Writing Process 16  
Scintillating Syntax: Part One

‘How do I know what I mean till I see what I say?’

In earlier Newsletters here I recommend that you should forge ahead with your narrative, trusting your intuition and your innate linguistic ability to say what you think and feel. 

There comes a point – possibly we have finished the story, or we are a good half or three quarters of the way through - when we all pause and look at what we had written in a more objective way. Clearly this is part of the creative editing process.

This is when we come to marvellous issue of scintillating syntax.

Just as oral storytellers naturally speak in paragraphs and dialogue, we who write our stories down have this facility at our fingertips. In a post in 2013 I told the story of how I discovered that I was using syntax in my writing before I knew just what syntax was.

Here’s how it happened

'[…] When I was in my second year at grammar school, aged twelve, I handed in a composition (called now a piece of creative writing…) called The Fox. My English teacher - a magisterial, handsome figure of a man - returned my story to me with a high mark. I treasured this, having learned very quickly the high gold-standard currency of high marks in that school.

But much more important, in the margin he’d written in his fine, flowing hand ‘Good Syntax!’

So, what was this thing I was good at?

I hod never heard this word before. I daren’t ask my teacher.  I had to go to th ebig doctionary, one of the two big books in the house. 

There I read:

Syntax 

·        The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences

·        The pattern of formation of sentences or phrases in a language

·        A systematic, orderly arrangement of words

So, it seemed, this is what I was good at!

I was very pleased by this revelation that I had, unknowingly, been good at this thing

More books now...

called Syntax. I reckon that was the point when I actually decided I could be a writer, even though I’d never met a writer and had actually never met anyone (except my teachers) who wore a white - not a blue - collar to work.

The rules of good syntax were only peripherally taught at that school; despite the fact that it was called a grammar school. There I only really learned the nature of syntax and grammar when I started to study French and German.  I had to do this in order to get to grips with languages whose grammatical structures were different from (different to?) my own. I still remember the exotic feeling of getting to grips with the subjunctive form in French and than realising that the subjunctive form exists in English. I had been using it for years and never realised it.

So how, you might say, did this little girl who lived in a small crowded house that had only two big books on its shelves get be the mistress of very good syntax at twelve? 

I did it the way we all do. I’d been using and speaking my own language since I was nine months old  -  talking,  listening and arguing in a verbally oriented  family for nearly twelve years.  Very importantly though, thanks to the library at the end of the street, I had also been reading my language for nine years and was now reading up to five books a week.  

          I now feel certain that reading all kinds of material voraciously when young is the key to the high literacy necessary if you are to be a writer. This visual, aural and intellectual process embeds grammar and syntax deep in your psyche – to become available to you when you need it to write your own stories. This is so even when you have not articulated the fact that you are using them. It is initially an unconscious process.

Proper language is already there, deep inside.  I well remember a child in a class I was teaching, saying to me ‘You mean I already talk in grammar, miss?’

Early in my studies for teaching career I remember reading that by the age of five normal children child will have incorporated into their individual brain structure all the rules of grammar of their own language. Children don’t have to learn it, they speak it, they talk it, they dream in it. It may later be useful for them to learn the rules they already operate at some later point - for example when they learn a foreign language.             Or when they so a linguistics or literature degrees.

          And of course we know it is useful when you become a writer and have to edit your own work…

I know from my workshops that some writers get jumpy and defensive about grammar and syntax.

Either they’re hide-bound by the memory of an opinionated or aggressive teach or a clumsy editor. Or they are terrified of looking stupid. Or - however good a storyteller they are - they are innocent of grammatical conventions in written language and fear that very innocence could send their work flying onto some editor’s floor.

This is a pity -these natural storytellers can make very good fiction writers. They have the most important qualities - a feeling for the trajectory of a story, an ear for dialogue and a fresh world view.

Good, self-developing writers such as readers here will appraise and creatively edit their own writing, and recognise the syntactical virtues of their own prose, eventually incorporating more of the magic of Scintillating Syntax, absorbing it and incorporating it into their own intuitive prose writing.[...]'

If you are becoming fascinated by the formal intricacies of our own language you might like my 2009 post on The Semi Colon.  Also remember Strunk & White's Elements of Style, the simplest reference for issues of grammar and syntax 

A later note:  These points above have been enhanced by my experience in writing my newest novel The Pathfinder, where the main thrust of my research was into the non-literal, artistic, complex, story telling culture of the Celts of West Britain, surviving under the literate dominant culture of the Romans in the dying stages of their Empire.

 This extract might go towards explaining it.

‘[…] That was the time my father went on to tell Pendragon and his listeners of a dream he’d had the previous night, where plucky battles and heroic charges were replaced by circuses of talk and the exchange of great ideas and of fine and necessary goods.
 'This was in a golden, happy place, where words sustained more benefit than rattling swords,’ he says. ‘And when I awoke, I realised that this is the pathway we should take ourselves. We’re half way there after all. Haven’t we always by custom welcomed into our halls strangers who are storytellers, music-makers and craftsmen? On the other hand, don’t we make warriors – high and low – wait at our gate?’ Because surely it’s talk and exchange that keeps the peace, not battle.’[…] 

Next Week: Newsletter 17

Scintillating Syntax Two: Long and Short Sentences.