[stylist] CNF Blindness prompt Aine
Bridgit Pollpeter
bpollpeter at hotmail.com
Sun Feb 3 21:41:10 UTC 2013
Aine,
First, it would be appropriate to include a description of the flute,
but make sure you only include material important and necessary to the
narrative. If a snack, or any other description, is important to
character or plot development, then go ahead, but if not, it's extra
info not necessary for your narrative.
Second, while traditionally your "non-sentences" are in deed
grammatically incorrect, as Donna is absolutely right, rules are more
flexible these days when writing creative writing. I have not had time
to look at your entire piece just yet, but based on the examples Donna
pulled out, you are both correct, and it's really up to you, Aine, if
you want to keep these as such or revise with a more traditional
structure. It will also depend on the type of editor and publication.
Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter, editor, Slate & Style
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
"If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can
satisfy, we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for
another world."
C. S. Lewis
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2013 22:03:44 +0100
From: Aine Kelly-Costello <ainekc at gmail.com>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] CNF/blindness prompt (Aine)
Message-ID: <510d7f57.4a63b40a.2de9.ffffb7c6 at mx.google.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed
Hi Donna,
Thank you very much for going through this in such detail, and
for your other e-mail also. Incidentally, the double spaces
between sentences are solely there because I didn't change my
BrailleNote's default braille to text "translation option which
puts them in automatically. But I can easily fix that with
changing that setting (thanks for pointing that out).
Yes you probably were writing your novel then; I don't remember
you posting anything to the list when I joined.
I'm currently in Spain studying Translation. I have one more
week here before I return to New Zealand which is where I live.
Sure, that's a good point about the flute. Maybe I need to put a
brief sentence in about packing my bag then (seeing as what
actually comes to a rehearsal besides my cane is my BrailleNote,
hard-copy Music, my flute or piccolo (or both), a water bottle
and probably a small snack). Thankfully I don't need to carry a
music stand as well!
I do understand that those parts you mentioned like "Nor, I
doubted, was rushing.", are not actual sentences. In the case of
that one, I agree (now you point it out) that the clause alone
doesn't work so well. I suppose what I wanted to do was
juxtapose the too extremes. The "doubted" was only there as I
vaguely thought maybe there'd be a fractionally higher chance of
finding someone more quickly if I ran. But the sentence would
probably sit better without it anyway. In the case of the next
non-sentence you mentioned "Now, only silence." I wanted to just
leave the key words behind as to demonstrate the effect of
"silence" if you know what I mean ... I don't know what the
"rules" per se of CNF writing are at all, but I know I have
definitely seen sentences along the lines of that one in fictive
novels aimed at children and young adults. I'll go through the
piece again though and try to remove all the unnecessary
non-sentences as I'd definitely agree there are too many.
Regarding needing "neither" to use "nor", in my opinion the piece
is sufficiently "informal" (for want of a better word) that
breaking that rule would be okay, but obviously I'm no grammar
teacher or anything so if you don't think that's the case, please
let me know and I'll change it
To be honest I had absolutely know idea about the saying with the
elephant. I might just change the animal in that case! And yes,
I will clarify that those were my thoughts, directed at the
teacher. I'm not sure about that passage either, but I think
I'll tidy it up and leave it in for now. Regarding the
4-year-old blindy thing, yeah-you're right I didn't make that
very clear. The case was in fact that this string teacher taught
primarily young children so I will mention that somewhere in the
previous sentence.
I'll edit the piece tomorrow (going to bed now). Do you want to
see the next draft once it's finished?
Thanks again for your comments, they are most helpful :)
Aine
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