules of grammar, I use language appropriate to the character’s age, class, gender, culture, religion etc.
Poetry for me (apart from being really bad at it) is a release, there is a form called free verse so I can follow the rules of having no rules without breaking one – or can I? By adding structure – number of syllables per line, number of lines in a stanza, repeating words creating rhyme – oooh that is way uncomfortable to contemplate.
As it happens I spent the day writing different things, two pieces of leaving cert homework for my son, a poem, essay for my course, essay for myself, essay for my tutor, and this comment. This is the poem:
hope ?
She sat waiting
Waiting to be picked up
Waiting to be nurtured
loved
She waited
Noisily at first
With ever decreasing
Whimpers, moans
sobs
She waited
Until she cried no more
expected no more
hoped no more
lone
She stopped waiting
I love this comment, Suzie. Thank you. Poetry is for the rebels all of us.
Good post. Knowing the rules, though, allows you to be able to confidently break them.
“I think one of the reason we give Stephenie Meyer such a hard time about not following the rules is because junior high girls are reading her, so she must not be very smart.”
I disagree with this. I criticize Meyer for breaking the rules because her rule-breaking doesn’t sound right. Her writing is unpleasant and grates on the mind. Psychosomatic fingernails on the blackboard. If she broke the rules in a natural-feeling, musical way, in a way that makes sense, then I wouldn’t mind her. Not at all.
We must break the rules when it makes sense to. We must write how real people talk. If a story reads like a person talking in your ear, then the rules of grammar and sentence structure are meaningless.
Do you think the kind of writing that grates on your ears is universally grating? Country music grates on my ears but my neighbors (to my chagrin) love it. Ebonics sounds foreign to me, but it’s being taught in universities. And I could read Faulkner out loud forever, while Liz gets so frustrated with it she can’t finish a page.
Stephenie Meyer grates on your ears but it clearly doesn’t grate on the ears of the millions reading it. It doesn’t really even grate on my ears, to be honest.
Real people talk all sorts of strange ways. Maybe Stephenie just speaks in comma splices.
It is about different tastes but the difference stems from whether or not the reader cares about the quality of the writing. Some people just want to read a good story – they don’t care how well or badly written it is. But does any writer want to write a bad book?
Stephanie Meyer doesn’t break the rules, she’s ignorant of them.
That’s a pivotal distinction! I agree, and it’s bad for kids to think it’s okay to write like that.
When my daughter read the first Twilight book, I had two serious conversations with her: one on the difference between a boyfriend and a stalker, and another on developing one’s writing style. My daughter likes to write, and if she eventually grows up to be one of those writers who breaks all the rules that’s fine, but she needs to learn the rules first. I don’t think Meyer ever did, and I made sure my daughter knew that.
Great question, Louise. You’re right. I don’t think anyone wants to write a bad book. Or a bad sentence. And yet, one her worst errors is her plethora of comma splices, and you just committed one in that last sentence. We ALL speak in comma splices, maybe (and don’t tell Liz I said this) the rules should reflect the way the language is actually being used. And to bring it back to CS Lewis, that’s exactly what he was saying. The rules of language reflect how it’s actually being used… by the educated people.
We have a perfectly good rule to cover that tendency; it’s called a semicolon. 🙂
I avoid semicolons like the plague—they’re remind me of term papers. ; )
I like what Sondra Smith told me on LinkedIn, “Every rule can be broken with a better, more efficient rule. That’s how we learn and grow. However, there are times to learn instead of trying to invent the wheel again.”
I love that you wrote this! I have had so many situations where following the rules seemed to get in the way of being able to accurately communicate the thought in my head, or made the thought sound so formal and stodgy that I wasn’t happy with the tone of the sentence. I tend to think of language rules as more of a letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law issue. The “rules” are there to help avoid confusion, to help the reader know what you are trying to say, but language and communication is so complex that sometimes adhering to the rules seems to diminish clarity instead.
That being said, I know I need to brush up learning the rules, so I can use them to their best advantage more often. I guess you could say that’s why I’m here.
Maybe that’s why people are much harder on Stephenie for breaking the rules? Liz provided a couple examples of how breaking the rules added confusion to the text. (I still snicker at the image of Bella’s voice breaking up a fight.)
My favorite English teacher asked us while we were reading Faulkner, What work do you have to do to get the gift?
Faulkner, of course, makes you jump through all sorts of hurdles to get the gift, and yet, those who do have said over the last almost-hundred years the gift is worth the work.
One of the questions behind your question about Stephenie is that clearly the people criticizing her don’t think the gift is worth the work. Reading is work. More so than watching TV, anyway. I think we can agree on that. And reading can be made more difficult by rule breaking (conscious on the part of the author or not). Stephenie may not have known the rules (although her editor definitely did), but that’s not why I think people criticize her. I think they do it because they don’t think the gift is worth the work.
Sometimes when we want something too much we destroy it. Emphasis on the ‘too’. It’s okay to want things, to desire them with a passion even, but when the wanting creeps into needing it threatens the balance and tips over into desperation. Then bad things happen. We crush the life out of the possibilities by grasping on too hard. We kill, we destroy, we exterminate, we see the finish line up close.
I pride myself on seeing every day as a learning opportunity.
What am I most curious to learn?
Anything to do with the subject of writing well. That’s what fires me up, that’s what wakes me up nights, that’s what kicks me out of bed in the morning. So I learn and learn as much as I can each day.
But sometimes I wake up and realize I’ve been trying too hard.
I grasp the rules, the guidelines too close. I align myself so truly that all life, all colour, all fragility is squeezed out of the bloom so that it withers and dies before the sentence is even completed on the page….
Follow the rules but not to the extent that your real self, your real voice, your real quest and freshness of being and self dies.
I know where you are coming from on that one. And if you don’t break any the same thing can happen. The sentence dies. Well put. Writing is scary.
What a great discussion. I’ve heard it said pertaining both to drawing and painting (when I was in college), and to writing; that before you can deliberately draw, paint, write, incorrectly (abstractly, experimentally) you must learn to do it correctly. Before Picasso developed cubism he could drawn and paint realistically. Before Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake he wrote Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Yuck!!).
I was reading the book “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffery Eugenides this week and I noticed that he, who is a Pulitizer Prize winning author and teaches at Princeton wrote some horrible dialogue. It was only about four sentences, but he has an educated kind of redneck person talking to one of the main characters, and when the redneck guy spoke I just cringed. It had a horrible incorrect ring to it. I just hated it. The first point here is that Eugenides apparently hadn’t “learned” the incorrect jargon well enough to write it convincingly (for me – could be just me) and the second is that if this weren’t a book that I otherwise liked a lot and had been looking forward to read and expected to be blown away by I wouldn’t have minded the error.
Faulkner uses a lot of dialogue that is very “true” sounding.
I don’t find Stephanie Myers jarring. I just find it boring and feel like it’s a waste of time to read it, and time is a kind of investment to put into a book, just like the effort to understand Faulkner is an investment. It’s up to us all to decide what we want to read but in writing I think it’s best to have a story to tell first and then tell it as clearly and compellingly as possible or else no one will want to invest in reading another.
Yes, Marianne, what our readers “spend” with us is their time. Offering value for that is important. At this stage of my life I care more about spending my time well than my money (within reason…).
Your point about storytelling resonates, too. I edit from time to time, and my best clients are folks whose writing skills are mediocre but have awesome stories to tell.
For a while I was thrown off by writing that blatantly uses fragments as sentences. Someone gave me a great music analogy stating how it often helps to know music theory to play a rock song.
Rules are nice to know sometimes, but oftentimes they are just meant to be broken.
Think of when you were most creative; you were probably a child.
You scribbled outside the lines (and probably on the walls of the house too).
Then someone guided you and taught you how to do improve your coloring.
You’ll find a mixture of breaking the rules and following the rules.
It will feel natural and your personality will shine through.
I am teaching what’s called Basic Writing at a community college in Southern Nevada and I have 8 students in my class. When the semester started, I had them write on theme that related back to the essay we read in class. So, one time they wrote about travel, another time they wrote a descriptive place, another was about their favorite music, and then they began working on their first essay, a narrative essay. I asked them to pick an incident from their life that they could write about in three to four pages and it be able to have a beginning, middle, and end. We also read several narratives in class as examples. Most did okay. One student’s writing would not pass even in a fifth grade classroom. (I know, because I asked my sister-in-law who is a fifth grade teacher to read it.) This is a pass/fail class and I told him that I would not be able to pass him because his skills would not pass in the next courses he would have to take, such as English Composition 101 or any class that required writing of any kind. I asked him about his courses in high school. He did not have to take English past his sophomore year, and they never taught the students how to write at all. I have been experiencing a lot of frustration the last two weeks because I’m wondering, “How does this happen?” I pulled out some of my writing assignments from sixth, seventh, and eight grade English, and I could write a coherent paragraph with no grammatical errors. Then as the tutor for the college, I’m seeing students who do not know how to set up a logical argument and follow it through. Some essays I’ve seen are a jumble of sentences that do not follow and go nowhere. I am 46 and it scares me that no wonder we aren’t a world power in basics anymore. Any suggestions? This isn’t just about breaking grammar rules, this is about not knowing them to begin with in order to break them!
Communication is what we are after. And I say that full well knowing that I just ended the first sentence with a preposition. Furthermore, the second sentence was indeed begun with the conjunction, “and.”
Whatever it takes to communicate your point, your story, your argument, your whatever–that is your linguistic toolbox with which you manifest your thoughts and tales, as alphabetically coded messages to be read and understood by your audience.
Audience–that is the question. To be, or not to be, understood, by those specific persons or groups of persons who should comprehend your message and even, yeah I say unto thee, even act upon it, for the world is in need of becoming a better place. Let me be clear, as they say in our nation’s capital.
For whom are writing? With whom do you wish to explain your messages? Or, as is commonly said/written here in the USA, who are you writing for? Who you gonna call?
If you are writing for most everybody out there, then let your participles and your prepositions dangle, if you like. And begin your sentences with “and.” Because clauses having no true predicate cannot possibly qualify as sentences and therefore make no sense. But then they do, in a way. . .like, you know what I mean. But then that’s the way everybody talks these days, so they’ll understand.
If you’re writing for the real readers–well, that’s another species altogether. There aren’t many of us around any more, cuz everything’s going to video.
Communication by imagery–that’s what’s happenin’. So all these little letters on your screen become irrelevant, unless of course you actually want to analyze the state of the nation and the world condition and how various assessments and evaluations of same are brought forth by thinking people who wish to communicate true ideas, a la Plato and Moses, etc. Now I’ve had my fifteen minutes or more; that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it, as they say in Vernacular, Kentucky.
‘If you’re writing books for smart people, break the rules. If you’re writing books for junior high girls, don’t.’
I’m pretty sure what you mean is: ‘If you’re writing for smart people, learn the rules, understand them, then break them if you need to for the sake of your art. If you’re writing books for junior high girls, don’t bother trying to write well because that’s not what’s important to them.’
No, not really. My comment was more a satirical point about how the content actually determines how we perceive the rule breaking. If you’re writing content that educated people are going to find interesting, educated people won’t care about which rules are broken because they enjoy the story. In fact, they might even appreciate it more if you break the rules.
If you write content that junior high girls find interesting, the junior high girls won’t care about the rules being broken (or followed, honestly) because they enjoy the story.
The darkside of this, and thus the satire, is that if you write content junior high girls find interesting, the educated people (and I apologize profusely for the overgeneralization) will judge you for breaking the same rules they praised the authors for breaking in the books written for educated people. Maybe that’s cynical, but I don’t think it’s far from the truth.
I heard a comment today that in K-2 grades, students are learning to read. After that, they’re reading to learn. If we’re breaking grammar rules in books written for middle schoolers, they’re not learning the correct way to do it. You have to know the rules in order to break them (I think that sermon has already been preached).
Katie
Good point. For developing minds, rule breaking is not very helpful.
I love this Joe. I am a big CS Lewis fan. IN fact when I was at Oxford I used to live in his house The Kilns.
=HYoU;! Encourage the saying of man the all to us! Stupid not them we say comprehend ever partial rules Some follow not we, mAybe> So( always under finish him victorious” wars to yesterday S. Lewis-C better wife even axis aha you thank, Very drip-likingmost}}
Haha well said!
Starting out with my writing focus in poetry, breaking the rules was my modus operandi. Like every poet should, I created words, capitalized on a whim and made punctuation my slave. In poetry, for me, the greatest tool was to use grammar rules like a sculptor uses mediums. Bend an break them and use them to get your message across. If a period makes people pause, then I will make them pause in the middle of this thought with a period to emphasize what comes next. And if “temporary reality” takes longer to read than I want the reader to process the thought, let’s make the new word “temporareality.” Why not? This method has come in handy as I move my focus into fiction and blog writing. Ultimately it’s the difference between communication majors and english majors (something I’m processing as I look at a career in tech writing). English majors (depend of course on the quality of teachers), having to have written tens of thousands of words in term-paper-correct english style tend to get hung up on correct grammar (the creation myth of grammar nazis?). Communication majors understand that what’s important is that the message that needs to be conveyed is both delivered and received, no matter the medium. Good grammar just prevents distraction when dealing with other English majors 😉
I think people give Stephanie Meyer a hard time for breaking the rules because they think (and I don’t know, but this is probably true) that she breaks them because she never knew them in the first place. It doesn’t bother me so much because Twilight is in the first-person voice of a teenager, who probably doesn’t know or care about the rules. Eh, but then again Bella is supposed to be a literature fanatic, so wouldn’t she know the rules? :/ Not sure…
My point is, you have to master or at least know the rules before you can break them effectively. Like in painting.
I think people give Stephanie Meyer a hard time for breaking the rules because they think (and I don’t know, but this is probably true) that she breaks them because she never knew them in the first place. It doesn’t bother me so much because Twilight is in the first-person voice of a teenager, who probably doesn’t know or care about the rules. Eh, but then again Bella is supposed to be a literature fanatic, so wouldn’t she know the rules? :/ Not sure…
My point is, you have to master or at least know the rules before you can break them effectively. Like in painting. Picasso could and did paint perfect Renaissance-style chubby babies. But he had something to say beyond that, so he exploded form, broke all the rules, and created NEW rules.
I’d like to think that we could make punctuation more of a living breathing aspect of our writing. For example, I personally love the dash – which provides a more visual dimension to a text. And, (oops!), I think the run-on dot has a lot going for it as a way of bringing depth and timing into a piece of literature. Sometimes the right punctuation mark saves a dozen useless words. We need to acknowledge that texting and e-mail speak are changing the way we write.
Joe, would you consider an amendment to your rule? “If you’re writing books for smart people, break the rules. If you’re writing books for junior high girls, don’t.” My amendment would be: If you’re writing for smart/educated people show them you know the rules and are clever enough to break them. If you’re writing for the less educated (shall we say) don’t distract them from your point by trying to be cute or clever breaking basic grammar rules, except where necessary for the story.
Maybe. But I’d rather be called an ageist than a class-ist. This is more of a marketing demographic issue than a education issue though. Other people read Twilight and Hunger Games than Junior High Girls, and yet they are the target audience. Just like other people saw The Avengers other than 15 year old boys, and yet most blockbusters coming out this summer will be marketed toward that demographic. I like your point and mostly agree with it, but my dad is well educated and yet he can’t stand Cormac McCarthy. So education level alone doesn’t predict whether someone will like serious literary fiction.
Somewhat it can be true but we also have to find others factors that can affect entire process.
Once upon a time there was this giant cock flying towards me and i was like “im gonna have to suck this giant cock” so i brace myself to suck this giant cock but at the last second it changes trajextory and hit me right in the end. i think “well at least i got that out of the way” but then the giant cock rears back and begins to jab my in the eye over and over and over and eventually its jabing into my brain making me lose control over my body. after this the cock comes out of my eye socket and slaps my across the face, causing me to fall out of my chair. weak and at my most vunerable,, the giant cock finally lodges itself sideways in my anus, where it rests ppainfully for 4, maybe 5 hours. and then i realized i was using the Mac OS X.
same. and, i love this
Im writing this story about a god-like being who takes care of one section of the planet. He/She has mountains and a forested base surrounding a misshapen lake with a small island near the center. When people enter his little area he choses to observe them. They pray to who he thinks is him and does everything he can to keep them safe. When the couple has been there for a few years they have a baby. I want the baby to cause some sort of natural disaster and have the mother die from childbirth cause duh their in the forest! The father will blame the god thing for what happened. The god thing saves the child from the disaster and takes her to the island in the lake’s center. I want the god to blame himself for what happened and hope that raising the child will be his redemption. When the girl is old enough I want the story to go to like a part two where she is the “speaker” where the god was in part one. I want her to hear him as some sort of voice in her head. As she gets older and realizes that she controls the nature in his area I want him to kinda behind the scene realize that the death wasn’t his fault. He will then put it aside and we can start part three with how he will teach her to be the god she is destined to be. But now there is a big choice… she would have the ability to start her life over and not have any powers at all. Which means she could have her parents back and live a normal (woodsy) life, or she could be a god having control over her little area of land and wait there one thousand years to have another child with powers end up with the same fate as hers. IF YOU DECIDE TO STEAL THIS IDEA IM ALLOWING IT GO ON AHEAD BUT AT LEAST MAKE IT BETTER THAN I EVER COULD CAUSE THEN YOU WOULD HAVE STOLEN AN IDEA AND RUINED MY HOPES FOR IT
with love
-Mariah
Sorry, but this isn’t working for me. First of all, junior high school girls are not reading Stephanie Meyers. They are reading her books. Unless she has something written on her body, your sentence doesn’t make any bloody sense. Second, James Joyce writes bull. I would much rather read Twilight then Portrait of an Artist any day.
You speak of breaking the rules… But what ARE the rules?
uhh maybe hes just trying to be kinda funny