The Value of Antecedents

They walked to the neighborhood park. Maybe walk is too sedate of a word. They jogged, skipped or ran in circles on their way. Once in the park, they scattered, each to their favorite spot.
She watched them. Some cavorted in the water sprays. Others pumped their legs driving their swings ever higher. A few chased each other through the tangle of the bars of the jungle gym.

Who are they? Perhaps they is a group of children. Perhaps they are a group of teenagers. They could even be a group of young adults out for a fun evening.

Who is she? She could be a mother. She could be a child usually ignored by the other children. She could be a terrorist.

Each choice of who they and she are changes the entire passage. Why do so many writers assume mentioning a name at the beginning of a scene or chapter is enough?

Pronouns require an antecedent, a name to define who or what the pronoun refers to. This keeps the reader reading a particular story instead of wandering mentally off into another one. It keeps readers from getting confused reading dialog.

For the last few weeks I’ve been doing some editing for other writers. It’s taught me one thing for sure: I don’t want to be an editor for others except in special circumstances.

Editing is showing me so many little things I could work on. One is using antecedents. Another is improving the use of dialog. An unexpected aspect of this is how, sometimes, dialog is not separated from a paragraph, but is part of it.

Why, since editing is teaching me so much about writing, do I not want to do it? Simple. When I edit a piece of writing for someone else, that is all I work on. I am supposed to be editing “Mistaken Promises.” It languishes on my computer waiting for me to find the time to return to it.

For me the definition of a writer is: someone who writes. That is the definition I want to apply to me.