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Serving up a Sentence
Confessions of Grammatically Challenged Writer
When my first book was published eleven years ago, I was both surprised and thrilled. I thought I’d be able to dust off my hands, sit back down at my desk, and throw myself into the next book with wild abandon; that it would be as easy as Sunday morning.
It wasn’t.
Wanna know why? Okay then, here’s the embarrassing part. It wasn’t easy because it turned out I had a problem with commas, semicolons, and quotes — a big problem. My editor, an English university professor, told me he liked my novel, but that I had…um, a few things to learn about the basic rules of composition. (It was his very diplomatic way of telling me I completely sucked at grammar.)
He wasn’t wrong; I did suck. Probably because I hadn’t paid much attention in school, at least not to things like dangling participles, preposition placement, and squinting modifiers. I was bored by it all. Hell, I just wanted to write stories! Surely that stuff wasn’t that important?
It was and is. And no matter how captivating and engaging your story, if you’re breaking grammar laws left, right, and centre, you’re going to be judged. Yeah, I hear you. It’s the story that counts, not the persnickety placement of those parentheses, but try telling that one to the roving gangs of…
