At The Write Practice, we publish a new article each day designed to help writers tackle one part of their writing journey, from generating ideas to grammar to writing and publishing your first book. Each article has a short practice exercise at the end to help you immediately put your learning to use.
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If the Oxford comma is a prepster in chinos and a green LaCoste polo, I’m a hipster in a dirty flannel shirt and skinny jeans. If the Oxford comma is, in fact, Oxford, I’m the year you took off college to go chill with some Maasai in Kenya. If the Oxford comma is a MacBook Pro, I’m that manual typewriter you got at a yard sale that everyone sees and asks, “Is that a real typewriter? Can I try it?”
Who needs the Oxford comma? Shoot who needs commas in general?
We’re introducing a new series, long planned, on the Write Practice. We’re going to choose one of our favorite practices and talk about why it was so cool (or not!).
Sometimes you just have to say, “Rules? No no no. F*&# rules. I’m not following any rules.”
That’s why on Saturdays, we at the Write Practice break some rules.
On Thursday, Matt Snyder wrote a great post about three ways to provoke your audience to action. He told a heart-wrenching story of a young girl forced into prostitution in Thailand. It’s the kind of story that makes you want to get up and smash some gross American men’s faces in.
It makes me want to do something.
But it’s not Thursday anymore. It’s Saturday, and on Saturday we do things differently.
Instead of provoking your audience to action, what if you provoked them to inaction?
You have two brains: a creating brain and a controlling brain. Both are good, but they don’t always get along. The problem is that your controlling brain has been fed for years. It has been well educated by well-meaning teachers while your creative brain was left to wither, sick in bed.
What is an interjection? I like how F.J. Rhatz describes them, “a noisy utterance like the cry of an animal.”
I was speed walking from my bedroom to the kitchen to grab a snack. I was so famished I walked too fast and hit my pinky toe on a door. Ouch! Crap! Darn it!
Those are interjections.
How do you edit your 1,000-word article in five minutes, your 5,000-word short story in ten, and your 400-page novel in under an hour?
Hint: forget spell check.
Steven Pressfield says he can’t read authors with strong voices anymore (he cites Philip Roth) because they rub off on him. That’s fine for Steve, but for us fledgling writers, those voices are like calcium supplements. They make our bones strong.
Lately, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. This is a problem because Annie Dillard has a unique and beautiful voice, and without meaning to, I stole it. I’m slightly embarrassed about it, so keep it on the DL.
When my English Literature professor, Marilyn McEntyre, told us Hemingway would write all day in small Parisian cafes and, afterward, take his lunch to the Musee du Luxembourg where he would look at Cezannes, it transformed how I looked at authors—and writing, for that matter—forever.
Elmore Leonard said, Never use any word other than “said” for dialogue. Why? Try reading the above out loud. The “he exclaimed” and “he admonished” and “she cried” become like a child saying your name over and over. Distracting.
The word “said,” though, is easily ignored. You want the attention focused on the dialogue, not your clever use of verbs. In many cases, it’s good to change up word choice. You don’t want to use “quintessential” or “luminescence” too many times. “Said” is a major exception. Let us tune it out. Please.
I closed my eyes, and what I saw made me cringe.
A little kid, maybe ten or eleven, sat against a wall watching some other kids his age doing tricks on their skateboards. He wore short red shorts and roller blades on his feet. When he got up to skate around the black top, the other kids pointed and nudged each other, laughing at him. Their shorts were baggy. He nearly tripped and fell several times. Embarrassed, he sat back down to watch.
I opened my eyes, shuddering.
The little kid was me.