Steering My Craft: Am I Saramago

This blog post is part of an effort to refine my own work as a writer, and to strengthen my practice as a writing teacher. For each exercise, I’ll provide the directions, my effort, and a short reflection.

The Assignment: Craft a passage using NO punctuation. Gulp. Here was my go:

He tied his shoes yes all by himself found his way to the garage and his bike and pedal pedal pedaled himself all the way down the block and around the corner past the mean old people house and across the street to the far park with the tall slide and the not creaky swings and the circling circling sickening circling merry go round but what he was looking for and what he really came for was just ahead of him in the sandbox and all he had to do was cross to the scratchy diggy crane but as he almost sat a hand grabbed his shoulder and a voice said WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER YOUNG MAN and he tried to speak or squeak but he must have dropped his voice in the sand so he got back on his bike and pedal pedal pedaled across the street past the mean old people house around the corner and up the block before leaving his bike his shoes his courage at the doorstep.

Reflection: No punctuation at ALL? That was tricky, having to toss aside not just commas and periods, but hyphens, ellipses, parentheses. Maybe I’m whining, but it’s hard to set a piece of writing out into the world with no help for my readers on how to hear those words in their heads.

I do think that my protagonist and his stream-of-consciousness thought made for a good match for this type of writing. Still, at some point, as the book advises, I may go back and toy with this one to see how adding punctuation changes the power of the piece.