I am running a bit ragged this month, so I will be posting the transcript from today's podcast which includes an answer to our month's question, and hopefully visiting around this evening.
Transcript:
00:00
Hello, and welcome to the truth about storytelling. This is Tyrean Martinson and today is an extremely short episode and it's not going to be one of my World building episodes. I will do that again next week on Wednesday, I will be talking about work and play in World building (next week).
00:17
But today, I am going to do a short little bit for Insecure Writer Support Group because our question of the month is: what's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer? So I'm going to name two.
The first one, I learned in school and I think it was only one teacher one year.
00:39
So, I don't really know why I took it to heart, but her rule was "Put a comma every time you would naturally pause in your speech." Now, this doesn't sound bad, actually, because commas are meant to indicate when we're pausing when we're reading. So, if you were going to read something out loud, a comma is whether you kind of have like a half a breath.
01:04
And a period is when you have time for a full stop, or maybe a full breath, right? So when you're reading out loud, you can do that and do it well. So, again, having a comma, every time you pause is not a bad idea on the surface level of it, but the reality is that's not how commas work.01:24
I took a college grammar class and we learned a lot about commas. However, I can't say that I've remembered all of it. It was a long time ago, but I actually enjoyed the class, which is another, another Side Story, but let's just say that putting in comma wherever you pause in a sentence when you're normally speaking is not a good idea especially if you're like me and you actually watch the original Star Trek series in the 70s, and you were hearing William Shatner, pause. Every dramatic. Moment. You would not want to put a comma after every one of those words to the sentence when you are writing.
02:07
But that's again, that's the common rule that stuck with me for a really long time even though I think it was just one teacher one time. And I don't think any other teacher ever said that. Another writing rule that messed me up that did not come from school that I remember, but it came from peers, family members community and actually from one of the fiction books that I liked as a kid Anne of Green Gables. If you read the Anna Gray, Gable series, she becomes a writer. But the story (she writes) that does well (in a contest) is a story that's about her life and there's sort of this implied, "Write what you know."
Okay. So I don't often write when I know I write fantasy and science fiction. And I've definitely had some pushback on that for different people in my life at different times who were disappointed. They want me to write about what my life is really like, they want me to write about things that happened in my childhood and show how you know, hard things can be overcome.
03:11
And I'm kind of like well I do want to write about hard things being overcome but I want to write about hard things being overcome in a fantasy and sci-fi world because that's what I enjoy imagining. And I like the exploration part of fantasy and science fiction. Because exploration and discovery are part of who I am.
03:35
So in a way, I'm still writing what I know because I'm writing what's true to myself because I like to discover things, I like to explore. And some of the first fiction that I really enjoyed was fairy tales and then also, again, I watched the old Star Trek show, and my parents took me to see the original Star Wars movies, even though I was a really little kid the first time.
04:02
So for me, discovery and exploration and wild ideas are actually kind of what I know in my imagination because it's what stirred my imagination for so long. And yes. I did have many oral storytellers in my family and yes, they did mainly focus on real world events that had happened to them.
And I love those stories. So I think there is a great place for their stories in the world. And maybe someday I will write more of those stories but right now, I write what I can imagine. I write what's true to what I know that inspires me.
IWSG has been this wonderful encouraging group that I've been a part of for over a decade and I think that it's just a great group to be a part of and we encourage people to write and write.
And I am looking for a street team, or a launch team or a release team, however, you want to put it for my book, Dark Blade Forged, which is coming out in October. So if you're interested in that, please drop me a note in the comments section.
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