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So, after a bit of searching, I've found style guides referenced, but no discussion of the different guides themselves. In college, I was required to buy three different style guides, depending on what decade the instructor earned his own degree. The problem with these is that they are all, more or less, academic style guides.
I'm currently writing a lot of fiction, mostly for my own amusement, but ideally, I would like them to be readable. I would like to avoid the most obvious of errors or faux pas before forcing a friend or family member to proof read. Nothing is more discouraging to me than a formerly black and white sheet of paper covered in red, like the floor of an abattoir.
Can anyone recommend a good style guide for fiction? Some rules that I know from academic writing seem not quite to fit, or cause me to create the most awkward and convoluted phrases when writing fiction. I'm not trying to win any perfect style prizes. I simply want to avoid creating confusion.
Also, I am a huge fan of reading aloud. I hope to create prose that falls trippingly off the tongue. Unintended chuckling at an awkwardly phrased sentence is never good.
Thank you in advance for your thoughtful input,
Joe Koenen
Victum Invideo Silenti
JoeKoenen said:
Also, I am a huge fan of reading aloud. I hope to create prose that falls trippingly off the tongue. Unintended chuckling at an awkwardly phrased sentence is never good.
When it comes to fiction, Joe, I highly recommend the style "guide" you suggest in your post: if something sounds good when read aloud, then it's probably stylistically acceptable. That is, of course, if you read with proper inflection and pauses on punctuation. But assuming you have a better-than-average grasp on grammar from your college education, you already know how to form a grammatical sentence. The rest, I think, is sound and rhythm. If an extra comma works, or an m-dash works, then use it. If you get your work to a publisher, there will be an in-house style guide that your editor will definitely bring to your attention (I think this has happened often with the use of commas; while sparing use of commas has become the norm, there are still many writers -- me included -- who like to use them somewhat liberally; if I want to force a pause in a sentence, and it's grammatical, I'll throw in a comma).
As you noted, academic writing has more stringent style requirements, and the different fields have plenty of (often disagreeing) style guides. I believe fiction is much more wide open. I've tried to play with this flexibility (with mixed success) by using an inordinate amount of colons in my sentences, or building an entire paragraph out of a single sentence with numerous semicolons (I'm not the first writer to do such things). If it sounds good, is clear and grammatical, and gets your point across, then I say you go with it. Style guides be damned.
I can't add that much to what tunawrites said. I think for fiction, that's sage advice. If you have a prospective publisher in mind, it couldn't hurt to request or inquire about their preferred style guide. They might have something "in-house" or refer you to an outside source. I'm reading a science fiction novel by Ben Bova (Mars Life) during some free time this week, and couldn't help but notice he breaks a lot of "rules" in his writing, for example, using sentence fragments. Haven't seen a semicolon yet. And when the characters speak, it's often just the words in quotes, and the reader has to "guess" who's talking based on context. That would never fly in academic writing, but it works well in this story.
I do mostly tech writing, and the style guides I use read like legal documents. There's an entire section on how to properly format mathematical equations. This is the other end of the style spectrum. But for fiction, barring any typos or blatant grammatical errors, I tend to agree with tunawrites. Have fun, get creative, and use the language more as a "paintbrush" than a "tool."
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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