Fun Stuff > ENJOY

Writers who write?

<< < (4/4)

LeeZion:
Here's some additional advice: Let your first draft suck.

No, I'm serious. One thing I've found, four novels in, is that if I took the time to hone everything I wrote while I was writing it, I would never get past Chapter 1. Instead, I concentrate on getting it out. That means taking the ideas and emotions tumbling around inchoate in my head and transferring them onto paper, in a form where other people can see them. The transferring is hard enough — my first two novels took a year each.

Only after I had a mediocre first draft — something that, in the very least, other people could see — could I go back and fix things.

It's a powerful experience getting all those thoughts out on a paper. When I was writing the last chapter of my fourth novel, in November of 2005, I was putting on the page words that had been floating around in my mind since February of 2003. What elation it was to finally get those words out!

Writing is an intrisically right-brain activity. Once it's done, the left-brain work of copy-editing takes over. That's when I start looking for sentences longer than 30 words and cutting. (Which is one of my rules, honed after years in the news biz: Be very wary of any sentence longer than 30 words.) That's when I turn on the word search feature in Microsoft word and start eliminating participles and adverbs.

The result: Four completed novels. And you can see some of the other results. When I'm in a hurry, I write the way I feel. Which is why, in my previous post, I have two sentences in a row that start with the word "Except." The copy editor in me looks at that and says, "Yuck." No doubt there are a few weak spots in this post, as well.

And before anyone starts getting snarky about "to finally get," three paragraphs up, yes, I know about split infinitives. I have strong feelings about when split infinitives are acceptable and are not acceptable. This use of a split infinitive is perfectly OK.

vegkitkat:
I tend to write on the bus, or on the way to the bus stop. I have a poem sitting in my pencil case that is almost illegible it was written so fast. The idea is good; it just needs refining. That's where I die. I guess I don't have the confidence to look at old work and see how badly it's written.

cuchlann:
Well, if you want to think about where split infinitives come from, there's no problem at all.  They're an addition by post-enlightenment grammarians that wanted the English language to act like Latin - you can't split an infinitive on that language, so why English?  Of course, the infinitive in Latin is one word, and two in English, so you can't split it in Latin because you *can't* split it, and you "can't" split it in English because people tell us not to.  Most grammar books never bother mentioning it anymore, for that reason, as well as an acceptance of language as a shifting form of communication.  

And no one can tell I love philology, right?  O_o

LeeZion:
My rule on split infinitives is simple. Go ahead and split the infinitive, UNLESS:

1) The word doing the splitting is "not" or "never"
2) The sentence really sounds better with the adverb somewhere else.
3) The sentence is better served by not having the adverb at all.

Otherwise, split to your heart's content. I always think of William Shatner's exhortation TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE! Any attempt to "fix" the split infinitive blunts the impact.

Another rule that should never have been created — and in fact was created for the same reason that the "don't split infinitives" rule was created — was the rule about never ending a sentence with a preposition. My rules on this are simple:

1) If ending a sentence with a preposition is good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.
2) Remember what Winston Churchill said. He described this fake rule as the sort of nonsense "up with which I shall not put!"

And I don't want to hijack this thread any longer. I won't talk about Grammar Rules From The Land Of Moron any more, unless someone really, really wants me to.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page