The world of writing

Reality of writing

Beginning writers are like waves breaking to the shore, and I was one of them once. Someone said to me today, “You shouldn’t give me absolutes. Just because that’s your style, doesn’t mean it works for me.” If I had a dime for every time I heard that…you get the picture. More importantly, contrary to what that writer said to me, I too believed what she believed, that regardless of what the “Experts” said to me, times are changing and therefore, all the stuff that was considered bad fifty, hundred, five hundred years ago, doesn’t apply today. Sadly, the rigidity of my grammar, and the holding on to the simple rules of structure, clouds the more succinct lesson of good writing. You see, she questioned my pointing out that massive use of adjectives is forced, telling, and not good storytelling. She said her voice was all about adjectives, all about the run on sentence, all about the elimination of punctuation all together. She was a new breed and I better get used to it.

It’s hard not to smile. You see, I was a new breed decades ago who decided punctuation and structure wasn’t part of my voice. I discovered, I didn’t know what voice meant. Voice is not how your words are written. Voice is what is written, and how it’s said. So if your voice stutters, or if you have the angry voice, or if you have a voice which is always in deep thought, structure will still be the same, grammar will not only be necessary, it will be imperative! “Do, do, do, you understand?”

You see, I discovered, without proper structure, “Can we eat Grandma?” takes on a whole new meaning. The important lesson to learn was I didn’t have to lose my ideas, I didn’t have to lose my idiosyncratic tics, but I had to make sure I delivered them to the reader in a concise way that was understand, and the only way to do that was to write properly. Your voice depends on you writing with structure.

Now, to her other point, “I speak passively, that’s my voice.” You can use passive verbs. It’s not going to be great literature, but it’s not grammatically wrong. Fair warning though, passive verbs isn’t the same as passive construction. You can speak, and have a voice that uses passive verbs, but you will die a grisly writer’s death if you use passive construction. Passive construction isn’t the same as using passive verbs. You can write, “I was running,” all day long. It’s lazy but it isn’t wrong. You can’t write, “He was stopped by the policeman.” Why? Because this isn’t a case of lazy passive verbs, it’s a case of incorrect placement of subject and object. The policeman is the subject, not him. He is the object, and as such, the sentence is ABOUT THE POLICEMAN. The next sentence, if following sentence structure, and on board to stream the consciousness of the reader, will give us more detail about that officer. “He was pulled over by the policeman. He asked for his license.” At this point, the reader is thoroughly confused. “The policeman pulled him over. He asked for his license.” That makes sense.

You see, voice is not about structure, it’s about cadence, tempo, style, but it will always be grammatically correct. If he stutters, the comma or the ellipse will dominate the paragraph, rightfully so. If he is overly excited, the exclamation point will surely find a spot. The rules will be more important, the more unique your voice is.

Hope that helps.

Write on!