From Great Writing to Great Grammar
Being a ghostwriter gives me a unique perspective on the mechanics of writing. First off, I’d like to draw a distinction between being a professional writer and simply writing for joy. Since I joined the pen and ink party a little late and everyone was already passed out and drooling by the time I arrived, I seem to have come to the table with a slightly different perspective.
Cutting my teeth amid the loose rules of the online world has done nothing to help. You can be the best writer on the net and still not know how to place a proper colon.
I believe one of the things that keeps many writers from placing pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is the unwavering fear that they won’t understand the rules.
This I understand. I’ve never had a writing class outside of high school, and those classes were little if anything to write home about. For an eternity of my own making I found it difficult (if not impossible) to believe I could ever be a writer, at least not professionally.
Because I didn’t have the basic mechanics, I never even tried.
This is balderdash. If you write for yourself, the road signs of the written word are a little less important. There is an exponential rise in importance once your words will be read by another, but it is still nothing compared to getting the ideas down on the page in the first place.
Mechanics arrive on the other side of practice. The most important thing is to get the pen moving across the page, triggering your brain into swirling ideas the likes of which it may not yet have seen, even though ideas are born from the energy orbiting inside us all.
When I look back to my earlier drafts, they are admittedly littered with lines of embarrassment. I cringe at my commas and shudder at my semicolons. Still, something is never begotten from nothing and nothing was the gate from whence I started. I wrote and read, read and wrote, the same dance daily over and over again.
Soon enough I started to see language in a new light. I heard people speak with punctuation where I never seemed to hear it before and allowed my brain to wander through the road signs of text, constantly telling me how to interpret the words as they fell before my eyes. From the books I read out loud to my children to the pages I turned before drifting off to sleep, each new sheet of prose was a map illuminating the road to clearer thought. The consistency of daily writing sharpened my instincts to a finer point.
After writing hours a day for more than a year I longed to do it professionally. It was then I knew I needed to sharpen my craft further. There is a place for every word and mark upon the page, and when you are charging someone a fee, you must make sure that everything is lined up exactly where it goes.
I read my resources, did my homework, and went full time, but that’s not where I started. I started from taking my ideas from my mind where they could only stagnate, and putting them down on the page where they belonged.
Anyone can start writing, don’t let the rules be your restraints.
Ghostwriter Dad
6 Responses to “From Great Writing to Great Grammar”
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I’ve always felt a little guilty about my extremely casual relationship with grammar. But it’s just in one eyeball and out the other!
(I mean, the first time I heard about a “past participle” was in SPANISH CLASS. I still have no idea what that is!)
No kidding! My grammar is mostly instinct. I can tell you what sounds wrong, but might have a difficult time articulating why exactly that is.
WARNING: the following paragraph might be littered with grammatical errors. Ah! Sean did you write this for me?
Throughout much of my high-school career I have struggled with proper grammar. I have been ridiculed ( all in good faith) by my teachers for not knowing where and when a comma is needed.
Did I let that discourage me?
Nope. I kept on writing.
Look I have a great deal of wonderful ideas up inside my head, and if it takes a few grammatically incorrect sentences to convey my powerful message so be it.
You see I truly believe that if you write with your heart the grammar will eventually take care of itself. Sure you can’t right lik dis. But as long as you have a somewhat coherent flow to your writing you should be fine.
Since beginning to write regularly my grammar has improved tremendously. This just goes to show you must write with your heart and the grammar will soon follow. Thanks for the wonderful post Sean. I’m glad to know I’m not the only person struggling with grammar. (Apologizes for my grammatical mistakes.) -Bud Hennekes
Hope all is well,
-Bud
Bud: Don’t listen to anyone who tells you grammar is more important than ideas. It isn’t. And I believed the ones who did for far too long.
Great post. Love this site, Sean. I know it’ll go into warp drive soon. When it does, I’ll try to make my responses Twitter length.
I’m an English teacher and translator by trade. My gramar advice? First of all, ask yourself who you are and why you’re writing. Sean knows, and that’s why he writes powerfully, and can ghostwrite too. He’s not afraid he’ll lose himself when he’s writing for someone else. His true self, his writer self disables the ego. If you think you’ll be sad when the novel you ghost write hits the New York Times best seller list and your name’s not on it, don’t ghostwrite. It may be that your overriding urge is to express your own unique voice. That gives you more grammatical freedom.
I know, when I’m writing to express my own thoughts and feelings, that I have an overwhelming ache to make up words and reproduce intonation, the sound of internal speech, so although I have dozens of linguistics books from my degrees etc, I ignore them all and trust my inner voice. As Sean mentioned, punctuation is a tool to represent speech as well as to create clarity of thought and meaning. Exclamation marks and italics? Rashes of them!! If I want dashes – I’ll add dashes. Silence…? Dots do it for me. Alliteration? I relish it ridiculously – Sean and I will be sent to rehab for it someday. I’ve been accused of sloppy punctuation, but I don’t care. It’s instinctive but deliberate. I’m a grown up. I’m Scottish, too, and just let people think we all wear kilts and use semi colons a lot.
And read like your life depended on it. Read everything – as long as it’s good and you enjoy it. Devour good writing – from kids’ books to Obama oratory – and you’ll absorb sound grammar by osmosis. After all that, if you still want to be able to talk about grammar as well as be able to use them, check out EFL ?ESL grammar books (English as a Foreign/Second Language) Because they’re designed to be understood by students whose first langauge is not English, they’re easier to understand.
Prior to the launch of P.I. I studied grammar books to learn how to write with precision.
But what I’ve realized is that though this is necessary if you’re going to be serious about writing, it isn’t something that happens overnight, not for me at least.
I needed that initial self-education, however, truly learning how and when to place commas, semicolons, colons and the like required a grammar consciousness constantly hovering over my writing. With enough writing and time coupled with grammar consciousness you begin to have it all fall into place with more ease.