In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I
read and re-read the authors I most loved. I read
for pleasure, first, but also more analytically,
conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences
were formed and information was being conveyed,
how the writer was structuring a plot, creating
characters, employing detail and dialogue.
And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like
reading, was done one word at a time, one
punctuation mark at a time. It required what
a friend calls "putting every word on trial for
its life": changing an adjective, cutting a phrase,
removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.
Francine Prose (1947- )
read and re-read the authors I most loved. I read
for pleasure, first, but also more analytically,
conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences
were formed and information was being conveyed,
how the writer was structuring a plot, creating
characters, employing detail and dialogue.
And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like
reading, was done one word at a time, one
punctuation mark at a time. It required what
a friend calls "putting every word on trial for
its life": changing an adjective, cutting a phrase,
removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.
Francine Prose (1947- )
