The Joy of Punctuation
Punctuation – What is it good for?
I’m on my third draft of Pig Boy and can no longer put off the moment of sorting out the punctuation. I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, punctuation seemed to be some kind of weird algebra. It had lots of complicated rules and snares waiting to trap unwary writers.
I had done my research online about how it is done and this only confused me more. There seemed a lack of consistency amongst published fiction books about how to do it but lots of stuff on line about how to get it ‘right’ that flatly contradicted what I had just read. Out of curiosity, I had a quick look at the National Library of Wales’ digitised versions of the manuscripts where the original version of Pig Boy – Culhwch and Olwen – is preserved I wanted to see how the original was punctuated. And guess what? It isn’t. Unless you count big red letters at the beginning of chapters as punctuation.
Welsh medieval scribes didn’t go in for much punctuation.
I’ll tell you how I cracked it later. But first I want to mention why punctuation is a proper part of the writer’s creative toolkit. First of all, I had to slow right down and pay close attention to what I had written. I am on my third proper draft of the entire book and I have poked, prodded and pored it over many more times than that. The result is, inevitably, familiarity.
The fine-grained attention you need for punctuation (I’m still not fluent enough to do it automatically, which is actually a good thing) made me much more aware of the shape and flavour of the phrases I am use, rather then just the sense. Taking my attention into the nitty-gritty of punctuation has brought the words and the story into clearer focus. As well as bringing my attention to unhelpful habits that I have unconsciously developed.
Punctuation, Art and Seeing
This reminds a lot of the great work done on drawing by Betty Edwards in her books Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Drawing on the Artist Within. What you see and what you think you see are two different things. Your left brain has worked out countless shortcuts so that you don’t have to expend too much effort actually looking at the world. This generalised way of looking is good in many ways because it means we recognise objects in the world without having to think, “Now, is that a carrot or an orang-outan?” People who are not able to do this can find the world a daunting and overwhelming place.
Get more updates about creativity and my forthcoming book Pig Boy
If you’re curious about how this method can change people’s drawings have a look at the two drawings below by the same person. Imagine if we could do the same thing with our writing! Who knows, maybe punctuation can help.
Drawing on the right side of the brain. Before and after.
However, if the shorthand version of looking at the world is the only one we use we lose out on wonder, beauty, surprise, creativity, authenticity and uniqueness. All things that make the world and our lives worth living and books worth reading.
So here’s what finally helped me make sense of punctuation. A little book by Dominic Selwood called Punctuation Without Tears. I got the kindle version for £1.19. He puts punctuation back into the job of communication. He boils the whole business down to three simple principles – Be clear, be creative, be consistent.
Click on the image to find out more on Amazon
In fact those three, simple, little commandments could be a creative manifesto in themselves. I’m about to dive back into the redrafting – wish me luck! But this time I am looking at punctuation, not as something that is a mind-numbing chore, but a way to find new and lively creativity in material I have been poring over for more than a year.