Writing and my Mother

Hello again!

So after having had some time to think about what I wrote on Grammar and the Mighty Thesaurus I wanted to share some personal examples.. err anecdotes? Whatever.

My Mother (yes I'm going there) is the probably the most intelligent person I can think of, creative in a way that is just unheard of, a little psychotic but in a way that makes my sibs and I grin. She would make up stories on the fly, really good ones and she is so witty and snarky if she ever put pen to paper with her writing she would be a best seller.

I asked her about a year ago why she never wrote her stories down, why she never tried to get published. She said, "I'm just not smart enough." Well I called her out on that, and she said, "I have terrible grammar." I personally have to admit that my punctuation sucks, and I couldn't tell you the difference between a verb and a noun but I know how to write a sentence... They usually start out as run-on and then get cleaned up while I'm proofing. So I paused and remembering a creative writing class I took I smiled and said to Mom, "Just write how you talk, you can get an editor to help you with grammar and I can help you proof."  Mom said she'll think about it... which in Mom-speak means 'No.' or 'I don't want to, lets procrastinate and see if they forget.'

Write how you talk. It gives your writing flavor.

I also wanted to mention, I am an avid reader, I read over 1500 words a minute and 300 pages will barely last me an hour so I read a lot of the little self published things on Amazon for Kindle. Last week I was reading this enchanting little romance novel (yes I know) the heroine was a fifth grade teacher and the hero was a billionaire (a little cliche but women like the fantasy of it) and two or three times a chapter the writer grabbed me by my sloppy ponytail and yanked me out of my reading by, only one mistake in the whole book but it was over and over again. She used 'meet' instead of 'met' its a tense issue and made me grit my teeth.

If you want to read it yourself it was a very good book, if you can get past wrong tense in a book that stars a teacher: The Teacher's Billionaire: The Sherbrookes of Newport Book 1

I confess I am a Grammar Nazi.