Mac McCarty
Nov 5 · 1 min read

I am primarily a fictionist — somewhere on the cluttered corkboard behind my screen is a personal reminder, “In good fiction, we don’t have time for that.” The esoteric exigencies of “flow” encourage maximization of all the rhetorical tools in the toolbox. In good story telling, all paragraphs, most sentences & many individual words generally serve at least a dual purpose — except when they don’t. In that world, a stand-alone, subject-verb-object sentence thus gains power.

As applied to the serial comma, I usually see it as an unwanted speed-bump; an interruption of crafted diction. Unless it isn’t. Thus, I am an opponent of standardization. If I follow a mandate to use the serial comma, I thereby rob it of its potential power. This is true of many “rules of good writing.” Not that fiction is an “anything goes” proposition — far from it, in most cases — but that the purpose of putting words on the page is to communicate rather than distract.

Non-fiction, which I also occasionally write, is, as they say, another story —as are house styles & style book demands — which is why placing a piece before the eyes of a particular publisher is called “submission.”

    Mac McCarty

    Written by

    Purveyor of anecdotal information; pattern recognizer; tool user; into that creative thingy.