Full Stop

I almost always speak or write in truncated lines. Cutting off the end where it needs to be cut. My nephew finds this amusing, says, "You talk so funny". Where funny means different. Different, I hope, in not an entirely bad way.

I admit it is done for effect. Though I'm not certain what effect is desired. For someone who has spent so much time alone - and for whom those separate, wide-open spaces have made a difference, have, at times, been a lonely blessing, words still flow. I'll run off a text, an email, fiddle with a story. The lines stay consistent. The rhythm of the full stop.


I doubt that I always wrote and spoke this way. A lifetime of reading played its part. At some point in the '80s I stumbled upon, or was given, Raymond Carver. He, echoing Hemingway, showed me how a sentence could work. Do its verb and noun work (adjectives and especially adverbs very much off the reservation). Now, some twenty-something years later, I'm reading Carver's biography. Trying to write again myself. Twelve pages into a story that I've been writing for six months. For forever.