Steering the Craft

[mary_j_59]

I am now reading Ursula LeGuin's Steering the Craft, and have shared a couple of the writing exercises with my creative writing club at the library. One of them was to write something completely without punctuation. This is what I came up with.

i love the rules of grammar because they tell me what i can do with words i know how to shade my meaning by using the subjunctive and once upon a time i even knew what a gerund was but i cant say im like hunpty dunpty words dont alway do what i want.

Comments

[anne-arthur.livejournal.com]

Nice! But what does this exercise actually do?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Well, I cheated a bit! What it is supposed to do is make you think about punctuation and how and why you use it. Ms. Le Guin suggested doing a crowd scene for this exercise - for example, an accident or a party. She wanted you to note how it felt to write with punctuation, how if felt to write without it, and whether the meaning got changed. Interesting stuff! As you can see, I did something much simpler than that, but maybe I'll work up to the "real thing" Maybe not! One thing I noticed is that I find it easier to use punctuation than not to use it. ;)