Thursday, March 14, 2013

Only read this if you are interested in writing

You might think that two people who can write a book together are going to agree on most things. This is not the case. Jane and I like each other’s writing and respect each other’s talents, but we have very different views on many things – and the use (or not) of semi-colons in a work of commercial fiction (i.e. PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS)  is the least of them.

The thing that amazed me – even knowing that we have both grown more opinionated and in different directions since we wrote PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS all those years ago – is that we can disagree on the cadence of a sentence.

We were writing the blurb for the back of the book and I emailed Jane this sentence -

On the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Sally Howe is hit by a double whammy – not only has her long-haul marriage ended, but her agent can’t find a publisher for her latest book, so it looks as if her writing career is on the rocks as well.

Jane changed it to:

On the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Sally Howe is hit by a double whammy – not only has her long-haul marriage ended, but her agent can’t find a publisher for her latest book, so it looks as if her writing career is on the rocks too.

She thought the cadence of her sentence with “too” at the end was better than my sentence with “as well.” I was incredulous. Amazed. I agree that “as well” could be seen as clumsy, but those two syllables at the end of the sentence feel so much more comfortable to me than Jane’s one syllable.

We have changed the sentence to:

On the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Sally Howe is hit by a double whammy – not only has her long-haul marriage ended, but her agent can’t find a publisher for her latest book, so it looks as if her writing career is also on the rocks. 

We are both satisfied with this. But you can see from this one example how hard it can be to write with someone else. If it wasn’t also huge fun, our book wouldn’t be coming out this summer. Miraculous, n’est-ce pas?

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