Month: January 2013

Order of a Sentence – with Maralys Wills

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

If a story moves forward one step at a time, each of those steps is the sentence. It’s the basic unit we read in, covering one small handful of points, and urging us on to read the next one. To explain that last part–about the sentence’s last part, and the sense of urgency it should give–I’ve asked multitalented author Maralys Wills to comment:

 

After years of teaching and doing line-by-line editing on some 50,000 manuscript pages, I’ve discovered one of the most effective, and yes, simplest, ways of improving your writing.  Always save the strongest word for the END OF THE SENTENCE.   For instance, if you have the sentence, “Death is the one thing I’ve always feared,”  you’d re-write it to say, “The one thing I’ve always feared is death.”  To the extent that you do this on all your sentences, you’ll find your work has a new feeling of energy, of power. You’ll discover that your words ring in the reader’s ears. As you write, you’re always building to strength.  Good writers do this instinctively.  But it’s something that even a beginner can learn.

I’d have to agree, a sentence lives and dies by its momentum. Except, maximizing that last word may not be as simple as it sounds, especially in fiction.

Consider the basic sentence shape,

subject verb object

such as:

John chased the outlaw.

The challenge is that fiction mainly needs the picture to evolve, one step at a time out of what it had been before. Nonfiction can casually drop a comparison of something to “a sheriff chasing down some desperado” into a paragraph to jazz up its point with its flashiest word as its object, right at the sentence finale. But in fiction the outlaw’s probably already on the scene, and we’re more interested in the shifting relationship between him and the other pieces there — not how many other names he can be called by, but who “chases” or “yells” or “shoots” at who. Or better yet, if that chase also lets John on his horse “thunder” after the outlaw.

That is, there’s more room for variety in the sentence’s verb, not its object… even though most natural-sounding sentences put their verb in the middle, not the end. Trouble.

One answer is not to ask the object to compete with the verb.<!> Moment-to-moment fiction just gives verbs too much advantage, and often it’s better to only look for an object that’s a worthy wrapup for the verb’s power.

(And, the main choices are just the verb in the middle and the object at the end. Plenty of sentences use or even end with other parts of speech, but those pieces are trimmings compared to the Big Three; trying to power-finish with “John chased the outlaw desperately” is more likely to crush the adverb under the sentence’s weight than it is to empower either.)

Still, there are a few options to get the most power out of objects:

  • pick specific urgent parts of a thing that will grab attention, like our outlaw raising “his gun.”
    • or, picking out an attached part just to paint a wider picture of that object, before swinging back to the central thing again, such as John noticing the outlaw’s gun hand’s “tremble” rather than always the man himself.
    • mixing in other subjects and their chance to pick a new object that , such as townspeople sweating in the temperature’s “inferno.”
      • or of course, when the plot swings around to new and important things that first appear as an object, like the outlaw grabbing “a hostage.”

(And of course, these can mix up the subject too.)

Maralys Wills has her website at http://maralys.com/

For my own larger collection of thoughts on sentences and wording, take a look at The Toolbox — what goes Around the words.

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Plot and the Power of OR

“Depth” is a word people have used different ways about fiction, sometimes not being that clear what they mean–just some sense that a character winds up with more layers, a situation more reality, and so on. Personally, I think the metaphor might be incomplete– because one of the best ways to give a story realism, or complicate a moment or a plot, or just loosen up the writing mind to let more in, is something I think of more as “width.” That is, ask the question “Or what else?”

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Yes, that’s partly what all writers do: work out a plot or moment by thinking, “what if something different happened here?” To rethink a choice that isn’t working, or to keep the next thing varied from what’s gone before, sure. Such as:

  • OR it’s someone else making a move (or even an object breaking or changing)
  • OR they focus on something else (a different plan)
  • OR it gets a different result.

Mixing up who takes the initiative can add a lot: a hero working through his plans while the villain never strikes back makes the story seem lazy, and a hero always defending is passive, but a sense of each retaliating against the other makes the whole story more organic and exciting. And other characters can’t be labeled so “secondary” that they never demand a scene when she tries to bargain for her husband’s life, or he needs protection after being the only crimelord to survive the villain’s purge, or they’re sure they’re the ones a troubled young man will listen to. For the second option, changing the target of that someone’s action covers going to deal with different people (or eliminate them, or whichever), gaining some other tool or pausing to develop it–using the whole world as a source of possible different tactics.

But changing up a plan’s result gets tricky–“let the villain win” can sound fun, but it’s bad news when the story’s only half over, and not much better to have the hero winning too much too soon. Worse, half the time the person and plan that fit best seem too sure to wipe out big parts of the story; what if the villain just had too good an opening to fail at? Asking that kind of “or” can put a whole story at risk.

But “or” can be more than a way to shake things up, it can be a whole perspective to work in. People often talk of stories as having “depth” when its elements have layers to reveal–a person with attitudes like masks over other masks, or a setting the story can explore within rather than acting like a 2-dimensional backdrop. But I like the idea that besides static layers, a story can reveal itself by how a character acts by asking “what else he tries,” or what his reaction is to someone else’s attempts; they “move forward but zigzag” to deal with each of those options to follow their goal. By this model, “depth” comes from those layers of zigzagging, how many different choices (of their own or others) that they deal with. All from considering “Or.”

That is, how many choices does a character really get to try out? At least half of making a story believable is in looking at those; couldn’t he just “leave the haunted house,” or Google a problem to get its basics, and doesn’t every problem have some expert or authority who’s already trying to deal with it? A story that covers more of its situations’ and people’s options comes off as more real–simple as that.

(The other half of plausibility is “what wouldn’t work” and the sad business of finding out if the hero’s glorious strategy is liable to get shut down because cars just don’t explode.)

“Or” is the viewpoint that can work all of this out, just by asking which options there are, and how far each goes:

What choices get blocked right away? Look at any situation from the view of a character trying to get through to a goal there, and it becomes a set of barriers and lost opportunities. An isolated house has distance to stop help from coming, and a fortress that’s lost its commander may have no leader strong enough to help; that’s what makes them ominous from the start.

What choices do characters realize won’t work? A fast way to explore more options is to just talk out, think out, or make quick tests to show some things as dead ends. How many scenes do we know where an Expert was called in, that began with “Did you try–“/ “Well of course!” Even a few lines of this builds realism, and suspense, in both how many choices it checks and the process of how people would go through them.

What choices do people try but fail, and which tempt them? These two might be half the structure of a scene or plot, and they may be the more important half.

After all, even though what actually happens or works is the spine of the story, so often what brings it to life is its contrast with the failed schemes, red herrings, and roads-not-taken set up next to them. A murder with one suspect, or a duel with no choice between safe and desperate maneuvers, don’t compare to stories that do make full use of these, and what they mean that a character chooses one over the other. After all, making that duelist choose between finesse and letting himself be hit creates a whole different scene–and character–from using skill vs. driving his opponent into a rage. Better still, when the story paces these to crush certain hopes at the right moment, or spring a new option just when someone’s resolved to go one way… now that’s momentum.

(Finally, what if there’s a plan or force that really does work–and something else comes down and overwhelms even that? “The cavalry comes over the hill” is annoying, unless it’s been hinted at first without ruining suspense… or it’s enemy cavalry…)

So often, “or” is the story. It sorts out the basics and then adds what else can justify them; it can take anything and define what it is by capturing what it isn’t; and then deciding how often to zigzag between choices can be the meat of designing any plot, scene, or even sentence.

Just a theory. Or…

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