I’m thinking that folks writing books in this flowing
stream-of-consciousness manner are either would-be, envious, behind-the-times Joycists
or angry anti-Strunkists revolting
against every red-inked correction they ever received from instructors whose
job was to make their writing readable.
But, then, I’m an old lady, taught the conventional
punctuation of the early 1900’s by Teacher Kuhnau, who was born in Germany and
understood that rules are important.
And I went on to teach teenagers the same rules he taught
me. We diagrammed in my classes. We
rewrote essays until they were close to perfect. For years–until I began to
realize that the red marks I was making on all those papers weren’t creating
better writers, only better punctuationalists. Then I loosened up a little,
wrote more Good!’s
and fewer Run-on!’s.
Only when I started writing full-time did I discover that my
own writing was loosening up also. I used
fewer commas, forgot what semi-colons were for, got in the habit of creating phrases instead of sets of words
that could be diagrammed. Forgot how to
diagram.
Felt good, this sense of freedom. Maybe overdid it
sometimes. I still believed in quotation marks, though, and my paragraphs had
places in them to breath.
Then, through an attempt to get Graffiti Grandma into a Publish on Demand format, I paid for the
manuscript to be proofread. The novel came back with digital red marks (the way
it’s done now) on every page. For a
minute I thought Teacher Kuhnau was back. It took a number of hours and
numerous pots of coffee to get through my reader’s corrections. I learned a lot: that dumpster is spelled
with a D; that too many had’s are
deadening; that incomplete sentences are okay, for emphasis; that commas and
semi- colons create a rhythm; that M dashes sometimes work even better than
commas– a little like my old German teacher taught me. I like the new look of Graffiti Grandma. I'm inspired to try to get it published again; it breathes so well now, with at least one hundred new commas.
So, I’ll never write two-page paragraphs with no commas
unless I get inspired by too many cups of coffee and the event of rain outside
my window after three months of yellow light and sweat when I walk the dog and
try to find a cool place to read the latest novel by a post-modernist who is
protesting the control he’s lived under for forty years and can finally throw
off the chains of punctuation and write the way he’s always wanted to but no
teacher would accept his premise that periods are a barrier to inspiration
and no publisher would even read his
dystopia novel until a courageous young MFA’s short un-perioded story was
accepted by a cutting edge literary magazine and began the revolution that is
causing havoc in much of the reading world as it tries to read and inhale at
the same time and which has brought these novels to my desk on this rainy day.
