Writing and cluelessness
I've been meaning to post up a bunch of thoughts on writing, and it seems that it would be better to do it in chunks rather than all at once. Otherwise, I don't see myself getting around to it at all
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I either use too many commas, or too few.
I tend to use MORE commas rather than fewer, and then in the woodshedding phase I'll see what can be eliminated. Too many can make people feel like a ping-pong ball being whacked back and forth across a net. Too few can make people go "Huh?"
One of the areas where I almost always use commas and people often don't (but should) is in introductory phrases. Such as,
The thing is, Dean's been through this before.
As Dean rambled on, Sam's attention wandered back to yesterday.
If you leave out those commas, you get "The thing is Dean's..." and "As Dean rambled on Sam's..." (!) That starts start the reader in the wrong direction for where the sentence is going.
I hope to have more on the topic of writing in the next few weeks, and I hope it'll be interesting for you and others to read. I plan to tackle Point-of-view at some point, which was a trouble spot for me as a beginning writer (and often is for beginning writers in general. The burning desire to address all of this started with a book I'm reading to my son that I last read as a child. Reading it out loud has revealed a lot of areas that are hard to parse but which I never noticed as being odd before. And there are some "issues" with the narrative that are well worth bringing up!
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It's not only beginning writers, I recently read Elisabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her and there's a few slip ups in there as well. One, or two, really jarring ones and a few minor ones that might just be the turn of phrase. (There's a chance it's just translation mistakes, I don't know.)
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I have SO MANY stories where I start out intending to write in 3rd-person omniscent POV, but then later find that the story is really solidly Sam or Dean or Lincoln or what-have-you. The voice has settled into a particular person, which I did not expect. At that point, you have to consider whether to revise the part where you seem to have gotten into a good groove... or revise the beginning to consistently be in that single person's POV.
But sometimes if you drift, you don't notice that you've drifted. Ten pages of Sam POV and you may still think you're writing omniscent POV because you meant to when you started. :0
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