Anyone who has been following The Write Practice since day one knows how I feel about the semicolon, sentence structure, spelling, and other grammatical foibles. If a writer lacks any of these things in his or her work, it drives me crazy. I’ll start railing on about the destruction of the English language, the dumbing down of society, blah blah blah.
But why would any writer care about what I think?
A couple of my friends are synesthetes, which means that they experience reactions from more than one sense from the same stimulus. For example, letters and numbers might have colors, or names might have a flavor. I remember one saying that lockers tasted like chicken nuggets. Of course, she hadn’t actually licked the lockers, and I guarantee that they wouldn’t taste like fried chicken.
How do you write something that makes your readers cry? Something that sends chills down people’s backs? Prose that explodes in your readers’ imaginations?
How do you write books that sing?
The fact is you don’t write books that sing. It’s impossible. Instead, you edit them until they sing whether they want to or not.
We humans have been telling stories since we learned to talk. No doubt those tales that sent torrents of adrenaline through our veins also seared the strongest tracks in our memory, and were told and retold through generation after iPad-less generation. Indeed, the definition of myth is “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.”
So where do you draw the line between a myth and a fictional story?
You don’t. You write one into the other.
On Saturday, I went out to dinner with some friends as an early birthday celebration. We all ate our fill, and when the server came by to ask us how we felt about dessert, all of us laughed because we were so full. Sweet treats to follow? Please.
Speaking of desserts, I’m sure we all know the different between a desert and a dessert, right? Just in case, let’s review.
I consider myself primarily a creative writer, but to pay the bills, I take on many the odd job involving writing. Because of that, I’ve been doing a lot of editing lately, editing blog posts, articles, books, and more.
With all this editing, I’ve found that I keep making several of the same changes again and again. Yes, there are typos and grammatical corrections, but a surprising amount of the editing I have to do is just simple formatting.
