M.B NOVELS®

I love a beautifully written sentence. And they’re so noticeable, too. I notice misplaced commas. I appreciate elegant syntax. I have, on more than one occasion, spent too long rearranging a paragraph because one adjective was sitting in the wrong place. Words matter. Rhythm matters. Grammar matters.

Somewhere along the way, many writers start believing that technical perfection is the finish line. We obsess over passive voice, dialogue tags, Oxford commas, sentence fragments, point of view, filter words, adverbs, em dashes, semicolons, and whether lay or lie is technically correct. We become students of the craft, which is a wonderful thing. Until we become so concerned with writing correctly that we stop writing dangerously.

I’ve read novels with flawless prose that left absolutely no fingerprint on me. Then I’ve read books that were a little messy. Maybe a few sentences stumbled. Maybe an editor would have sighed dramatically at certain stylistic choices. But the story made me stay awake until two in the morning.

I’ll forgive almost any technical imperfection if a story has a pulse.

That’s the thing about craft; readers shouldn’t finish your novel thinking, Wow, what excellent comma placement. They should finish it wondering why they suddenly miss people who never existed.

Of course, this isn’t your sign to ignore the fundamentals and call it a writing style. Learn the rules. Study them obsessively if you want. Read books on structure. Take workshops. Figure out why a sentence works instead of simply admiring that it does. Understanding your tools gives you the freedom to break free from them.

I think we’ve become a little obsessed with writing structurally impeccable stories. Every beat must happen on the correct page. Every subplot must be resolved. Every character arc must satisfy. Every chapter must end with a hook. Everything must be optimized, paced, marketable, and clean.

But I think your characters should occasionally embarrass you. If everyone in your novel behaves sensibly all the time, congratulations, you’ve accidentally written about robots.

I think that’s why the books we return to again and again aren’t always the most technically perfect ones. They’re the ones that left us sitting quietly after the final page because we weren’t quite ready to return to reality.

So yes, care about craft. But don’t polish your story until you’ve sanded away its heartbeat.