Format For Writing A Novels & Stories

I drafted the address over three days. Not continuously. I wrote in the evenings when the lab work was done and the flat was quiet and I could think in the mode that formal address writing required. That mode was different from building a case. Case-building was argumentation: identify the claim, find the support, anticipate the counter, and sequence it correctly. A formal address was a declaration. State who you are. State what the situation is. State what it means. The argumentative logic was implicit rather than explicit—present in the structure of what you chose to name, not spelled out in connecting clauses.

"You'll be able to save it and read it as many times as you want. Now go, I need to concentrate." "Alright," he said, placing his hand on my shoulder. "If you need anything just call me." I stared at the blank document and my fingers immediately started typing. About a paragraph in, I realized I was actually writing in quite a formal way, almost academically. Just for the fun of it, I decided to structure my writing as a formal essay, giving it a title, an index, and even references at the end.

"He won't let me write it. He won't let Okafor write it. He wants to write it himself, longhand, in his own words, and he wants it entered exactly as he writes it. No editing. No legal smoothing." I looked back through the glass at my mother, asleep now, Hannah's head tipped against the chair beside her. "That's not unreasonable," I said, though my stomach had already started sinking with the arithmetic. A statement that has to be written by hand, checked, faxed, and filed before six in the morning is a different thing from a statement that simply exists.

I opened a new section. —-------------- I wrote for two hours. Not with the precision I used for operational documents, not the clean factual sentence structure that went into the formal records. The other kind of writing, the kind that comes when you are trying to put something down accurately enough that someone who wasn't there might understand what it actually felt like to be there.

To be absolutely sure. Writing wasn't exactly my strongest skill, and I was torn between keeping it formal, because, well, it was a letter to The Elders, or making it more casual since it was, after all, my personal testimony. I’d ended up somewhere in the middle, though I wasn’t entirely sure that I'd hit the mark.

While I warm up in the studio with Valentina moving through her own stretches on the other side of the room. While I lie in the dark listening to the penthouse settle and thinking about a man I am not ready to name my feelings for in the room on the other side of this building. Every version starts the same way. Formal. Careful. Measured sentences that give nothing away, that acknowledge receipt of the letter without opening any door too wide. The kind of letter you write when you have spent your whole life learning that open doors let things out as well as in. Today I actually write it.