Photo by Stuart Pilbrow , via Flickr Recently a writer friend of mine lost all her work when her computer crashed – because she had no backup. This is every writer’s nightmare. Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Her experience reminded me of a story I once read about Ernest Hemingway. (I don’t know how true it is, because of course I didn’t actually know Ernest Hemingway, but truth or fantasy, the message of the story is the same.) Anyway, the story goes like this: Hemingway had just finished a novel, and packaged up the only copy and gave it to his then-wife. This was way before computers, and maybe even carbon paper – or Hemingway didn’t feel like using carbon paper, I don’t know. Anyway it was the only copy. He asked his wife to mail it to his publisher in New York, while he went off to chase the bulls in Pamplona or something. Well, his wife got on the train to Paris, taking the novel with her and meaning to post it to New York once she got to Paris – but she had ...

At the top of my blog, A Mind Adrift in the West , there is a quote from Ernest Hemingway: "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration." Papa was a smart man, and this quote is one of my guiding lights when I sit down to write. If I build well, my story will stand up. The time to worry about the color of the walls (just to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point) comes later. I would posit that one of the essential elements of rock-solid writing is balance -- properly weighted words, meanings, cadences. A well-designed sentence has structural integrity that promotes simple elegance and ease of reading. One of the ways this balance is achieved lies in parallel construction. Consider this sentence: She wore taffeta, diamonds and had a gold ribbon in her hair. That sentence is out of balance, and it thumps along the page like a warped wheel. The solution? Make the construction parallel: She wore taffeta and diamonds and had a gold ribbon in her hair. The o...