on Live Write Thrive:

Fiction writers, when in the throes of creativity and busily working away on their story, don’t want to interrupt “the flow” by stopping and searching for grammar help online or thumbing through a stack of books. If they need an answer to a puzzling problem, they’d like the answer quickly—so they can get back to writing. And they’d like the answer to be simple to understand.

There are few things more intimidating to a fiction writer than a litany of the names of the parts of speech and the usages thereof. Who has the time (or interest) to memorize all those terms—such as “nominal clause” and “past perfect indicative”—and exactly what they mean?

Yet, writers do need to have a good grasp of the English language (if they write in English) and understand the basics of proper grammar, punctuation, and usage. There’s just no getting around it.