In Today’s Journal
* Chopped Livah 1
* About Commas
* I Get Scam Emails
Chopped Livah 1
Chopped Livah 1, a deep dive on “Six Senses, the POV Character, and Setting Description” is ready to go, and I’m tickled pink. It’ll post at 8 a.m. (Arizona time) on Sunday, September 27.
That issue came in at a little over 4000 words, and I think I gave free subscribers almost half of it as an excerpt. (I tried to, at least, and I believe I did.) They should be able to read from the top all the way down through the first paragraph after the section titled “A Little Deeper.”
So if you’d like a good example of what I’m doing over there, Subscribe Free Here.
All About Commas
The only reason punctuation even exists is so writers can use it to direct the reading of their work.
Like the maestro with his baton does for an orchestra, punctuation helps set the rhythm and beats for fiction and nonfiction alike. It also emphasizes or de-emphasizes passages of text, providing the reader with short, medium, and long breaks as they read.
And the thing is, readers don’t have a choice. You can’t choose to read through a mark of punctuation. That’s exactly what makes it such a powerful tool for writers.
But as is the case with most things, the Powers That Be got hold of punctuation and tried to impress each other by adding new, often unnecessary “rules.” They made a great tool far more difficult to understand, much less to use.
As a result, many writers (even professionals and even bestsellers) either don’t have a clue how to use punctuation or are flat afraid of it because they don’t understand it. You know, like spiders.
And no wonder they don’t understand it. My old HarBrace College Handbook had either 9 or 19 pages (I forget) of “rules” just for the comma.
That’s what gave rise to my little book Punctuation for Writers. It clarifies a lot of that, and it does so in simple, straightforward language.
Because it’s necessary to use words and phrases like “clause” and “dependent clause” and “phrase” and “preposition” etc. to explain the use of punctuation, I even included a brief grammar refresher in the book.
Anyway, probably the most misunderstood and most abused mark of punctuation is the lowly but very powerful comma. It’s also the mark that gives writers the most fits.
We’ve had a lot of new subscribers at TNDJ recently, so I thought I’d toss out this bit on using commas.
This is excerpted directly from the second edition of Punctuation for Writers. I also used it as a quick aside in the upcoming Chopped Livah post:
The Five Rules of Comma Use
1. Never place a comma between a subject and its verb or between a verb and its object. (Realize that a subject may have more than one verb and that a verb may have more than one object. See Chapter 7.)
2. When a subordinate clause introduces an independent clause, separate the two with a comma. (If you aren’t sure about clauses, Rule #2 is an example of itself as is this explanation. Also, see the discussion about clauses in Chapter 7.)
3. Do not use a comma to separate the clauses when a subordinate clause follows an independent clause. (In Rule #3, “Do not use a comma to separate the clauses” is an independent clause and the remainder is a dependent clause. This rule, again, is an example of itself.)
4. Use a comma before the appropriate coordinating conjunction to join two related sentences. (The coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Remember the acronym FANBOYS.) By the way, you very seldom need a comma after a coordinating conjunction.
5. Trite as it sounds, when you are in doubt about whether to use a comma, leave it out. Believe it or not, most comma problems arise from misuse of commas, not from their omission.
All of that’s true, and it’s all you need to know to use commas to direct the reading of your work.
I even wrote a 16-page handout, titled it “The Rules as They Should Read,” and used it to teach English to college freshmen, New Citizens Project students, and GED students at the Roswell Campus of ENMU before I finally expanded it and turned it into Punctuation for Writers.
As a result my students never had to buy the expensive HarBrace College Handbook. When the dean of the college called me in to ask why, I shrugged. “Why confuse students instead of enabling them to learn?”
I Get Scam Emails
I finally found a good use for AI.
I received a scam email yesterday from a guy who purported to host a podcast in Dallas. Of course he gushed about my work, my websites and newsletters, etc., and invited me to participate as a guest on his podcast. The whole email was obviously generated by AI.
But the boatload of proposed questions in the email comprised a great interview. So I copied and pasted all the proposed questions into a Word document, then wrote my responses to some of them. I’ll finish writing my responses today.
The resulting interview will be much too long to post here in TNDJ, but it will form an excellent basis for another issue of Chopped Livah.
Then, because he (or it) donated so many great questions to the cause, I briefly responded to the email. Here’s part of what I told him:
1. Of course the characters—whatever the writer perceives them to be—real, his or her own construction, or whatever, are the ones who are actually living the “fictional” story.
Even if the writer is constructing the story block by careful block, the characters are still the ones living it. In the writer’s “real” story, with any luck s/he’s sitting alone in a room making sh-tuff up. How does that not make sense?
2. If all the myths you mentioned work, why isn’t everyone who follows them step-by-step a great fiction writer?
Maybe more to the point, why do so many fledgling writers who’ve spent months or years outlining their masterpiece eventually give up and find something else to do? I can answer that question. You can’t because you’re too stuck in the myths.
3. We all enjoyed making up stories even before we learned the alphabet.
And none of us stopped believing we could do that until a lot of people who do not write fiction (mostly critics, teachers who don’t know any better, and others who speak from a vantage point of deconstruction and criticism) decided to make money by telling us what we ‘had’ to do if we wanted to be fiction writers.
They invented the myths, and then they set about selling us books that reinforced and propagated those myths: outline, [write], revise, seek critical input, rewrite ad nauseam, and finally publish (or submit for publication).
Notice that of those six “required” steps, only one is actually writing, putting new words on the page. All of that other stuff, to the working fiction writer, is ridiculous.
***
Of course, some of that made it into my interview responses.
As Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”
Talk with you again soon.