How things fit together, logically, with rules, describes a world where creativity can flourish….even when a creative person breaks the rules.
When you walk into a well constructed building, be that an airport, a home, or a corporate headquarters, you should not notice how well the ceiling keeps out the rain. If light breaks through yonder window, let it be The East, and not a crack in the casement molding.
That’s grammar for you, metaphorically speaking. Grammar describes the rules governing various materials that hold things together, and when it’s used well, it practically disappears. When grammar get handled sloppily, however, the roof not only leaks, but cracks appear to challenge our confidence in the entire edifice.
It’s natural to think of language first when discussing grammar, but that would unfortunately miss the more elegant aspects of the whole enterprise. Grammar should be thought of as a series of rules that enable ideas to exist with as minimal impediment as possible. Notice I’m not asserting that grammar should insure proper or correct usage; that would be an entirely subjective judgement. Writing dialogue, slang, or other forms of vernacular requires deep understanding of grammar so the writer can help the reader keep track of what’s being said. Put another way, the most effective means for breaking a rule is for the breaker to fully understand what’s being broken in the first place. Without understanding how things work, excellence can only happen by accident.
This is true for music and painting and cinema and any other formalized creative enterprise. Where structure exists to keep ideas organized, grammar exists to show us which side of the road traffic should flow.
Take music. There’s a joke that the best way to torture a classical musician is to conclude a composition with an unresolved chord. The substance behind the jape points to the natural order of musical grammar, at least in a western context. We expect chord progressions to resolve, presenting listeners a sense of completeness and conceptual conclusion. Unresolved in sound, a listener will almost instinctively feel that something has fallen out of joint.
It’s certainly OKAY for a piece of music to end without tonic resolution. That’s a function of grammatical choice, a rule broken to communicate an idea. An unresolved piece of music, breaking traditional grammatical conventions, conveys a sense of unresolved purpose precisely because it breaks expected rules. Without rules we all expect, there’s no way for a creative decision to deviate.
Movie and television viewers intuitively understand how dialogue scenes visually behave on screen. Consider this: one character speaks in close up, then the other speaks in close up , and while each character may appear alone in the frame, he or she is often facing the opposite direction in that frame simply to help the viewer stay oriented in space; they’re facing each other even if the other person is out of each frame. The camera COULD be anywhere, but grammatically speaking, it wouldn’t make sense. The rules of storytelling practically insist on a way we structure our information, which in turn helps us make choices about the kinds of information we might choose to present.
Adherence to rules for their own sake generally self defeats the purpose of those rules in the first place. To create something, a person must first have a need to create something, and that means the creator must have a creative soul. But acts of creation without awareness of a thing’s unique grammar denies its value in large measure. When imagining something new, take care in thinking about how ideas go together. Rules don’t mean you’re limited. More often than not, you’ll still have endless choices available. Just think: a finite alphabet enables an infinite set of written words. But adding rigorous guidelines to any creative enterprise will likely enable an idea to not only come to life, but also make sense to someone else who recognizes how your idea works in the first place.