Do You Need Good Grammar to Write a Book?
- Jul 17
- 7 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
A young writer asked me if they needed to be really good at grammar in order to write a book. I've heard the same kinds of worries and questions from adults, so I thought I'd turn it into a blog post.
Worries about grammar can talk would-be writers out of ever even starting.
What if I'm bad at spelling? What if I don't know how to diagram sentences? What if my grammar isn't perfect? What if I can't remember the difference between a verb and an adverb? Shouldn't I fix all that first, or at least get lots better before I begin?
You do not need good grammar to write a book - you just have to be willing to keep learning while you write.
A confession from someone (me) who loved English classes in school
I had an affinity for English in school. Reading and writing came more naturally to me than a lot of other subjects - my own learning disability lives firmly in the math department, not the language one - so you might expect me to tell you that grammar has always been effortless for me.
But there are words I misspell almost every time I type them (my fingers and I have a long-standing disagreement about the words "definitely" and "receipt"). I have to think hard every time I need led or lead. And when I'm drafting fast, I splice commas, and can switch tenses in the same paragraph. If you handed my rough drafts to a strict English teacher, they'd bleed red ink.
Here's the thing, though: none of that stops me from writing books (or emails or texts or blog posts or newsletters!). It just means the writing and the fixing are two different jobs, and they happen at different times. And full disclosure, I don't bother editing emails or blog posts much, so if you're eagle-eyed, you'll probably find errors in lots of places!)
The thesaurus trap (or: a lesson from Joey Tribbiani)
If you're too young to have caught Friends when it first aired, there's a scene worth looking up. Joey volunteers to write a glowing recommendation letter for his friends, decides he wants to sound smart, and runs every single word through a thesaurus.
The result is glorious nonsense. His original line, "They are warm, nice people with big hearts," comes out the other side as "They are humid, prepossessing Homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps." Then he signs it "Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani," because he ran his own name through the thesaurus, too!
I bring this up because a thesaurus is a wonderful tool and I use one often when writing books. But it's important to only reach for an alternative word only when you actually mean it, not just to sound impressive. Half the time the simple, true word ("warm," "nice," "big hearts") is the better one.
Note: Using a thesaurus actually helps you build your vocabulary over time! Even if you do write some purple prose (excessively ornate, flowery, or complex) while practicing at first.
How writing actually gets better
While I do think English classes and grammar courses have their place, there's a big difference between learning how to write an essay using MLA formatting and writing a story.
When it comes to writing fiction, you don't get better by studying grammar rules in a vacuum. You get better by absorbing them, almost by osmosis, from the books you already love.
The first time you read a book, read for fun. The second time, read like a spy. When two characters talk, how is the dialogue laid out on the page? Where do the quotation marks go? Does the question mark go after the last quotation marks or before? How do you format a sentence when there's an attribution involved (he said, she said)? When does a new speaker get a new paragraph? How does your favorite author show that someone is angry without ever using the word "angry"?
I learned how to punctuate and format dialogue not from a textbook but from flipping back through novels I loved and studying exactly how the authors did it.
And even after decades of writing, I still have to look up where the em dashes go if I'm interrupting dialogue. I naturally want to write it like this:
"Everyone be quiet! I can't—" Kit flapped her hands, gesturing at them both "—hear anything with this racket!"
That looks fine, doesn't it? But it's not quite right. When a character keeps talking and an action interrupts them in the middle of the sentence, the dashes belong outside the quotation marks, hugging the action:
"Everyone be quiet! I can't"—Kit flapped her hands, gesturing at them both—"hear anything with this racket!"
The rule underneath it is small but sneaky: if a character's speech gets cut off or trails away, the dash goes inside the quotes ("But I thought you—"). But if it's a beat of action breaking into speech that otherwise keeps going, the dashes go outside. I have written sentences like that a hundred times, and I still pause and check.
(My blogging program hates em dashes, so I usually settle for a regular dash in posts, but I pasted them in properly so the above samples read more clearly.)
Lean on the people around you. Your English teachers want to help you! Ask them to read a paragraph and correct it (not a whole book, please, they are terribly busy and underpaid!). If your school or library offers a writing class or a young writers' workshop, take it.
Study the errors, too. Years ago there was a blog on Tumblr called Reasoning with Vampires where the writer marked up sentences from the very popular Twilight series and pointed out, line by line, what made them clunky or confusing. It was funny and a little horrifying - but reading it taught me an enormous amount about sentence structure. I even saved a lot of the graphics in a folder on my desktop so I could go back and reference them.
Seeing why a sentence doesn't work can teach you even more than one that does. (And please notice: all those Twilight words were sentences that got published anyway. More on that below.)
The most famous books in the world are full of mistakes
Errors don't only happen to nervous beginners. They make it into the biggest, most carefully produced books on Earth - and those books turn out just fine anyway.
Even if you aren't religious, you probably know that the Bible is the number one selling book of all time. And back in 1631, two London printers put out an edition of the King James Bible and accidentally dropped the word "not" from one of the Ten Commandments. Which meant their Bible instructed everyone to commit adultery. (Which means, go ahead! Cheat on your spouse!) Around a thousand copies went out the door before anyone caught it. People have called it the "Wicked Bible" ever since! Most copies were rounded up and burned, but a few survived. Today they're prized rarities. One sold at auction for more than $50,000.
Or take Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In the very first printing, the list of school supplies on page 53 tells new students to pack "1 wand"… and then, a few lines down, "1 wand" all over again. Only about 500 of those flawed first editions were ever made - and rather than being worthless, they're now some of the most sought-after books around, with one expected to fetch more than $33,000 at auction.
And it isn't just books. If you've ever scrolled the "Goofs" list for a favorite movie or show on a site like IMDb, you've seen how many continuity slips sail straight into finished films that hundreds of trained professionals worked on - a glass that's full in one shot and empty in the next or a character whose hairstyle changes mid-conversation.
Not one of these mistakes stopped the work from being made, published, and loved.
Even published authors don't do it alone
Published books are not written by one flawless person who never makes a mistake.
They are edited. Behind almost every book you've read is a whole team:
a developmental editor who helps with the big-picture story
a line editor who tightens the sentences
a copyeditor who catches the grammar and spelling
a continuity editor whose entire job is to catch it when a character's eyes are blue in chapter two and then - oops! turn green in chapter nine
And this is true even for indie and self-published authors like me. When I publish, I hire those editors, because I know I splice commas and drift between tenses. I'm not embarrassed about that - it's just how the sausage gets made. No one writes a clean book alone. Which means you, at the very start of your journey, absolutely do not need to be a one-person grammar machine.
Practice out loud, and let the criticism teach you
One of the best ways to practice, especially when you're young, is fan fiction. Writing about characters and worlds you already adore lets you focus entirely on the craft - the dialogue, the pacing, the emotion - without having to build a whole universe from scratch. And when you post it, real people read it and respond.
Now, I'll be honest: reading criticism in the comments can sting. But once the initial ouch fades, some of that criticism can help you improve. "I got lost here." "I couldn't tell who was talking." "This part felt rushed." That's not someone telling you everything is crap and you should quit! They're handing you a road map so you can see exactly where you need to improve. Learning to sort the useful feedback from the just-plain-mean stuff is a skill of its own, and it's one every working author has had to develop.
So, should you wait until you're "good enough"?
No. Please don't.
The blank page will not fill itself while you study for a spelling test. Spelling is fixable. Grammar is learnable and also something you can hire people to help you with later. But the story - the idea only you have, in the voice only you have - that part can't come from anyone else, and it can't come from a version of you that's still waiting to be perfect.
Write the story now and fix the commas and spelling mistakes later!
