How To Write Fiction Without The Fuss by Lucy McCarraher

Author:Lucy McCarraher [McCarraher, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rethink Press
Published: 2013-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

13. STRUCTURING A SENTENCE (PLUS PUNCTUATION)

Whether you are ‘showing’, ‘telling’ or composing dialogue, your writing should communicate your meaning to the reader with maximum ease and clarity.

‘Be kind to your reader,’ was one of the best pieces of advice once given to me by an editor. By this, she meant that making prose simple to understand and easy to follow (however complex the action or ideas) for readers is the best way to keep them engaged in your story.

To do this, it’s essential to write grammatically and use punctuation correctly – not for the sake of sticking to rules, but because grammar and punctuation are tools of good communication. They provide a window through which the reader ‘sees’ your scenes: well-written narrative gives the reader such a clear view that they are not even aware of the glass through which they are looking; mis-punctuated writing with poor grammatical construction is like a dirty window that the reader is constantly distracted by, and through which they peer with difficulty in order to ‘see’ what’s going on.

‘A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.’

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

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