Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Write WHATEVER you WANT

At the end of it all, your story needs to be accessible to the people who you want to read your story. The grammar you break that may annoy your readers will drive them away, so we like to think that grammar goes hand-to-hand with accessibility, but it doesn't always have to. Sometimes, breaking a grammar rule makes a scene easier to understand, and that's okay too.

Breaking grammar is what leads to new words existing. Google certainly wasn't a word three decades ago. Shakespeare himself invented dozens of words. Our language is constantly evolving, and that evolution comes from writers who break the convention and discover better ways of communicating something that doesn't already exist. If their new words or grammatical tricks become mainstream, then English dictionaries have no choice but to indoctrinate them into their understanding of the English language. Language evolves, which is exactly why books from eighty years ago don't sound like books today and you struggled to understand your Shakespeare. New rules are made every year, and maybe you might be a forerunner on a new grammatical idea!

Of course, I'll repeat my mantra for this book as well. Make sure you understand WHY these rules exist, get comfortable within the rules, and then come up with a reason why you should break them before doing so. You're probably NOT Picasso, and while you can break convention, true innovation does NOT come from breaking the rules. True innovation comes from accepting limits, and finding new ways to get around it.

Here's an example. You know the video game South Park: Fractured But Whole? The original title of the game was the Butthole of Time. However, unsurprisingly, the game developers wouldn't let Trey Parker and Matt Stone keep that title with the word Butthole in it. Plus... unless you're five, it's not particularly funny... or creative. So, with that as their limitation, they came up with Fracture But Whole, which is way wittier, more memorable, and also great for those who like puns. Their limitation forced them to be more creative.

So keep in mind that as much as you want to invent your own way of speaking, you'll have the limitations of popular opinion weighing you down. However, there is one more thing holding you back as well. That is the rules of your publisher. First off, every publisher is different. Talking about finding a publisher may fall way outside your current development as a writer, but humor me for a bit. Usually, you'll find an agent first once you have a completed manuscript or two, then he'll hook you up with some publishers. Every publisher follows their own grammar rules, and they may differ from others. Every time you submit your work, you may need to fine tune some of the ways you write to cater to the publisher you want.

On the opposite side, you make want to pick publishers that publish books like what you write. Don't submit your science fiction story to a typically romance publisher. If you plan to submit a short story to a magazine, make sure you know the rules that magazine keeps for proper English and grammar. Yes, they have an editor that'll fine tune anything you write, but the closer your work is to your publisher's ideal, the easier you'll be able to sell it.

I'll also put a nod out to poems. There are no rules for a poem; unless, you write a poem with rules. There are hundreds of different pre-rendered formats to follow to create haikus, sonnets, epics... but it's entirely up to you to restrain yourself in whatever way you want to. A reason poems are often so pretty and creative is exactly because of the constraints.

So that's the point of this chapter in all. Write what you want to write. Do whatever you feel like. However, you follow grammatical rules so that you know it will be accessible to the majority of your writers. If you can't communicate the ideas you want to communicate to the majority of the people you want to communicate it to, you failed as a writer. This goes beyond just physically understanding the mechanics of the scene.

If I want you to feel sorrow in this chapter, and you don't, I failed. If I want you to understand this guy is a bad guy, and you don't, I failed. If I want you to like my main character, and you don't, I failed. These are the kinds of questions critics should be helping you filter out. Are you conveying the message you want to convey? Not just can they read the sentence, but do they want to? Your job is to convey the story you want to tell to the people who read your story. You are at the whim of your audience.

And ultimately, if you want to do anything beyond self-publishing, you are at the whim of big publishing. They will tell you what they want on their websites. You have to give them that. English classes are there to set you up for all the expectations your publishers will have in your grammatical format. We live in a miraculous age where writing doesn't have to go through a publisher to reach a public, but for the moment, it's still one of the major things that make English what it is today.

The standard of English is set by the publishers and the people, they are the ones you're trying to sell your work to, so don't make stuff grammatically correct because you "have to", do it because you're catering to an audience, and you want them to be able to read, follow, understand, and be affected by the words in the way you want them to. In the end, that is every writer's goal.