In Praise of the Parens (Or, Why This Blog Has A Silly Name)

In the big sandbox of grammatically correct fiction writing that I am so desperately trying to play nicely in these days, there are certain no-nos that wind up cropping up over and over again in my writing style:
1) Sentences that are way too long (I blame academia!)
2) A suspicious fondness for that most misunderstood of puncuation marks, the semicolon; I suspect that this is just part of the first problem, since semicolons actually allow me to make my sentences even longer. I'm also quite partial to the dash, however--probably for the same reason.
3) An over-reliance on parenthetical asides (which honestly may again just be part and parcel of that original sin back in problem number one)
4) A leftover tendency to connect words/concepts with slashes, in a pomo kind of way (again, I blame academia!)

These are things that I battle against constantly in both my formal fiction writing as well as my informal correspondence. In what I consider my "real" writing, the novel-in-progress, I am always having very nice critiquers point these problems out to me. I know with my head that these no-nos are no-nos for a reason, and that the critiquers are being quite helpful to me in gently bringing these lapses in writerly etiquette to my attention. But I still have the wee ego voice inside kvetching and whining, saying "fuck em! You can write how you want to write, it's what makes you a unique voice--for God's sake nobody apparently ever held Faulkner's ultra long sentences against him, bla bla bla..."

And that wee voice isn't entirely wrong, just (I like to think) ahead of its time. Like with any art form, of course, you can make the choice to flout convention as long as you realize that you're making a conscious choice about it. But as a writer I also have to come to terms with the general capabilities (and preferences) of my audience--and let's face it, most readers don't like long convoluted sentences. I probably don't love 'em either when I'm reading, I'm just hooked on them as a writer. (Maybe I talk that way too. I'm just not sure.)

But back to the topic I nominally started with, the parens, or more specifically, the parenthetical aside. I love asides (really I do). And one of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place to play with some ideas and some writing that doesn't have to be so *polished*, so thought out and revised and tweaked "'til it just sings". A place where I could just let my brain play/dump/explore.

So: Parentheticals will be a place for asides, and for long sentences, and for all kinds of daring punctuation. You (the largely hypothetical readers of Parentheticals, of which there are probably, oh, 3 or 4) have been warned.