In a rejection yesterday...
I was chided for overusing sentences that begin with a conjunction. And I would never do something like that. Or at least not often. But sometimes it seems to fit the voice of a piece in my head to do so.
In all seriousness, it's quite possible I did overuse it in this piece, so I'm glad the editor pointed it out. There are times when the voice I have in my head seems to clamor for conjunctions, and at times those are just right. I have occasionally run into fellow writers who are so conditioned by the academic-writing style that frowns on conjunctions, so they argue you should never do so in fiction either. That's silly. It's a rule as divorced from natural writing as the rules against not ending a sentence in a preposition or not splitting an infinitive. Sometimes a conjunction is exactly right at the start of a sentence. But...sometimes I have in the past overdone that, so now I'll have to see if I did the same here in this story.
I was chided for overusing sentences that begin with a conjunction. And I would never do something like that. Or at least not often. But sometimes it seems to fit the voice of a piece in my head to do so.
In all seriousness, it's quite possible I did overuse it in this piece, so I'm glad the editor pointed it out. There are times when the voice I have in my head seems to clamor for conjunctions, and at times those are just right. I have occasionally run into fellow writers who are so conditioned by the academic-writing style that frowns on conjunctions, so they argue you should never do so in fiction either. That's silly. It's a rule as divorced from natural writing as the rules against not ending a sentence in a preposition or not splitting an infinitive. Sometimes a conjunction is exactly right at the start of a sentence. But...sometimes I have in the past overdone that, so now I'll have to see if I did the same here in this story.
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