Oh my gosh, yes - I am so happy to read your answers for this. I love your style, and I love hearing you talk about writing and reading.
And ha, I hear you about set internal defaults. Left to my own devices, it's all em dashes and parentheses. I know it's bad in my casual non-fiction writing when I find myself nesting multiple sets of parentheses.
I pay a lot less attention to prescriptive grammatical rules and conventions in other people's writing, but they're useful lenses for my own work. I like structure in general. As someone who starts a few dozen projects for every one I finish, I find that having some sort of measurement or framework helps me not get paralyzed by all the choices - helps me stop picking at this sentence or that, and helps me actually decide to be finished with something. That's probably why so many of my stories are 100-word drabbles, Five Times stories, metrical verse, or take place over the course of one year divided into months or seasons.
no subject
And ha, I hear you about set internal defaults. Left to my own devices, it's all em dashes and parentheses. I know it's bad in my casual non-fiction writing when I find myself nesting multiple sets of parentheses.
I pay a lot less attention to prescriptive grammatical rules and conventions in other people's writing, but they're useful lenses for my own work. I like structure in general. As someone who starts a few dozen projects for every one I finish, I find that having some sort of measurement or framework helps me not get paralyzed by all the choices - helps me stop picking at this sentence or that, and helps me actually decide to be finished with something. That's probably why so many of my stories are 100-word drabbles, Five Times stories, metrical verse, or take place over the course of one year divided into months or seasons.