subscribeWriting Workshop Wednesday: Poetry
Wednesday August 11, 2010
The Wednesday workshop wisdom continues! This week…
Poetry workshop take-aways // or, why this novelist kept taking so many darned poetry workshops.
I think in novels. As a kid, I thought, Oh, I think in stories. No. I learned later: I think in novels. In my first workshop at 15, I told my advisor that I couldn’t write a short story. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. “I write long things. Um. Novels. I think in novels. I can’t make it short. I can do chapters, if that’s okay.” That wasn’t okay. I was coaxed into writing stories that… read like chapters. My advisor finally coaxed me into making my final project a “novella.” But it still read like half a novel. By the time I got to college and realized that short fiction was the name of the workshopping game, I sighed and got to work learning what this short story thing was all about. In the meanwhile, I signed up for poetry classes. Poetry. Verse. Shakespeare. I knew what a sonnet was, thus, I could write poetry. WRONG. But those workshops taught me so much. This advice is hardly a substitute for what I learned, and may seem obvious, but it absolutely changed the way I thought about writing fiction — and about poetry. By learning to write it, I learned to read it, to appreciate a poem written well (like those of a former classmate, whose work I adore). Admittedly, the poetry I wrote for workshop reads like a novelist wrote it. (It’s also terrible.) Which is [yet another reason why] I write novels.
Besides the fact that poetry is (1) beautiful and (2) absolutely worth reading, you novel-reading people you! these were some of my biggest poetry workshop take-aways.
1. Words are beautiful.
So is the way a set of words can be strung together, the sounds they make when they smack and rub and brush against each other. Words are alive, alive on the page and in the mind of the reader. So many writers seem to use words as a means to an end. Yes — words are the vehicle by which you tell your story. But paying attention to diction, to image, to the particular words you use and how you string them together is an often overlooked part of novel writing. (And yes, paying attention to words is also a pursuit better left to revisions, not first drafts.) Most novelists are so focused on plot, on character, that they forget novels are built with words. We have more room to waste words than a poem in our 80,000 novel, technically speaking, but why should we waste a single word? Why? There’s no good reason. None. Words are beautiful and they deserve to be used well.
2. Image, image, image.
String together images as well as actions. Build images as well as dialogue. When we read we build an imaginary landscape in our minds, we populate it with the writer’s words and the images they draw with those words. Too much exposition and not enough grounded image loses my attention. Too much dialogue without rooting me firmly in the scene distracts me.
Showing versus telling, to me, is that difference between rooting me with image and giving me exposition. Telling me, “Anna’s father beat her when she was young” is very, very different from giving me the visceral recollection of a slap. But — images come with intensity, with meaning and depth. Images are immediate, are sensory, tangible things. Sometimes an image is too strong and exposition may be the better choice. But I hate to be told a crucial bit of information in a casual, throwaway bit of exposition when it can be relayed with an effective image or even a strong bit of dialogue (and “voice” is related to image, because I feel voice).
Images don’t need to be paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of scene-setting detail. Too much image, too many adjectives and clunky nouns can overload an image. Too much image without enough meaning, depth underneath it. Images can be brief and still have strength. They can be slices of a life, picked out by a discerning eye, weighted with the promise of story.
Novels, as a medium, are not built around images as directly as a screenplay is built around image. Not even poetry needs image the way film needs it. But to ignore the effectiveness of well-placed images is to deflate the potential power in a scene.
3. Space is a tool.
Physical distance on the page can allow for emphasis. Where you choose to break sentences, add commas or semicolons or emdashes–these breaks influence the way your words are viewed, are digested by your reader. Judicious use of space is a subtle tool in any writer’s arsenal, regardless of how long their work. This goes for chapter breaks and section breaks as well. Those breaks can and should be regarded as tools, not just “breaks.” Space is a tool! Use it.
But don’t abuse that space.
With lots of dramatic paragraph breaks.
Because after a few instances, it looks silly and loses the emphasis you’re going for. Like the ellipsis, or the exclamation point, paragraph breaks for the sake of drama should be used sparingly, or at the very least, pay off for the reader.
4. Repetition. Repetition is a tool.
But it’s also one of the easiest tools to use too often, too much, becoming annoying rather than effective. There’s a difference between repetition and redundancy. You can use repetition to be effective. You can never use redundancy for anything.
How many times does your character’s name appear in a given passage? How frequently are the same words in close proximity? When you read aloud, do the same words pop up over and over? There are a plethora of action verbs and adjectives at your beck and call to describe similar actions and behaviors without being redundant. Decide which is effective repetition and which is redundant blah and eliminate.
5. Unnecessary words are clutter. Cut them out. Efficient images are effective images.
This is the simple reason why you see blogs and advice to writers repeating over and over to eliminate adverbs. The truth is this: adverbs are not inherently evil. But when you say she was grinning widely or shouting loudly — you are being redundant.
Redundancy, as we’ve agreed, is not effective writing. When the reader is pulled out of your image by its clunky phrasing, it is not an effective image. And we’re going for effective images, yes? And I know, as we agreed, words are beautiful things. But too many of them leads to clutter. Clean them up and really be honest when you’re doing it; this cleaning up may take multiple readers and a loving editor but you’ll have stronger prose.
6. One of the quickest ways to establish voice is careful diction.
Diction: the choice of words and the way in which they are used. Establishing voice is not simply a matter of throwing in key vernacular or vocabulary (like “y’all” or “dahling,” say). It’s not about short sentences. Or about long, flowing, elegant sentences replete with word upon word, flowery adjective piled upon adverbs of glorified density. No. Diction is all of that. Establishing a voice is about finding consistency, about finding a style and a flow that reads naturally. (I do enjoy well-used vernacular, but please: simply tagging sentences with vocabulary does not count as adding it naturally!)
Poems can establish voice effortlessly in single lines. Some of the shortest poetry can still feel as if it has a character behind it despite its few words. Getting into a character in a short poem was one of the hardest and most effective lessons for me in establishing voice, in getting into a character’s head and speaking their words. When I am having trouble finding a consistent voice, I fall back on my poetry workshop tricks. I look at my word choice, the consistency, the tone my words evoke. I ask for feedback. I read it aloud. It helps.
7. Your reader has five senses. Do you take advantage of them?
Not only within the imagery of the page, but with the very words on the page. When I say I love “evocative” writing, I mean to say I love writing that seems to lift from the page, that has undeniable depth. I measure that depth by the sensory experience I have when I read it. When someone needs to shake me out of a world — that’s a world written well. Every one of those worlds draws me in through smell, through sight and sound, through the occasional stirring of a memory through an image that brings my own sensory experiences to bear on my reading experience. The reason This Is Just To Say hits me so hard every time I read it is because I know what it feels like to bite into that cold, sweet plum, the juice dripping down my chin. I feel that. But some of my favorite books evoke that same visceral experience for an image or a scene I’ve never personally experienced because they use the same tricks of making reading a personal, sensory experience. I’ve never faced down a dragon. I’ve never been in a war, a battle. But the best scenes bring me there and keep me grounded through those little details, and through sense.
——–
Do you read or write poetry? (Or both?) Has any poem or verse influenced you or your writing (be it the “greats” of the past centuries or someone more modern)?
What tricks do you think writers of prose can learn from poetry?
Query statistics for BOUND BETWEEN
Friday August 6, 2010
Today, over at kt literary, the Friday Ask Daphne! About My Query post features…
My query letter for BOUND BETWEEN. Eeeeeeeeeep.
Now that my query letter is out there (it was actually revised twice after that), I figured I should finally post my query statistics.
My novel was re-written, polished, and ready to be sent out mid-January 2010. But I was nervous. I dawdled, re-read it, and puttered until both my husband and Kristan yelled at me — literally — to send it out.
I sent my first queries (all three of the first batch) on February 9, 2010. Kate was one of those three. She requested my partial on February 15. She requested my full on March 30. She extended an offer of representation on July 19.
By the day of the offer, I’d received 5 partial requests, 5 full requests (3 from partials), and 16 form rejections — all polite. I also received silence from 10 queries — 2 of which were to agents whose websites said they guaranteed responses, so I had been prepared to re-query. (So 8 silent rejections.) Every request made me grin but every rejection hurt, regardless of how polite or impersonal. On a day when I received two forms in the early morning, later that afternoon I received two full requests. An emotional rollercoaster, querying? Nooooooo. Of course not.
I sent my queries in batches: three, five, eight. When I didn’t feel like I had “enough” out there at once, I sent more. There was never a time when someone wasn’t reading something of mine. From late April to mid-May, when we were buying the condo and moving, I didn’t send any out and was willing myself not to think of everyone reading my book. I tried not to read double meanings into mysterious Tweets. I worked on other things.
Response time was all over the board. Some I heard from the same day, or the next day. Others the same week, or the next week — or weeks later. Some of the partials and fulls took months. Some days. There was no apparent pattern, either; some of the quick ones were both requests and rejections. Some of the longer ones were both as well. So anyone who thinks anything is “normal” — that was not my experience. My experience was that every agent handles queries and requests differently. Simply because one agent requests on the same day you sent out doesn’t mean silence from an agent for three, four, five plus weeks will equal a rejection. Considering the wildly different work habits and schedules of authors, why wouldn’t agents, too, work as differently from each other as authors?
At the time of the offer, I still had some queries in the tubes. To anyone with actual partials/fulls, I sent a polite email letting them know of the offer… but even as I sent those emails, I knew where I wanted to go. The closest comparison I can make, and this will sound silly, was that those days were like waiting for college acceptances: you get accepted by one of your dream schools, but then you have to impatiently wait for the others to come in, so you can guiltlessly accept the dream offer. Well. It took a few days. I don’t think I slept much.
In the days after accepting the offer, ironically enough, I heard back from a few of those queries that were still in the tubes. Internet etiquette is still fuzzy on what to do for the people with “just” a query when you get that offer — do you give them the chance to request, or consider they aren’t invested enough to care? Some don’t want extra emails clogging their inbox, some have specifically requested a follow-up. I emailed those who requested or seemed to want updates or a follow-up. But I didn’t email those whose websites indicated any additional emails were not necessary or desired. I tried to respect the guidelines as best as I could, as I’d tried to do for the entirety of my querying process.
In 2008 I started researching agents on the internet, following them on Twitter and their blogs in Google Reader. I started querying — for the first time — in 2010. I didn’t query any agent who didn’t have a clear, crisp website explaining their agency and their tastes. I queried big and small, new and experienced. I followed every guideline I could find and if there were no specific guidelines listed, or if there was conflicting information on the internet, I held the query, to wait to see if they updated their guidelines or website — and over the course of my querying period, some did. I used QueryTracker, AgentQuery, Predators & Editors, Twitter, and Google, as well as the hardcopy of the 2010 Guide to Literary Agents. (That book was tabbed and color-coded before I sent a single query out.) To say I went into the query process obsessively prepared may be an understatement. This is my career, the path I knew I would follow since I was twelve. Every job I’ve held, every unpaid internship and spare moment of my time, has gone toward learning about the publishing industry, writing, and how to be a better novelist, how to write, how to participate in the business of writing. I would not let myself become one of those queriers.
That said, I still think I am terrible at writing query letters. But I didn’t need to become a query expert. My query needed to do a job. It intrigued agents, got them to read my pages, and some my book — and it found me my home.
The first installment of Writing Workshop Wednesday!
Wednesday August 4, 2010
I was thinking lately that I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops and have [probably] had every kind of experience in one. I figured I may as well share some of the many things I’ve learned — and ask you all to dive in and offer your own advice for others! I want to make it a series of posts for the next several Wednesdays. If you all like it, I’ll keep the craft talk going! So this week, I’m going to talk about…
Tips for the Novice Workshopper // i.e. things to get over, and fast, to maintain your sanity and survive a workshop.
[A lot of these tips can help when working with a critique partner for the first time, too.]
No one will read your work the way you read it, or the way you “meant” for it to be read. Be prepared for interpretation.
This is a big one. Especially if no one has read your work before, or the only people who have read it are family members, close friends who are not writers/readers by nature, or teachers in a one-on-one environment. It’s an alarmingly simple concept: the same words can be (and are) read in different ways by different readers, especially critical readers. There’s no guarantee anyone else will read, interpret, and see your world as you do. Reading is an intensely personal experience; not everyone will take your characters’ actions and words to mean the same things you do, or you want them to. Consider: Do you need them to read it a certain way, or are those possible interpretations enriching? Do the different ways people interpret something left somewhat open-ended give the story greater depth, or does it lead to confusion? Confusion should be cleared up, but I love when an author leaves room for interpretation. I’m not talking about cliffhanger or open-ended endings, but rather details left undefined.
For instance, in the first writing I ever had workshopped (I was fifteen), my characters’ appearances were vitally important. I needed everyone to see them the way I saw them. The reason? Because I’d seen them that way, darn it. (Which is not a reason.) Strangely enough, half of my classmates read an ethnicity into one of my characters that the others hadn’t, which started a debate on perceptions and realities, which was… enlightening. Something I hadn’t intended ended up being one of the most interesting things my peers discussed about my story. I learned early, then, that one must prioritize, in a sense. If certain information is vitally important to get across to the reader exactly the way you envision it—and you do have to ask yourself why that information is so important before you push for it—then that’s something to ask for very specific feedback on, to ensure that your readers “got it” or “saw it” the way you needed them to, for the sake of the story. But everything else you don’t need to prioritize, it’s okay to leave it open. It’s okay, really. Is it important, for instance, what color your character’s hair is? Do we need to know everyone’s eye color or height or weight or age or build or what they ate for dinner last night or what clothes they’re wearing? Etc. Priority of relevant information distribution is something I’d never considered before a workshop taught me to see it like that. Readers can only digest so much detail at once. Clogging the first pages of a story—especially in short fiction, when page space is scarce—with needless detail and description lessens the impact of the story and its characters. Before workshop, I’d never really considered how a reader digests information, how the way I reveal it can impact their interest and their imagination. Now it’s something I never lose sight of.
Criticism is important for growth; so is knowing how to take it AND how to give it.
Writing workshops are a very good way to learn how to take criticism. They are, or should be, a safe space. I’d been told, jokingly, that enduring a writing workshop is like having your soul ripped out. But possible soul-ripping-out is very perspective-based. The first time you ever receive critical feedback, regardless of how mentally prepared you are… it’s soul-wrenching, no doubt. But moving past that is essential, because the reason it hurts is either due to (1) an inexperience with criticism or (2) related to the above point, about how your reader didn’t necessarily see it the way you do. But criticism, given in a constructive way, is essential for growth.
What do I mean by “constructive”? That’s one thing I kept asking my teachers, because no one wanted to explain it to me in concrete terms. One professor explained that negative comments in workshop should be framed by positive comments. That’s helpful, sure. But what constructive criticism means to me now is feedback to help a writer make their story the best it can be—pointing out things that don’t work and why. Pointing out places that could be stronger, and how. Simply saying “This character felt flat” is not as helpful as saying, “Her dialogue felt wooden. I believed her actions but when she spoke, she didn’t feel real to me.” That I can take home and work on. Specificity and suggestions are essential. I want to come away from a workshop with “homework” to do—not a list of complaints and issues with no suggestions on how to make my story better. Even suggestions I won’t follow are good, because they show me what got my readers thinking and where my writing took their thoughts. I love knowing what possibilities are out there in readers’ minds.
Personally I never spoke in workshop when I didn’t have something to offer in the way of a suggestion. I couldn’t bring myself to point out flaws without offering solutions. What this meant, sometimes, was that I started challenging the writer with questions, ones I had, ones their story brought up for me. I always love to know the writer knows more about their story than I do, so I tend to ask a lot of questions–not necessarily for me, but for the writer to think about.
In workshops, it becomes obvious after a while what kind of criticism everyone is best at giving. (Natalie Whipple spoke a little about this on her blog last month, as regards crit partners. There are definite similarities in a workshop environment.) There’s bound to be the one person who’s a stickler for grammar, the one who pays attention to character above all, the one who’s always looking at language and page space, the one who’s focused entirely on plot and “what happens,” always pushing you to think about plot. In the workshop environment, isolating who gives which criticism consistently may help you interpret their comments on your story in a different light.
The writer’s brain gives you a different perspective when reading. Learn how to turn that perspective on and off.
If you have a writer’s brain, a writer’s passion, you are not like everyone else. (You are really a superhero! No. Sorry. Just a writer.) The workshop environment was the first time I experienced writers who were willing to look at what could be on the page rather than what was, those whose brains were programmed to look at a story in a first draft and give advice on how to make that second draft even better. That kind of reading calls for a different way of thinking about a work than a normal reader will think about it. It’s different again from say, an English major reading a text and analyzing it through a specific critical lens, or a casual reader tearing through a novel and experiencing it for pleasure’s sake.
That said, realizing that you need to turn on and off the writer’s brain when reading can be helpful. In life. Nathan Bransford discussed this idea in a recent blog post and the point he was getting at is this. Know what you’re reading and how you ought to be thinking about what you’re reading before you go into it. Turn off the hyper-analytical writer’s brain before reading a bestseller. When a friend offers you a story to critique but wants you to first give them a basic read, to “get a feel for it” or to see how it all flows… turn off the writer’s brain. Become a reader. Absorb it, don’t let the criticism start intruding until you need it to. Maybe your friend has the grammar of an orc, but is the story solid, are the characters real, is the setting evocative? It’s hard to turn off the critical brain once you’ve gotten used to it, but it’s essential to learn how to turn it on and off, otherwise you’ll be micro-criticising everything in the back of your mind, all of the time. That’s no good for sanity, people.
The writing you do isn’t the ONLY kind of writing that is (1) worthwhile for you to read and (2) worthy of your respect.
Of course you, oh wise blog reader, know this. But in my first workshop? There were kids who believed it was Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or bust. They looked down at anything called “genre” and termed it “irrelevant” for them to (1) read and (2) ever consider writing. What could they learn from reading genre? One teacher actually told the class, straight out, “Happy endings are unrealistic, fictitious, and boring.” (I was sixteen, that was at Yale. So I cried a little.) But, contextually, this was back when Harry Potter was considered “Something my twelve year old sister is reading,” not yet a multi-billion dollar book-and-movie-and-video-game-etc franchise. Genre was something to be looked down upon, something without artistry or commercial value. Stunned, I thought of all of the fantasy books that had won awards and influenced culture—can anyone say Lord of the Rings?—and couldn’t believe that my fellow workshoppers wouldn’t give genre a chance. I was determined to prove them wrong.
(The genre-in-workshop story for me has a happy ending, but I’ll save that for another Wednesday.)
Perhaps in retaliation for this vehemence I experienced in my first two workshops, I grew to have the opinion that the only writing I should be reading was young adult fantasy. High school assigned reading wasn’t worth my time, so I skimmed most of what I was assigned, except for Shakespeare (who was and is too seminal to mess with). Those I did read influenced my teenage brain more than I should have let them. (The Fountainhead had me on a snotty individualism kick for months; The Stranger gave me an existential crisis.) So at some point I said, Screw anything not in MY genre. This Jane Austen person? Not reading her. Pride and Prejudice? BAH. …Then, my mother made me sit through the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. Having fallen for that Mr. Darcy quite thoroughly (I blame Mr. Firth), I tore through that book in a few days—a staggering pace for me, for a non-fantasy novel. Suddenly books written before 1960 were, well, relevant. (And that Jane Austen person? I never doubted her again.) Ever since I’ve never dismissed a book out of hand and really, it was a lesson I should have learned long before high school. (Something about books and covers and judging, I think it was…)
Bottom line? Dismissing any writing out of hand is silly. (Says me, who refuses to read Eat, Pray, Love because it’s a bestseller. Um. *runs away guiltily*)
Learn to love reading aloud. Or at least learn how to do it decently. (Which means practice.)
It’s a fact of life that most of us become writers [partly] because we’re terrible at other things like, say, acting. Or speaking. Or singing. Or… the list goes on. There are some few of us writer-types who do multiple things well and I applaud them. But I—and just about 98% of all of the writers I know—do writing best. That means speaking, public speaking, public reading… that’s pretty far down on the list of things I do natively and do well. There are some writers I know who are amazing readers. They will take the story they’ve written and captivate an audience with it. I envy them. I want to be them. But I’m not, so I practice. I do try. I am still attempting to become comfortable with simply talking about my books, talking about my characters and plots without getting lost in the details. It’s something I could not do in my first workshops. I shook and could not get the words out of my mouth in a slow, coherent manner until some years later. Reading poetry aloud helped. Going to readings, hearing other writers read, helped. Listening to audiobooks helped, too, hearing actors perform books I know and love—that helped. I’m still learning and trying because a long time ago I learned that a writer can’t simply hide behind her desk for the entirety of her career. She’s got to get out, talk about her books, and even read. So. Practice.
Some people are born gifted. Plain and simple. But that doesn’t mean you are talentless.
Any artist in any field knows who I am talking about. There’s always that one boy in your high school, one girl in your college class. They are not only gifted but magical. No, honestly; you find yourself wondering whether or not they made some kind of Faustian bargain as toddlers or maybe their parents consumed an experimental drug when they were in the womb, because they are unnaturally gifted for their age, for their experience. It’s not luck—there’s definitely a difference between a lucky person who is talented and this kind of thing—this is pure, phenomenal talent. It’s always easier to spot in those dance prodigies, those chess players, in athletes, in singers. You’ve seen those kids on those singing competition shows. But with writers, it hits you in that workshop and it feels the same. God or whomever has seriously given them a talent and, well, then there’s you. Try as you might, you need several drafts to get it right. You need to hack and edit and edit and edit anything you write to bring it into the territory of reasonably good. But there’s that poet whose words sparkle on the page and she spent forty minutes last night writing that little thing of brilliance, then went and watched TV. Or the first novel that’s won a kajillion awards.
That these people exist is a fact of life. But simply because they are amazing doesn’t make your talent less. Their success doesn’t hinder yours, doesn’t affect you at all. Everyone is different, everyone works and thinks differently, and if there’s any big thing I learned by being in class after class of writers, there’s no right way to be a writer, or to succeed as one. It’s about perseverance, cheeky optimism, and yes, some talent. But talent can be grown and honed, too. (Meryl Streep went to acting school, you know.) Those magnificently gifted writers you meet along the way shouldn’t serve to discourage you, but encourage you. They’re good. But so are you, you negative, overly-critical, self-effacing ninny. I’m talking to you. You’re good too. Remember that.
——
Anything to add on the topic? Any advice of your own to give based on your own first workshop or crit partner experiences? Please share!
Productivity! I has it.
Tuesday July 6, 2010
Despite the holiday weekend (ahem, Friday to Monday) and despite a few out-of-town jaunts, I’ve written over 20,000 words in a fresh rewrite of a project I started on Saturday, June 26. I needed something to work on while I’m still sending out / waiting on the most recent completed project and switching gears entirely and working towards another fully-completed, sellable project made perfect sense. Also, with my summer break from work, I finally have the time to simply get this done. It feels so good.
This one is YA fantasy (shocker), with a lot of the elements of a swords-and-horses-and-princesses kind of fantasy, but with a couple of flip-the-genre-on-its-head unconventional twists of plot and character. (Yay for being vague!) At its heart, this is a story about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons; about questioning one’s role in one’s family and the larger world; of others’ expectations versus personal desires; of truth, deceptions, and consequences. (EVEN MORE VAGUE!) Is it better to break out of the shadow of your elders and try to be your own person, strike the consequences, or is it better to surpass your elders’ expectations of you in following the path they’ve set for you? I always find I write stories about finding one’s identity, about reconciling expectations: those of your parents, of others, and of yourself. Granted, it’s fantasy, so I’ve taken some, ahem, magical liberties shall I say, in the extrapolation of these circumstances. But like any interesting fantasy, this story resonates with me (as a writer especially) because it’s ultimately about the journeys of the characters as they try to come into their own, to prove they’re just about grown up — to everyone as well as to themselves.
Also, this story has nothing to do with “destiny” because I happen to think the “destiny” trope has been done [well and poorly] by others and I’ve no interest in exploring it. Besides, I happen to think “expectations” are a lot more annoying, harder to handle, and more interesting as a relatable concept to a reader in a non-fantastical context because we all have them, or others have them for us. Really: which is harder to live with, being destined to do great things, or being expected to do great things? The externality of the pressure of “destiny” is interesting, but it’s remote. Destiny implies a deity or other such remote being/concept with a “plan” (for one or for all), and that can get sticky — and epic. I heart epic, but this story is not epic. (And that’s another thing this all comes down to: what is right for this story.) Here I’d much rather stick to human beings and their relationships.
Like everything I write, it has no title, so I may refer to it here as a lot of things including “this story” and/or “the WiP.” I hate titling things until I must, then even afterward I squirm uncomfortably. (Even titling these blog posts feels odd, which is why so many of them seem like partial sentences or involve language reminiscent of I Can Has Cheezburger.)
Now, back to Scrivener and its loveliness!
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