Madam Thinksalot

This book had me annotating like a crazy person. I think if Stephen King saw the number of post-it notes I have on my copy, he would mighty disapprove. What’s clear from his book is that he is a strong believer in going with the flow – a sentiment that rings true in my writer-heart but I am incapable of doing with this anxious brain. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft  is part biography and part collection of tips for an aspiring writer in fiction. The book is like a step-by-step writing guide that is structured in a very intuitive way. King starts off with the simplest thing:  where  to write. He then takes the reader through  when  to write,  what  to write about,  how  to write and  how  to edit your own manuscript. He looks at the significance of symbolism and theme. He gives ample examples to illustrate each point and he hit most of the questions I had when I started writing. Let me be honest: I have read only one Stephen King novel and it’s not even one of the famous ones. I rea

I recently read an article on Literary Hub called The Punctuation Marks Loved (and Hated) by Famous Writers . I was curious to see if any writers I know or like were on the list. I wasn’t expecting much more from the article. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be surprised by how these writers speak about punctuation. They talk about punctuation as if it is a living, breathing thing – a neighbour perhaps, a friend, and in some cases, an arch nemesis. This is what Garielle Lutz had to say about her love for hyphens back in 3 rd grade: “I started putting hyphens between all of the words in my sentences. I thought that was a way to keep things from falling apart, but the teacher made me stop. (…) The hyphen, though, is the sweetest of punctuation marks, because it unites words into couples (and sometimes threesomes and foursomes). It’s an embracer.”  Have you ever heard anyone call a punctuation mark an embracer? It is such a strange thing if you think about it. When you si