"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any." - Orson Scott, Novelist

Good Tuesday morning on this May 12, 2020. I do have trouble with my sentence structuring at times. Proper word order and all of that seems, at times, to be a mystery to me. Let me go on record, just so you know, I correct some of them, but, not all of them. At times I have trouble finding my proofreading and editing hat, therefore, if it's close I go with it and you may end up with a sore neck just from trying to make sense out of my writing. It came to me that I need to find a good excuse. I looked up the information for dyslexia and discovered that one would really be a good one, but, I can't really claim it since I don't have the symptoms. Honesty is the best policy, therefore, truth is, while I have a lot of information to share I may not be really knowledgeable regarding all the rules that apply. I do use a free grammar software program, but, I certainly do not always follow its advice. I typically do on spelling but when it points out a better way to say something I don't always agree. After all, I'm not writing a textbook excerpt each day, I'm writing a friendly colloquialized rambling representation of whatever happens to be on my mind. One of the acknowledged great writers, Mark Twain, had some reflections on the process.

1. “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader, and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

2. “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

3. “One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.”

4. “The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.”

5. “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself… Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

6. “There was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it every day, that he committed it every day, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings, and associations”

7. “I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.”

8. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.”

9. “Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.”

10. “Write what you know.”

11. “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact, he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No–that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning, he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this because it has happened to me so many times.”

12. “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

13. “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

14. “It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense”

15. “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.”

16. “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

17. “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.”

18.  “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

19. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

20. “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

I've read these before and they are helpful even though I certainly have no proof that I have closely followed them. I find them, like his marvelous prose, to be entertaining in and of themselves. He was known as a humorist and a storyteller. One of the best ever. He became wealthy and famous plying his trade. For me, I just want to be a good communicator of the things I share. That does include telling stories. My stories. You have yours and I have mine. That's one reason I shared those tidbits from a recognized master. I do hope you know I take seriously the process of producing my daily episodes. The information is not necessarily serious but getting it onto the page is. Feedback tells me that I am not wasting everyone's time every single day. That's always good to know. The total time devoted to one episode including the preparation, review, correction, and final approval is somewhere around a couple of hours. Today's issue has around 1400 words. An average reader can easily do 300 words per minute so we are talking about 5 minutes or less. At least when I am wasting your time I'm not wasting that much of it. I knew there was a silver lining somewhere. Have a great rest of the day and may God add His blessings to it. Amen. .....More later.