Your story is what you want your story to be. I've made references to this fact a few times in this book, but I wanted to be clear on what this means. I'm hesitant to write this on the grounds that I don't want people to misunderstand what I'm saying. Read my chapter on 'What you can do and what you should do', before you get too excited by the words I'm leaving you in this chapter.

In school, writing seems like such a simple thing. There are specific and clear grammatical rules. A paragraph averages 4 sentences, a chapter averages 2500 words, ect... ect... This very book goes to great lengths to tell you these averages and these expectations so that you know what is expected of you as you write.

As you mature, you find out that a lot of these averages aren't definitive. Some of the greatest authors of all time routinely defy what is considered common sense. As a result, authors emulating those authors will go out and break the rules. Some rules they break are grammatical. Sometimes, they invent words that don't exist in our current dictionaries. Sometimes, they do something absolutely new, innovative, and refreshing.

So here's the horrible truth about writing. This is the thing your English teacher may never accept, but it is the truth never the less. You can write... whatever you want. There are no grammatical rules you can't break. There are no averages you have to stick to. There is nothing in writing holding you down from doing EXACTLY what you want to do. These things are arbitrary and made up, and it's only because of BIG ENGLISH that you've been oppressed all of these years. Sorry Grammar Nazis... you guys aren't doing anything but satisfying your own anal retentive nature.

What you create, no matter how much of a grammatical nightmare, is entirely up to you. That said, in the creation of literary work, there are exactly two restraints on your writing, and they fundamentally shape everything that we know about the English language. Every grammatical rule that exists is because of these two issues. English, as a language, exists because of these two restraints.

Those restraints are first, the capacity for you to easily communicate with other people. The second, is the mandates/expectations of your publisher.

The first thing is the only thing that matters here. You can publish just about anything on Wattpad. Okay, first off, even Wattpad has limitations. If you write just a string of intelligible characters, they might delete it. If you make overly racist/sexist/gruesome remarks, they may refuse to host it. However, in general, Wattpad lets you publish ANYTHING you want to publish.

Therefore, your ONLY limitation on Wattpad is your capacity to make your writing clear to the people reading your writing. All of these grammatical rules that we set up are only there to make it easier for people to read. If you don't follow the grammatical rules, or at the very least, use the grammatical rules in a way that people can follow, then no one will understand what you wrote.

This is how barely edited, barely readable stuff becomes popular on Wattpad. It doesn't need to be perfectly grammatically correct. All it needs to be is readable for the people who are the target audience. Don't get me wrong, most of the time, the target audience WANTS grammatically accurate writings. All of my chapters on pitfalls, exceptions, and grammar are there for your benefit. When presenting a work, making something grammatically correct and avoiding the annoying pitfalls does wonder towards making your story more accessible to your audience. However, you can make that story accessible to whatever audience you want.

A complex story with good sentence variety, no Buts or Ands to start a sentence, and well defined structure may be something I like, but a 13 year old girl might like reading a story that sounds like it was written by another 13 year old girl. Therefore, breaking down your grammar and writing a story in text speak might be the very thing your story needs to reach your text speak audience, no matter how much it annoys a more adult audience.

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.