On Fire, Lately — #7
On exclamation marks, greek yogurt scones, and the rest of what's lighting me up this month
Hi friends,
I ran into a problem when I first started writing about passion. When I’m swept up by something I love, there’s a lift in my chest — like I’ve swallowed a helium balloon. But when I go to put that feeling on the page, it can feel like doing it properly means letting the air out.
And yesterday morning, sipping my coffee and watching my cat Rio bat a worm around on the sidewalk, it finally hit me why. Writers get told their whole lives that exclamation marks are the mark of bad writing. “Cut out all these exclamation marks,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” Elmore Leonard allowed only two or three per 100,000 words of prose. (That’s an entire book!)
But passion is exciting! So when I noticed it was often so much easier to write about the hard parts of passion (of which there are many) than the joyful ones, I knew something wasn’t adding up. I got curious and went looking for where the warning against exclamation marks comes from. Turns out it mostly applies to third-person storytelling, where you want to show the emotion rather than tell the reader what to feel. But what about when the feeling is the whole point? When you’re so lit up you want to grab everyone within earshot and tell them about it? That’s exactly when I want to break the rule.
(Turns out I’m in good company. Tom Wolfe and Friedrich Nietzsche both used exclamation marks freely. My guess is they were pretty passionate, too.)
So expect to see a few more of them around here from now on. Don’t take them as me shouting at you. I mean — just look at these lines from Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The Secret Vice”:
“The secret vice! A whole new universe! Buttonholes!”
Talk about passion!
Here is a look at what is lighting me up this month:
3 Small Obsessions
Air fryer greek yogurt scones. I recently discovered a whole world of greek yogurt air fryer recipes and I’m obsessed. Combine flour, yogurt, baking soda, and berries of your choice and put it in the air fryer for about fifteen minutes. It’s delicious.
Libby app. The best library app I’ve ever found. I get so many of my digital books and audiobooks this way.
David Sedaris. I recently started reading him again starting with this and spent the whole morning at the coffee shop when I was supposed to be writing giggling at his essays. I think he’s one of the most brilliant writers and observers ever.
3 Things I’m Reading
Contrapposto: A Novel by Dave Eggers. I loved this book from the first few pages, so much so that I read it as slowly as possible over the past month because I didn’t want it to end. It’s about art and love and what makes a life a life. I finally finished it just last night over fish tacos. I now want to go back and reread his other books.
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris. I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed harder reading a book. I actually recommend listening to this one — he reads it out loud and his delivery is just… perfect.
Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. This is the book that got me thinking about exclamation marks in the first place. “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun,” he writes, “you are only half a writer.” Writing should be fun!
1 Thing I Learned Recently
I had my very first wrestling lesson yesterday! After four years of pulling guard in jiu-jitsu, I decided recently I was ready for the next challenge. I learned the right way to do an arm drag, a cool judo fake into a trip that felt like something I can actually add to my repertoire, and why wrestlers are in such great shape: wrestling. is. exhausting. So much fun.
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1 Quote About Passion
“Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something– as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all that she does.” — Susan Wolf
1 Question for You
What are you so excited about right now that it needs an exclamation mark?
Thank you for being here. I hope you do something that brings you alive today :)
With fire,
Krista
Fantastic read!