When I was growing up, an authority figure in my life was an abstract painter.
He was okay at figure drawing, and okay at cartoonish things, and he couldn't have drawn you a realistic face to save his life. Rather, his thing had always been abstracts. He would draw trees in a very jagged, blocky, harsh style, people composed of exaggerated shapes, with almost garishly bold colors distributed within these shapes, as if he had put the thing together from a prescribed set of blocks and semi-circles and cylinders. And in a sense he was doing that-- the way that he painted, as he described to me, was kind of like putting together a puzzle. He had all these pieces that he knew and liked to draw and he liked to put things together from those pieces. He had never had a formal education in art. He had been observing art for a very long time and had a keen interest in abstracts and so one day he just started doing it. My opinion on his work doesn't matter, but people with money thought he was good enough to hang on walls.
Until time claimed all of his ambition and harsh economic conditions came for us all, he even made a good bit of money selling these.
To me, there is nothing that really stops language from being abstract in a certain sense.
One of my favorite books I own is "No Tiger," a collection of poetry by Mika (available from publisher Apocalypse Party). Mika's writing fascinates me because she has her own lexicon and expressions. She has her own grammar. The flow of her thoughts is atypical, unique, but sensical if you put in the effort to interpret her, to decrypt what you are reading rather than consume it passively. She doesn't spoon you meaning, but you can extract it. English prescriptivists would look at her work and have a heart attack. To me her work was really encouraging to read and was one of the things that solidified my own beliefs. I'd always been against the idea that fiction writing should be "professional"-- that sticking to a set of rules was necessary not only for understanding, but that the "craft" was to work innovatively within this set of rules. Late into writing the Solstice War, and then again when writing Unjust Depths, I realized that I really liked writing scenes, particularly action scenes or emotionally fraught scenes, with a lot of choppy partial sentences. It simulated my own behavior in difficult situations, where it felt like everything moved more quickly than I could analyze and new thoughts formed before old ones were fully processed. It felt like writing this way disturbed the typical understanding of a sentence in the way a gunshot disturbs the typical understanding of life itself-- kind of the way a semicolon or a dash does because they're not often deployed in formal writing.
The first few chapters of Unjust Depths were written "safely", but over time, I started to experiment more and more with my own style.
Eventually, and currently, the writing is intentionally kind of messy, and there are a variety of places where it breaks down into a sort of realm of the interpretative, where I just don't complete any thoughts, and leave it up to the reader to decrypt. It's invigorating to be able to work with such a rigid language in such a kind of chaotic freeing way.
We are taught that "correct" grammar and spelling are signifiers of "good," "professional," "high quality" writing. However, there are places where we ascribe intentionality into defying these sorts of rules. As an example, I have seen people who grew up online and who mainly text and post, expressing that writing in complete sentences which begin with a capitalized word and end with a period expresses a certain coldness and intimidating aura in text. The internet has its own forms of intentionality, and its own grammar in a sense. Often my wife and I will jokingly mispronounce or misspell words in ways that communicates something to one another. Writing "bunny" as "Bnnuy" communicates something within a certain community. To see "bnnuy" and point out that it is mispelled would in that instance look really ridiculous on your part-- unfortunately we do see that kind of cringe boomer stuff constantly online to this day.
"Cringe boomer stuff" is in itself a phrase with a life of its own, isn't it? And we allow it; we relish it, even.
More and more I am unable to express myself in fiction without some of "my own grammar," without my own lexicon. I am a person with a deeply dysfunctional brain, but I am also someone who got a formal education in specifically English writing, and whose day job involves a strict style guide. However, I am not striving for efficiency in fiction-- I am optimizing for my own expression. We tell writers to write with concise, perfectly composed English sentences in order to efficiently convey meaning to readers-- this presupposes that you will want to reduce friction for mass market publication, that you will appeal to the greatest possible amount of people. You must write something "fresh" but that is easily transmissible thereby easily *sold*. But art should not necessarily be easily transmissible. In video games, there is a frequent discussion of "friction." Mass market games have "sanded off edges" that people who grew up with older video games not only remember fondly, but edges that meant something. We have returned to ideas like, for example, that there is intentionality to "clunky" movement, that it defines a relationship to an environment. I think that similarly, writing gains something as art by being *less* transmissible, by being more encrypted in an author's personal grammar for its own sake.
Rather than seeing it as lacking "polish" or constituting a "mistake"-- it should be possible to both create and to analyze writing which is messy or difficult or which orbits a certain lexicon (particularly, writing which takes after the mannerisms of internet users!) as writing that is "doing something" rather than "lacking something." As writing that is conferring a different experience. It should be possible to set aside the strict use of a comma (perhaps the stupidest and most pointless argument in language) and look at what a work is saying and doing, and what the context of the author is, and continue to read without judgment or disgust. I understand there are readers for which this represents a difficulty (I can imagine screenreaders do not like what I am doing, which is a different argument). I am okay with being dismissed and not being read. I love having less readers because it means I have less conversations about grammar or god forbid chemical and mineral sciences with people who annoy me. Anyway I will continue to stubbornly present my argument nevertheless. I am a communist and if I am staunch in my belief in such a thing despite the mainstream authoritative view on it then you have no idea how stubborn I can be about how little I give a shit about English grammar.
Since typical arguments against nontraditional grammar are essentially the academic equivalent of someone saying "cope," "citation needed," or "you're just jealous" I won't feel the need to reproduce or orbit them to prove my point in any way. Basically you can low tier god if you disagree with me and that's that on that.