Exclamation Points Cause Cancer

Exclamation points are the MSG of writing. Put in as flavor enhancers for emphasis.  They are almost always unnecessary if you are using the right ingredients and tools to start with.

Exclamation points are fingers of accusation at the writer. You don’t trust your voice, plot, characters, and description, to convey emotion. You don’t trust your reader to be smart enough to get it. You are lazy! You are guilty of telling and not showing. Unless you are trying to be funny or using exclamation points in dialogue, I don’t want to read anything like this:

O how happy we were! or We were in danger! I began to tremble and sweat! I screamed! He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever! Granddaddy should have loved me! Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!

No. Just. No.

Even worse is the practice of multiple exclamation points crowded together at the end of a sentence like a chorus line of expert witnesses.

I knew we would be together forever!!!!!!

Pffffffoooey.

That one sentence left a sour aftertaste.

Returning to some of the examples above, if you’ve written, O how happy we were! ask yourself (because the reader will) how happy were you? Show the reader what happy looks like. We were so happy we found ourselves giggling for no reason. We were so happy we started a Facebook page for planning our wedding. We were so happy Mike stopped biting his nails and I forgot to be embarrassed by my big ears.

If you’ve written, He was the ugliest King Charles Spaniel ever!; you don’t need an exclamation point. You need a period and then elaboration. ….ever. His under bite made him look like he was chewing his own nose and his ears looked like dirty bath mats. Instead of the soulful eyes typical of the breed, this dog viewed the world with a suspicious squint.

As for Granddaddy selling the dog for booze, the fact that he is the speaker’s grandfather implies he should love the speaker. Instead, he betrayed me and sold the dog to buy whiskey!  The action recorded and the word “betrayal” evoke the desired emotion from the reader. The exclamation point sabotages the drama and pushes it into melodrama. Is that what you want to do?  By the way, if you write, I screamed! an exclamation point is superfluous. A scream is understood to be an exclamation by its nature. It doesn’t need a red bow of punctuation.

If you habitually use more than three exclamation points per double spaced page, please cut back. They’re artificial. They’re not good for you. They’ve been known to trigger migraines. And they leave the reader hungry for what’s fresh and real.

Writing in the Active Voice

First, a word from our sponsor. I recently attended the 2012 North Carolina Writers’ Network Squire Writing Residency at Queens University in Charlotte. Pat MacEnulty, Creative Nonfiction instructor, gave our group a prompt: Writing is…..Ten minutes later we shared our thoughts about writing. To my surprise, I discovered I’d written something between a manifesto and a purpose statement. Now, I share it with you:

Writing is the organization and illumination of human experience. Writing is reaching across the abyss of aloneness to others. It is a temporary restraining order against death. When it’s going well it’s a rush few activities can match. It is an act of discovery, archeology, and creation. In the beginning was the word. “Logos” means more than “word” in Attic Greek. It means an organizing principle.

I read as a writer and write as a reader. If either activity leaves me unchanged, then the text or I, or both, have failed. As a reader, I want to experience three things:

•  Resonance
• Revelation
• Aesthetic pleasure

      As a writer I want to inspire the same three things. 

,    To write in the active voice is to make something happen. It is about taking responsibility. It is not to say, as a former President did, "Mistakes were made"  which is passive, but to say, "Jane started a blog, Writing in the Active Voice, because writing makes things happen.

The Truth About Memoir

I’ve always wondered what the hell I would have to say in a blog and today I realized it is a wonderful space for a foaming rant. Today, I am ranting about memoir and in particular the process of developing a memoir in a workshop setting.

The person who appears in your memoir is not you. They [sic] are one you out of many you/s. The you of your memoir is a persona constructed for the page using the materials of recollection, reflection, research, and invention.

A reader of a memoir has accepted the author’s invitation to suspend disbelief and to honor the presentation of a life, which by its very nature, is a subjective truth. The writer of the memoir, having extended the invitation to such intimacy also has obligations to the reader. And make no mistake, to enter a memoir as a writer or reader is to be in a relationship. The writer must realize that it is not enough for an incident to be true; it must be believable.

Unbelievable events occur in every life. And yet, if they are not supported by the narrative, a reader feels cheated and loses some faith in the credibility of the author’s voice.  At a minimum, the memoirist should acknowledge the reader’s belief may be strained by the depiction of what takes place in the story.

…It was hard to believe that Dwight, fourteen years old, with cerebral palsy, could win a fight with a man twice his age and three times his size. I never figured out how Dwight did it, but after that afternoon, Mr. Oxendine carried a small larva-shaped scar that split his left eyebrow neatly in half…

The more unlikely something is, the more scaffolding it needs to hold it up to the scrutiny of the audience.

In a writing group or workshop, it is the task of the memoirist’s colleagues to suggest places in the telling that could benefit from clarification or from the stated admission that what is true can also be improbable. Always, participants should note sections of a text that are especially skillful and effective. It is not for the reader to assert that the writer can’t possibly remember this or that thing. Memories are specific to each individual and the reader must take on faith that the writer remembers what she says she does. Likewise, a reader must not say, “Nobody could possibly forget a thing like that!” if the memoirist records a gap in recalling something. As with visual art, negative space (in this case, not remembering) can define as clearly as a positive image.

It is essential in a workshop to focus on writing as a made, artistic artifact----a created thing, and not to focus critique on the writer as a person open to judgment. The writer is not the work under discussion. Readers, in critique, keep in mind the author can feel exposed and vulnerable. He will be more receptive to suggestions that encourage. Remember, your story will also be critiqued.

That said, it can be difficult for readers to discern that the person on the page and the person who composed the page are substantially different people. It can also be difficult for the writer to make that distinction, because the personal nature of memoir sometimes makes the two dimensional character (say, Sandy) seem inseparable from the three dimensional author (also, Sandy). Everyone must understand that the character and the author are not interchangeable.

The you of your memoir, the portrait of you at that time, in that place is no more who you are this moment than the photo of you on your driver’s license. Your written portrait may be improved by adding more detail, definition, color, or background. Or your artistic writer self might be satisfied with the rendering as is. Either way, as the creator of memoir, the choice is ultimately and always, yours.