Kitty Burns Florey is the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. She has also written ten novels, including Solos, The Sleep Specialist, and (coincidentally enough) Five Questions. Her most recent book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, will be published in November.
Q: What is your preferred environment for writing?
A: I’m most comfortable in my own slightly untidy study. I like a window for when I need to stare into space and think, a place for my omnipresent mug of tea, a cat on the floor, and my papers and notes and books and junk handy. But I can write anywhere, and have, and do.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: I hate semi-colons—they seem wobbly to me, neither one thing nor the other—but I am deeply attached to colons. A colon seems very eloquent and generous: it indicates that a statement is about to be expanded on or clarified.
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: I’m an editor as well as a writer, and what drives me crazy in anyone’s work (including my own, when I come across it) is a lack of close attention to what’s being written. Every word is important, every word influences the words around it, and a glitch in meaning can happen much too easily if you go on automatic pilot and never read things over or revise. That’s why there are so many dangling and misplaced modifiers in this world (“Lying dead in the road, I could see the dead dog.”). This stuff is so easy to fix! But not if you don’t see it. I think it’s vital for people who want to write well to scrutinize every word. I’ve written a dozen books, but the last thing I do before I turn in a manuscript to my editor is make the computer search for some of my pet words (“little” is one of them), which sometimes turn up three or four to a page. Horrifying!
But a shorter answer to the question is “it’s” vs. “its.” Is it really so hard to keep them straight???!!
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: In my fantasy world, I’m in a dim-lit cabaret in New York wearing wearing a slinky dress, everyone is drinking martinis, and I’m singing Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern.
In the real (well, realish . . . ) world, if I had to change careers, I would work with animals. I would love to be the Jane Goodall of wolves, or rabbits, or wild pigs.
Q: What drove you to become a writer?
A: People. Characters. All my novels began not with an idea but with a character. I’m fascinated by people. I’ve often thought I’d like to write a book about morning rituals – what people do in the first hour they get up. Or what their favorite food is, and why. There are very few things about people that I don’t find interesting, even boring things! After nine novels, I now seem to be mostly a nonfiction writer, but I’m always sneaking stories about people into my books.
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