Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
The awesome co-hosts for the December 1 posting of the IWSG are PJ Colando, Diane, Burton,Louise – Fundy Blue,Natalie Aguirre, and Jacqui Murray!
IWSG December Question: In your writing, what stresses you out the most? What delights you?
Writers are supposed to know their grammar, right? Well, I don’t.
I had just moved back to the States after living overseas for years, and my 8th grade
grammar teacher was so obnoxious (or maybe I was the obnoxious one?) that I made a
conscious decision to NOT learn from her. I went through the motions, turned in my
assignments, and then forgot everything, thinking I’d really shown her. Now I have a huge
gap in my knowledge that I have to keep learning and relearning because the rules of
grammar weren’t engrained when I was young. Thanks, 8th grade me! Good plan.
What delights me is when I have my writing soundtrack going and the perfect song is
playing, my characters are lined up and ready to go, and I have a clear vision of the scene
I’m going to write. Then I “spin the top” and watch what happens. As the music plays and I
become more and more immersed in the moment, my characters seem to write the stories
themselves and I just record what I’m seeing. When that moment of creative synergy
happens, I feel like I’m flying. It’s blissful and hours can pass in what feels like an instant.
I think I have the opposite grammar problem you have. Proper English grammar was a big deal when I was growing up, both at home and in school. Now sometimes when I writing a story, I feel shackled by all those rules. (You can't start a sentence with 'And'! And let's see how many dependent clauses you can jam into one sentence. Never mind it's hard to read, it's correct!). That's my inner grammar editor ranting. She's annoying.
Read a lot, and trust your peer editing street team. It's best to be back in that zone where the hours fly by, not where your thoughts get caught in the grammar tangle.
I’m with you on the grammar. Been tossing up whether to do a short grammar and punctuation course just so that things flow more smoothly and less edits are required in the future! Then again, that’s what editors are for, right? ;)
I love listening to music when I write, but it has to be either instrumental or in a language I don't speak (which is most of them). As with what you wrote in your blog post, it helps me to get into the "zone".
That grammar thing. People like to say that the word processor will fix it but too often, it's wrong or misses it. Yep. Get that grammar in order!