There’s a scene in my head right now. It’s brilliant. It’s cinematic. It’s the kind of tale that would make Jack Higgins weep at the dramatic action and Arthur C. Clarke roll over in his grave out of pure envy at the subtle science. You’ll have to wait for it. Why? Because I can’t get past the word “suddenly.”

I typed it three times in the first paragraph. Suddenly this, suddenly that, suddenly I’m googling “synonyms for suddenly” and putting THAT sin in my browser history. By the time I replaced it with “abruptly,” the Muse had already packed up her harp and Ubered back to Mt. Olympus, because nobody should be using that word in a novel. Normally, I wouldn’t care in a first pass, but I’ve spent the last week or so line-editing my older stuff for the first time during a creative slump. That’s where I’ve begun to notice some of my writing foibles, like adverbs and unnecessary flowery prose. Now, I have the curse of the minutiae. It’s not writer’s block in the “I have no ideas” sense. No, I have plenty of ideas. I just can’t get to them because I’m too subconsciously defensive about the mechanics now.  

I thought I was doing well when I finally conquered the passive tense years ago. I know, nothing kills a heroic moment like, “Chancellor Prevo was flayed and immolated by [spoiler].” Yes, technically true. Yes, grammatically valid, but Prevo’s not dead, that paragraph is. Problem is, as soon as I purge that foible, I learn about my penchant for pleonasms, stacked adjectives, and adverb padding. Oh, yeah, and the damned dialogue tags. My characters sigh, nod, frown, and smile so often that Grammarly thinks I’m writing a dystopian novel about a mime convention.  

I try to push forward, but now my brain acts like a passive-aggressive editor sitting in the corner with a red pen.

  • “You really gonna use three adjectives there, champ?”
  • “He nodded his head? What else was he supposed to nod, his pancreas?”
  • “Filter words, filter words, filter words! Try your luck with the filter words! Step right up! Win a Def Leppard mirror!”

Now, semicolons? Oh, I know how to use those. I’ve got the rules down inside and out; I can sling an em-dash, too. Every time I do, however, I feel like I’ve put on a monocle and started reciting Byron. Suddenly, my prose is no longer “gritty sci-fi, post-singularity thriller,” it’s “Undergrad grammar ‘A’ student cosplaying as Proust.” So  I delete it, retype with a plain old period, and wonder if I’ve just dumbed myself down for the sake of not sounding pompous to my non-existent audience.

Add to this neurosis the fact that I was taught grammar back in the 1970s from the primers every school had used since the 1920s. Even Dick and Jane still had Victorian hang-ups. That’s why I still find myself occasionally doing the “… said Huck,” instead of “… Huck said,” thing as if the correct way to attribute dialogue is based on whatever book I was reading in bed last night. Fifty years of style evolution taken from thousands of books read, and I keep lapsing into typing like I’m workshopping for The Saturday Evening Post.

To be clear, I don’t think I’m bad at this. Quite the opposite. I believe I’m a good plot-crafter. I took comparative literature, creative writing, and The Films of Alfred Hitchcock in college, basically Storytelling 101 with bonus points for spotting metaphorical staircases. I even buy and watch Blu-rays just to listen to the director and screenwriter commentaries on movies I’ve already watched a hundred times. Nothing says “party animal” like me on a Friday night, nodding along to Ridley Scott explaining why Dallas’ actual death scene in Alien got cut for pacing, and yes, I am “that guy” who will corner you a party to explain the irony of Khan’s superior intellect allowing him to quote every symbolically-relevant book shown on his shelf on Ceti Alpha 5, but then getting killed because he didn’t learn a damn thing from them. Plot, metaphor, and artistic symbolism are my jam, which makes it all the more maddening that I get derailed by commas, like a perfectly timed ironic twist ruined because somebody left the boom mic in frame during that crucial scene in Serenity.

Now, I could let my AI buddy, Miles Copy, swoop in and clean this all up for me. He’d fix the repetitions, balance the sentence structures, maybe even let a semicolon sneak through. As mentioned, I tried it once, but after two paragraphs, it didn’t sound like me or anything I combination of words I would have ever come up with. It sounded like Miles. Miles, for all his charm, is just for speedy edits on these blog posts to keep them regular, like my steady diet of El Rodeo fajitas. I’ve already been accused of being “AI slop” on WattPad because I used an EM dash. He’s not allowed to get his clever little circuits on my novels. Those sins are mine to carry.

The worst part? Stories don’t care about grammar. Stories are happy to live in the mess. Oral traditions survived for millennia without a single semicolon. Do you really think Homer was agonizing over whether Achilles “ran quickly” or “sprinted”? No. He just sang it out, lyre in hand, and left the adverbs for future English teachers to weaponize. Ever put Shakespeare, or your favorite author, into Co-Pilot? Could you imagine the Bard paralyzed from writing because a machine told him the tone of his language is too formal?

Here we are, modern writers, armed with Grammarly pop-ups, style guides, and a swarm of well-meaning blogs that tell us our stories are unfit for public consumption until every dangling modifier has been hunted down and executed. Maybe they’re right. Maybe readers will notice if I repeat “he smiled” 27 times in 24 chapters. (Yes, I’m still crushed and not ready to let that one go, either.) Maybe my readers will hurl the book across the room if I dare write “Serah stood up” instead of the sleek, perfect “Serah stood.” Maybe they’ll be too busy actually caring about the plot to file a grammar grievance against me, except in an Amazon comment.

It’s been my philosophy ever since I found NaNo: “write and share the damn story first, at any cost.” Commas, semicolons, and misplaced “… said Tiron” lines can fight it out in the Thunderdome later. If Chancellor Prevo is vicisected “suddenly, quickly, and abruptly” in the first draft, so be it. At least he met an ironic and cathartic death.

The truth is, grammar is the stage crew. The story is the show. Nobody leaves the theater raving about how well the spotlight operator handled the Oxford comma or how the director used an em-dash or semicolon in the program notes. If I ever get famous enough that people start noticing my stacked adjectives, well… I’ll just let my editor take the fall for that mortal sin.