WordWacky

1. Write at the same time every day, no matter what.
2. Never, ever use an exclamation point!
3. Have an agent if you want to sell to a big publishing house.
4. Don’t expect to get rich writing — do it because you love it.
5. And conjunctions don’t start sentences.

I buy at least a couple of books on the subject of writing every year. Seldom do I ever pick them up to read them. And even more infrequently, I finish them.

I read Strunk & White in high school or college, and it was a godsend. Through careful editing and rigid adherence to the standards, I could make my writing correct — even if correct did not necessarily mean good.

Strunk & White’s best quality? Its length. The book is about 100 pages long.

As a story addict, a lover of narrative in its true, fictional, and semi-fictional forms, instruction books are the least appealing way to spend my reading hour and my library quarter (library delinquent that I am). That includes instruction books on writing. Yet who doesn’t wish for a few guiding principles, a checklist which is guaranteed to make a piece better?

Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, has posted a collection of 50 solid tools to add to your craft toolbox. Thirty-two of them are even podcasts — you can “read” them in the car driving to work. [via Writers Unbound]

“Learn the rules, then you can break them.” That this idea would only tame the unkepmt talent! The argument is that by choosing when and if you break a rule, you can use the rules themselves to say something about the story, the characters, the setting, whatever you choose. I subscribe to this idea, and my most exciting moments in literature often happen when rules are carefully broken.

The prescriptivists would say that standards are the keepers clarity, the basis of common understanding of new ideas, while the descriptivists think the linguistic mores of this time are fleeting, at best, and will always be broken.

Keep this in mind: if language changes from the bottom up, the writers are the last to catch up.

[via Shelftalker]

Someone once told me that among writers, there are those who underuse and those who overuse the comma. I am in the latter camp. That there are precise rules to govern comma use is a surprise to some — many liberal comma users like myself are more interested in the pace of their piece than adherence to standards.

According to Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as quoted in Wikipedia:

A passage peppered with commas — which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention — smacks simply of no backbone. People who put in all the commas betray themselves as moral weaklings with empty lives and out-of-date reference books.

While it would be easy to feel offended by this, I am instead encouraged to do things my own way. Strange quote for a book subtitled, “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” 

Also from Wikipedia — commas have history:

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