When I started writing, I really paid no attention to rules of writing. I just wanted to get words down on paper, or a computer screen. I didn’t give a shit about rules, fuck rules! Surly the first people learning to write made up the rules as they went along. Trying to capture a language in the written form. 

At first, I just jumbled everything together. Paragraphs could just ramble on forever. Dialog was not separated by anything, and multiple voices were crammed together like a Greek Chorus, but then I was reluctantly convinced that there needed to be some sort of order amongst the chaos. I agreed that different scenes needed to be separated, and different speakers needed their own paragraphs to keep a reader from being confused.

Ah, but when I had completed my first draft, I knew that things like commas were somewhat important. I knew that they were supposed to be added in between lists of objects, but for the most part, I thought of commas as being much like pesky little mosquitos, necessary to the survival of hungry, little birds and important for the ecosystem, but they seemed more like a bother to me. I would roll my eyes and say, “Why do we need all those little pests?”

Cletus was the first to read my completed first draft, and complain that I had missing commas. “Really?” I said, I suppose I thought of commas more like a fancy decoration, sorta like the trim between the floor and the wallboard. I had tossed them about willy nilly, much like a flower girl at a wedding, a sprinkle here, a sprinkle there, stick one where they sounded good. 

But oh no, Apparently I had much to learn about those irritating commas.   They must go after “he said,” or “she said.” They must go before someone’s name, after someone’s name, after a prepositional phrase, and who knows where else those nasty things are supposed to hide. And fuck semicolons, I don’t have a clue about those things, or braces or brackets, those last things sounds like something next to the rectum, or tools for the handicapped, and I’ll not use them in my writing. You have to put your foot down somewhere. Surprisingly, I have no problem with apostrophes or parentheses, though I wonder who named those poor, unfortunate punctuations. And ellipsis…well, I think they are one of the most beautiful of punctuations, trailing off into infinity, the last remnants of thought, “heavy sigh.”

So now, I’m on a quest to tack on those pesky little beasts to help fulfill the functioning ecosystem of my novel. I suppose I will miss a couple here or there, and roll my eyes at other places where they should go.