Writing

G is for Grammar

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Frankly my Dear –

Some people make a great fuss about Grammar, in short, they are pedants!
Those of us who write, or speak, in English, know that we can understand the language as it is spoken, no matter how “badly”, with words strung together in almost any old order. Not like the Germans who literally fall over and can’t understand you if you don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence ( I may be exaggerating slightly for comic effect) and what is with all those portmanteau words a sentence long? The French are not much better, they pretend they don’t understand you because of your atrocious accent and despise you even more if you don’t attempt to show yourself up – of course, they may just be (understandably)  miffed because French used to be the official international language unit English superceded it because, I believe of the ease with which you can learn it to the point of being understood. Why am I talking about speech when the subject of this blog is grammar? Well there is much the same ease of communication in written “English” as with speech – that is, it is easy to get to the point of being understood, being perfectly correct in speech or written English is another matter altogether. We have rules of grammar so arcane that they make putting the verb at the end of the sentence look like child’s play. But here is the point, if you can make yourself understood, even speaking or writing in a patois, then that is the most important thing. 

There is another reason I have talked about speech in a piece on grammar, and that is because, when I am writing, especially in a blog, which to my mind should sound, inside the reader’s head, as if you are talking to them, then grammar is there to help the reader to achieve that feat. Nowadays I use Grammarly, an app which is far more than a spell-checker, it spots extra spaces, offers fairly basic grammar suggestions and even assesses the tone of your writing, mine comes out, disappointingly, as “Formal” given that I strive for relative informality…

I am sure you will be glad that this is not the sort of blog where the writer offers compendious coverage of their chosen topic – the internet is there for that sort of thing if you really want the nitty-gritty of grammar but I hope you understand why I began with the quote “Frankly my Dear – I don’t give a damn…” If I can understand and be understood, I will not judge and I hope will not be judged on some pedantic point of grammatical correctness. 

I will, however, talk briefly about three things which I use a great deal, which the grammar police would probably disapprove of. Firstly, as in the “Gone with the Wind” quotation above I often use a hyphen rather than a comma when I want to indicate a slightly longer rpause than I feel a coma suggests. Likewise, at the end of the quotation, I have put there dots, the proper name of which is,  an ellipsis and the proper definition of which is “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” Now I think you can see what I mean about obscure rules… What I mean when I finish a sentence with three dots, is that I want to leave the sentence idea hanging in the air and not terminated by the finality of a full stop.

Lastly, I want to mention the Oxford comma. This is the sort of rule that divides even the pedants of English grammar… In brief, I was taught at the age of seven or eight, and I actually remember the very lesson – that you should NEVER put a comma before an and. Now the strange thing, is that I grew up in, and received this lesson in Oxford, and though I have been using the Oxford comma, the breaking of this rule for a long time. I use it because it reads better as if spoken. An example is the comma after the word Oxford (first instance) in the preceding sentence. In the following sentence you would not use the Oxford comma ” My favourite puddings in order are Bread and Butter Pudding, Apple Crumble, Peaches and Cream.” But in this sentence you would – “The ingredients required are Flour, Sugar, Peaches, and Cream”. Makes it read right…

 So there it is, ignore the rules as long as you are understood and to my mind, what makes writing sound like speech is what works best…

I Don’t Give a Damn…

E is for Editing…

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Editing do you love to hate it?

Does anybody love editing as much as writing the first draft? I have had to train myself not to push the “Publish” button as soon as I have finished writing a blog because past experience has taught me that there are always mistakes.

Novels, (two on the go for longer than I can bear to declare) are different – you fully expect there to be many drafts – not least because – if it is your first novel and it’s taken a very long time, then your skill as a writer not to mention your ideas, will have changed by the time you are xxx% of the way through.

I like to write in longhand because it stops the temptation to edit as you go along which slows the flow but also because I can write faster than I can type which also holds back the creativity. Then the only problem is typing up because then I will edit as I go along so it is VERY SLOW.

One thing that has become easier in this digital age, is spell-checking. If using a word-processing programme, I like to have the Paragraph button active because it then shows all the extra spaces and the difference between paragraphs and line returns, but using some apps like Blogger, this button is not there. I also use Grammarly which not only spellcheck but checks grammar as well. In fact, Grammarly also asses your writing style which, annoyingly, always marks me as “Formal”.

With Blogger, I have to remember to add all the Tags which means at least one read-through but I do realize that waiting ten minutes and reading it through a couple of times does give the chance to remember those bits I thought of lying awake in the early morning planning the next post.

Blogging is not the throwaway smatterings of Twitter, birdshit on the bonnet of life – here today, washed off tomorrow (sorry if Twitter is your thing though you are here on a blog site!). Blogging offers a place to be more thoughtful, to develop and launch ideas out into the world, so it demands a little more attention to detail, a little more of the polishing which is editing…

A Writer is someone who writes…

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A blogger on my reading list has thrown down a challenge that chimes with a decision I had already arrived at, namely that I must write more and set myself some specific challenges. Over on “Off go the Panties”, Panty Parade has posted the “The Stop Whining Twelve Step, Twelve Week Challenge” to all recalcitrant writers claiming to be blocked, too busy yada, yada, yada. 

I’m in!

I started or rather re-started writing creatively a few years back when I lived in Co. Sligo, Ireland – a place steeped in the likes of WB Yeats and soused with a barful of contemporary writers. The vicissitudes of schooling had meant giving up anything but criticising other people’s writing at an early age and I had forgotten the pleasure of setting sail down an open page…

I progressed from short pieces generated in a writing group to a novel that now stands at some 40 thousand words and which I have added to in the last few years in a desultory fashion – but now the time has come to knuckle down and finish it. So below I will list some goals and seek a mentor as per the challenge but first let me share an insight.

On Sunday mornings my parents, and by custom, us children too, had a lie in. My father would switch on a small radio on the landing and we would all hear “Songs form the Little Chapel in the Valley”, “The Archers” Omnibus edition and Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America” and it came to me suddenly the other day that my blogging style owes much to Mr Cooke’s wonderful rambles that would start and return to some key observation on American life by way of several other fascinating stories. Blogs are like a diary and all diaries are addressed to some future audience whatever anyone says and Alastair Cooke was definitely and directly addressing the British audience with his observations softly dropped into our Sunday morning ears. So perhaps he was the prototypical blogger from before the internet was born. I wonder how many others had their writing sensibilities subtle shaped by the wonderful Mr Cooke.

Back to the challenge…

Goals:-

1. What kind of writer am I (and what programme of writing will suit me)?
I am a morning person by choice and I can get out of bed and write before I have even had a cup of tea and if I can do this regularly it suits me and I will steadily increase the words in my novel. I have thought enough about the novel I have plenty that just needs to get out. 

2. I also like blogging and besides this one which takes me when I feel inspired, I also started a new one dealing with my relationship to photography. This is partly an excuse to get my brain in gear in another way so although it might seem counter-productive to finishing the novel. I also commit to posting at least once a week both here and there.

3. I am going to seek a mentor for the novel writing and by way of a fishing trip, I include a fragment below and to anyone who cares to read more I will send 2 chapters of what is a sub-plot of the book. As a result of any comments I receive back, I may request a mentor.

There are other goals to the challenge but I will return to them in later posts.
Any other stalled writers out there? Take the challenge…

The novel – a fragment…

As the Dublin coach made it ‘s way along the banks of the Liffey, through the evening rush hour traffic, a pedestrian with more than a little “drink taken”, lurched off the pavement. The jolt of brakes applied suddenly together with the driver’s curses brought Margaret out of the trance she had been in for the whole journey. The same song had been going round and round in her head without registering but now she realised with a certain amount of chagrin, it was The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”. Before the words could unfold their story again, at this moment too painfully close to her own home, Margaret switched her attention to the river running alongside The Quays. In the Margaret of all previous journeys heading into Dublin along the Liffey had always produced a barely suppressed excitement. A teacher had once told her class how every breath you take contains a molecule of air expelled by Julius Caesar in his dying breath. Peering down into the green walled channel, the water always at a different height depending on the state of the tide, Margaret had thenceforth imagined the Liffey as a lung for Dublin – breathing it’s slow, twice daily intake of water that might have come from anywhere in the world. What foreign ports had breathed in this water before and where would it waft to next? Further down The Quays, you could see the ships moored that went to other countries and as a child she had pictured herself on board some vessel, swimming out the river, through the sea and up some other river in “foreign parts. Tonight, the dream would become reality, she would change at Bus Aras an head out to the North Wall and board the night ferry to Holyhead, not the most exotic destination possible but a gateway to a new life nevertheless. She would take the train to London and do a little sight seeing but she wouldn’t stay there in case she was followed – no, she would move on somewhere else, somewhere less obvious, somewhere special. Exactly where she wasn’t sure, but it would come to her, or rather shewould come to it.

The Blog Title

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I should explain the title of this blog it is from a Haiku I made up as part of an artwork I created some years back

” How would you know it was just a dream if you don’t know you’re asleep!”

I was pretty pleased with it as it is not just the 17 syllable rule that make it a Haiku but there has to be some reference to time or seasons passing. I hope the shift in tense between would and don’t, imply the difference between a waking and sleeping state hence the passage of time.
Even without the time reference, I still love John Cooper Clarke, the Punk Poet’s skit of a Haiku

“Writing a poem in seventeen syllables is very dific”

Any favourites?