>>20151005>Anyone can write a story following the rules of grammar to the book. A good writer takes these rules and works within them to formulate their own individual styleThe thing is, unless the style you're going for is "shitty writer", you need to know the rules first before you can go around breaking them and have your writing not suck. And I don't mean a passing familiarity of the rules, but actually understand them. If you don't know what a run-on sentence is, how could you know when a good time to include one is, or even how to create a run-on sentence intentionally, for the right effect?
And forget about style. Style is how you use these tools: word choice, sentence structure, pacing, the list goes on. But if you don't know how to construct the most fundamental pieces of written language, how can you expect to do something consistently, let alone in a way that is interesting? You're not honing your style, you're attempting to learn how to write through trial and error, something people have been working on for thousands of years. You don't have to retrace their steps. Sure, you might get there eventually, but it's going to be a long road. There's a reason we learn to count before trying to learn how to divide.
Sorry for the rant, but it's a pet peeve of mine. IMO one of the reasons no one takes fanfiction seriously is because neither do most fanfiction writers.
