Please welcome guest blogger - Karina Evans - Breaking Rules Publishing UK author - Echoes.
You can find the link to purchase Karina's book at the bottom of this blog post.
Should You be Taught How to Write?
I have a confession.
I don’t care about form and style and grammar. I don’t care that the last sentence I wrote contains too many instances of the word ‘and’. I don’t care if you care that it does, either.
I read a lot of books, and many of these books are written imperfectly. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor is another. Echoes by Karina Evans is another (I slipped that one in to make you buy it).
‘With the first gray light, he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.’ — Cormac McCarthy
If I’d handed this into my secondary school teacher it would have been sent back covered with red scrawl. My teacher would have sat, head in hands, disappointed tears pooling on her pile of exercise books. It is perfectly imperfect. It paints a breathless picture. The prose holds doom within its words. The long soft sentence symbolizes a journey, with the shorter demonstrating an urgency. How can that be deemed anything other than beautiful?
A sentence can start with ‘and’ or ‘but’ or ‘then’. Speech marks can be forgotten. You can write one word a line if you so wish. This is your story; your time; your creativity; your passion. Don’t be afraid of the lesser-spotted semi-colons; who needs buts and becauses when you have that winking beauty? Words are malleable, they can be shortened and lengthened; split into two.
They can rhyme and they can judder.
A paragraph need to contain only one word.
One.
Words can, all of a sudden, stop. Like that. Just stop. Dead.
Or you could keep them bouncing, down here, up there, trying to catch them but missing and suddenly they are flowing escaping running from you and you are chasing breathlessly can you catch them in time, can you control them, can you slow them, have you got them; there they are.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that a writer needs a degree in English; that they need to know what a sub-clause clause super clause thing is. Because they don’t. All they need is a passion and
A
Rather
Large
Vocabulary
But, if I catch you using more than one exclamation mark, the word ‘lol,’ or more than three dots in an ellipse, I will hunt you down. And that is that.
Karina Evans
Author of Volcano and Echoes
And that all-important - shameless plug.
The link to Karina's Breaking Rules Publishing book - Echoes is below.
Echoes - $10
Echoes is a collection that introduces that anonymous: the people you have walked past, but never seen.
These 'deliciously dark' musings showcase short stories in a contemporary form. Gripping and powerful, you may never view strangers in the same light again.
Breaking Rules Publishing continues to accept submissions in all genres from writers around the world. Simply email us at infor@breakingrulespublishing.com
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