COLUMNISTS

Creative license: Does it tell your age?

Hanaba Welch

Creative license. That’s what you make for yourself when you need proof of a fake age, like 21. Good luck with the lamination.

The creative side of me would like to make one. A little success and I’d want to up my game to passports.

Yes, there’s that other kind of creative license too – the kind I actually need. It’s what I pull out of my pocket to write this weekly column. I’d be restricted without it.

Hanaba Welch

If you openly guess at the truth or break a rule of grammar, creative license is very handy – especially if you still live under the rules taught you by your dead or alive high school English teacher. Maybe that should be “dead-or-alive.” Either way, RIP Charlene Alexander. You were the best.

Against strictest rules, I started this essay with a sentence fragment. Creative license.

Editors last week let me get by with the four-hyphen term “fellow-non-pot-user” because I’d immediately said parenthetically that I didn’t know if all the hyphens were necessary – non-secret code for saying I was using creative license.  

        Sure enough, my superfluity of hyphens probably included two too many.

        Fellow non pot user.

I wanted to see what the term would look like with no hyphens at all. A little bare, I’d say, if anything can be a “little” bare. My computer prefers “fellow non-pot user.” Hmmm. Sounds like a fellow user of “non-pot.” “Fellow pot nonuser” would be another option – probably correct but too clunky.

        We’re getting into the weeds now.

        If you’re not following what I’m saying, don’t blame yourself. I’m not either.  

Voilà! A rule of thumb for writers. If you can’t understand what you’re writing, chances are your reader won’t either. Unless, of course, you’re a poet. Then all bets are off.

        Back to creative license.

In the real world, the license applies to more than writing. It’s the card we play when we’re forced to get creative – like when we use vice grips to replace broken handles and knobs. Seems like my friend Roger installed three pairs in the cab of his old Chevy truck – two for door handles and one for something else. Maybe the gearshift?

Vice grips are such a common solution they almost cannot be called creative. (If you’re worried that “vice grips” is not a generic designation, I checked. As long as you don’t use a hyphen, it’s an acceptable term for locking pliers. Ah hyphens.)

In closing, let me simply share my own not-inspired-by-Pinterest latest use of creative license:

The cow skull was nicely sun-bleached and looked good hanging on the wall, all teeth intact. But something was missing. You guessed it. Horns.

        What to do?

Bear with me while I toot my own, although I really shouldn’t be sharing this idea before I apply for a patent. Here it is anyway:

        You just paint the horns on the wall.

In my mind’s eye I see a few readers who are glad they didn’t already quit reading. The ones with incomplete skulls.

Hanaba Munn Welch, a correspondent for the Times Record News who divides her time between Abilene and a farm north of Vernon, appears on Mondays.  Her columns, as a tribute to the Childress Engine 501, always contain, amazingly, 501 words.