The beat-yourself-up meme

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Dan tagged me. Here’s the idea: I’m supposed to identify my most frequent writing mistake, then tag five other bloggers to do the same.

Trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. But I do have a tic: I love exotic punctuation. Colons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses are like an irresistible plate of hors d’ouevres. Why stop at one? I’d rather fill up on them!

I think I have this tic because I’m a control freak, and I love controlling rhythm. I want the reader to hear the same linguistic tune that’s rolling through my brain, and I don’t trust mere commas and periods to do that for me. Why is this a bad tic? Because it draws attention to the writing. As I’ve said in the past, I would prefer the writing to drop away and leave the reader with nothing but story. Anything that calls attention to the writing (or, God forbid, the writer) breaks the meditation. For example, yesterday I looked at a column written by Christopher Hitchens, in which he not only used a two-bit word (etiolated) but linked it to its Dictionary.com definition. “Blanched” or “anemic” would have worked just as well, but Hitchens went with etiolated.

Now I get to tag five blogger-writers. I’ll link y’all later, when I have access to a computer that’s not Flintstone-aged. (There we go!)

Blog about it if you like, or answer in the comments. (Oh, and if you’d like to play and I haven’t tagged you, be my guest.)

With any luck, I’ll have something truly disturbing for you, either later today or sometime tomorrow.

Walnut, September 28, 2007. Category: The Fearful Meme, Writer's Life.