Blogs

A Denser Air goes into final edit next week.  There is no doubt that the edit requires a very different mindset.  It’s just as enjoyable as the writing, but more of a left-brain activity.

It’s wonderful to let the mind write, roaming free of the rules of punctuation, sentence length, Point of View etc. but you can’t beat a good discussion with your editor about the structure of the text itself.  Without following the specific rules of punctuating dialogue, the narrative cannot flow, ambiguity can creep in and conciseness is lost.

The beauty of this craft is that to write something effortless to read, requires considerable effort.  As the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote:

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”