Strike a prose

Who needs commas?

I wrote a piece recently about all the weird little rules I tend to follow when writing, that were beaten into me by successive angry news editors, proper editors and assorted grizzled old hacks who didn’t want the responsibility of high office but still felt the need to bully their younger colleagues.

I’m not much of a grammar expert, but I do have my rules, right or wrong.

I also know a few harsh truths – that a lot of people don’t read past the third paragraph, and that of those who do, many often skim stories in an “F” shape to get the general gist.

And I’m fine with that.

I try and liven things up occasionally. Depending on the content, I might inject a bit of humour (not always appreciated, it has to be said… particularly in the nuclear decommissioning industry). If I can’t be overtly funny, I’ll try my hand at a pithy headline, or wrack my brains to get in a few puns or a bit of clever wordplay.

Hey, it keeps me sane.

I also like to try out some of the tricks of my favourite authors, where I can – a bit of poetic repetition, to reinforce a point or to jog along a list. A stop-start narrative injecting in lines like “And I’m fine with that” or “Hey, it keeps me sane”.

A random reference to something vaguely cultural, like the 1973 film Westworld. An idle messing about with sentence structure, fracturing a few rules to make the narrative flow better.

I even have treatises on writing by my faves, including Stephen King’s On Writing and Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This, two books about writing fictional prose which I would recommend to anyone wanting to improve the way they write… whatever writing that may be. I know they’ve helped me in a day job where there’s not an underground fight club or haunted hotel to be found. And far more than anything which might purport to tell you how to write an intranet article.

One author I love who I’ve not dared nick the style of (yet) is the guy responsible for the paragraph above. That rule-breaking piece of prose comes from the book I'm reading at the moment, the second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, The Crossing.

All his stuff is like that. Enormous sentences with no punctuation. Speech with no speech marks, or explanation of who said what. It takes a bit of getting used to, but he has his own rules and once you get used to them, his stories are stunning. They tend to be about tough, no-nonsense people, and he writes as you’d imagine his characters think and speak. If they were explaining to you how they got out of bed and got dressed, they wouldn’t flower it up with punctuation, so McCarthy doesn’t either (at least, that’s my interpretation).

I don’t think the decommissioning world is ready for the full McCarthy, but there’s a few things I might try, if I get the chance. It would be nice to replicate the process of moving through our change rooms in the cadence of a sentence, or recreate the metronomic beeps of a personal radiation detector via some short. Sharp. Sentences.

Something to think about, anyway.