this is one of the best pieces of prose-level writing advice i've ever encountered and i wish they'd teach it in elementary schools. i spent SO much time knowing that something like this was what was separating my writing (at the level of diction and sentence structure) from the things i loved to read but not being able to identify it; if i'd run into this it would've cracked off my power limiter in a second. transcript follows after readmore:
What we learn in school is the basic mechanics of writing. What is a paragraph? What is a question mark? Where do I put a comma, and what the fuck is a conjunction? And when you learn editing, it's to fix things like this. You end up with sentences that are, technically, fine, and they get the point across, but that's all they are.
So when you try to write creatively, you're leaning on all of those things, but what you make sounds--and, more importantly, feels--nothing like your favorite novels. Creative writing requires you to write creatively, which means bending, breaking, and sometimes flat-out ignoring the "rules" and conventions of formal writing.
From I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, one of my favorite stories ever.Gigantic. The words immense, monstrous, grotesque, massive, swollen, overpowering, beyond description. There on a mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own irregular breathing, its snake neck arching up into the gloom beneath the North Pole, supporting a head as large as a Tudor mansion; a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most monstrous crocodile ever conceived, sensuously; ridges of tufted flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly; it heaved once more, and lifted its great sweat-colored wings in a movement that was certainly a shrug. Then it settled and slept. Talons. Fangs. Nails. Blades. It slept.
This story sure does use a lot of commas! A period, a question mark, an exclamation point, they're all signifiers of the closing of a thought. The comma and the semicolon are a brief pause of the momentum, not a full stop, allowing things to keep moving forward and grow into something monstrous and overwhelming. Which this story does a lot! (and I have definitely subconsciously lifted for my own writing haha)
Part of learning to be a "good" writer is learning to be a good reader. Which, unfortunately, does mean thinking critically. But this is nothing like what you had to do in school! If you finish a scene or a chapter feeling a certain way--happy, scared, excited, disgusted--pause and ask yourself, why did that happen? Go back over the text and try to find that moment it happened. Was it the word choice? The sentence structure? What are the things that make you feel things?
But writing in this sort of way can help you with your business emails and persuasive essays and stuff like that. It makes you a better writer everywhere. Which is why it sucks they don't teach you any of this in school.
