Writing for Five Senses – Description on the Run

It’s one of the most common writing tips: “Write the scene using all five senses.” But whenever I hear one writer give another that advice, I feel like one of my own trickster characters, and not just the ones with enhanced or extra senses. It’s more that I have to keep my smile in place while inside a part of me will wince.

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

It’s a vital point; advice like Orly Konig-Lopez’s Unforgettable Writing: Use all 5 Senses to Add Emotion show how much it can add to a story. What I think it misses is—who’d have thought?—how that single line of advice describes it.

[bctt tweet=”The problem with ‘describe all five senses’ is how it describes the idea. #writing”]

Because… five, seriously?

I think we all cringe a little, at the idea of keeping that many of anything in our minds all at once, at least when we’re doing something as focused as creating an impression out of thin air. For favorite books or grocery lists, five is a small number; for senses to juggle in one description, it’s huge. (Plus, taste? In a chase scene?)

Yes, yes, the tip doesn’t mean every sense needs equal time. But it keeps us thinking about how hard it is to keep track of that many senses in writing, instead of how we could get more of them in by using how they relate to each other.

Quick Check: the Big Two

[bctt tweet=”All five senses are not created equal. #description #writing”]

We all know which two of the human senses do most of the work in a story. In fact, you can probably divide your scenes into “mostly hearing” (usually dialog) and “mostly sight” (everything else).

—Just don’t stop at that.

It’s the easiest way I know to bring description to life: keep some sounds mixed in with the sights.

Sight being what it is, it’s the main sense we use to organize our surroundings—especially if we’re trying to describe something and have the space to only mention so much. But it’s all too easy to see (there’s that word again) the scene just in terms of the eye.

When my hero was infiltrating an apartment complex in SHADOWED, I could have opened with:

Trimmed trees and brush lined the paths around the buildings, but Paul saw none of the families walking around it now that the sun had set.

Not too shabby, I think; in twenty-six words it shows different pieces of the place and conveys a larger picture, including how Paul has been waiting to make his move.

Except, all of it is that visual “picture.” This is the kind of one-sense writing it’s easy to slip into, that leaves the description a bit flat. So instead I used:

Trimmed trees and brush lined the paths around the buildings, and Paul could hear a baby crying, probably part of one of the families he’d seen walking when the sun had been out.

Six more words, but just having that second sense in there drops the reader into a more real place. You can start imagining how Paul would pass other sounds as he walks in, and you might even be halfway to filling in the hard concrete under his shoes or the fading smell of barbecue, because the description won’t let you settle back into seing the neighborhood as just a painting. Sound goes with sight like, well, thunder with lightning.

[bctt tweet=”Sound #description goes with sight like thunder with lightning. #writing”]

Naturally this works the other way too: dialog and other sound-focused passages can get the same depth by working in some visuals. A page of pure conversation never feels as complete as a page sprinkled with faces, background images, or a full “walk and talk” of what the characters are doing or passing by as the chat goes on. Imagine how much this line from the next page of SHADOWED would lose if it had stopped with the sound:

“Who are you?” Koenig gasped as he groped for the drawer.

(If you’re a dialog-centered writer, you may have worked out the sight-sound combination starting from this end. Add enough gestures to conversations and you start to see the need for noises in a landscape too.)

Writing would be easier if there were one rule of thumb about this—maybe one sound per paragraph or three sentences of sight and vice versa. But of course the real fun is each of us working out our own mix, and just remembering how much mixing in one other sense fleshes out the moment.

That’s my one-step tip for deepening descriptions. I hope you’ll keep it mind when you read, write, or you come across the flat “use five senses” statement.

Next week I’ll go further into how comparing those two senses can help all five work together in a description, and some of the patterns that can steer pacing and suspense. After all:

You can’t see everywhere.

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Dialog, Plot, and a bit of Spock — Layers brought to life

Dialogue might be the most powerful tool a writer has. It’s absolutely the easiest one to lead in any direction you want, and yet… Just by keeping track of what pieces the story’s built from and what the character’s own viewpoint is, a writer just might find a line that plays several points off each other all at once, in such a bold combination the reader’s completely hooked. Just look at these lines, from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, between Saavik and Mr. Spock after meeting Captain Kirk (okay, it was Admiral Kirk at the time):

“He’s never what I expected… He seems so human.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Saavik.”

How much work do these lines do?

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

Well, let’s say you’re a viewer who knows nothing about Star Trek (a real stretch, I know) except that the two seem to be aliens because you notice their pointed ears (hmm, maybe a bigger stretch). That and you’ve just seen Kirk sweep in as the officer who’s inspecting Spock and Saavik’s ship. Even if you somehow don’t know the rest of the Trek story, it still captures a whole range of points:

Kirk is Important, or famous, enough that Saavik has expectations about him. Enough expectations that she bothers to talk about them in the middle of an inspection, when she could have stuck to business.
Kirk isn’t what Saavik expected (laying the foundation for him surprising any number of other people too–not a bad thing to keep in mind for Kirk).
Saavik’s concerned about “humanness,” out of all the things she might predict or notice about a person–
and from Spock’s reply we see she wasn’t mentioning humanness to compliment it.
Spock isn’t so impressed with humanity either, the two aliens agree on that in theory–
but at the same time Spock is more tolerant of it, or at least of Kirk.

Six points, all leading up to how Spock’s respect for Kirk trumps all the rest. (In fact there’s a seventh point, since most viewers actually would know Spock and Kirk are longtime friends: the fact that Saavik dares to say this about her superior’s friend reminds us that even Vulcans military officers don’t let human respect keep them quiet, at least among themselves.) If this were a new universe it would be a magnificent bit of multipurpose exposition; in a franchise like Star Trek it puts the audience on notice that this writer gets the characters and the story’s only going to make better use of them from here on. Not too shabby.

In fact, this isn’t just a dialog point. It applies to any kind of characterization, and that means it can inform the whole plot of a story: how does a character really see a situation, and what’s he going to do there besides the obvious? Turn and salute the enemy he’s just viciously wiped out? Be the only person in the room who doesn’t believe the evidence, and so change the whole course of what happens next while the reader stops to think “Wait, I guess she would be the one who can’t accept it yet…”

One key to finding those openings might be to look at the story in terms of differences within its elements. What or who doesn’t fit with who, what’s grown stronger than what, who wants one thing and who wants something else, what options or tools have just stopped working–and where does a character stand on these? (“Differences,” of course, are another way to say “conflict” or at least the fun stuff that gets a reader’s attention.)

With the Saavik/Spock exchange, the gaps it points out are between Kirk’s achievements and his very human nature, comparing that with how she (as a Vulcan) sees that as odd and unsettling, all against how Spock–although he partly agrees–still has that tolerance for it. That’s a lot of bases to touch, about history and one man’s individuality, two different cultures, and Spock in turn bridging between them.

So, how many pieces is your story built from? And how many different things can you compare to each other, by finding the right character and the right moment to show a few of those differences all at once–or just the one that the reader will never forget?

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Ten Writing Tricks from Gaming

The following are tricks I’ve learned from role-playing games, board games, and other gaming fun, that help me remember what works in writing.

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

#1: the Characters’ Viewpoint lets you write

For me at least, the best tool to help me write is getting into what it’s like to be a character– from bits of their background, signature skills or tactics, and all kinds of details, plus every plot twist that helps sweep me up in how he has to do what he does next.

Gamers can use each session to practice their sense of these, and see how other people do them too. The more in touch you are with what works for you, the more you’ll get written.

#2: Conflict

No matter what a story is, gamers know the narrative should never get far from the conflict: why the hero has to do something, why someone or something else is in the way, and anything that helps or hurts his struggle.

Games show how the story is always better with a strong villain, especially when the story lets that villain impress the readers, and then tick them off. (Or if the obstacle isn’t a villain, the situation should still be a serious challenge, and sometimes seem like it’s “out to get” people.)

And, weakening the villain weakens the whole story.

#3: the Stake or Change

Role-playing games have both routine adventures and ones that changed parts of the storyline; the changes are usually the more memorable ones.

Also, role-playing games let characters gain power and equipment, for the excitement of getting stronger. Try writing to build a sense that your characters can only do so much– and then they learn to break some of those limits.

#4: Losing

Games have the thrill of actually being able to lose, instead of the jaded “the hero always wins.” But this works in games because you can still play another game, or resurrect or replace a dead character– it’s harder in stories where the hero’s life is on the line.

Some stories provide this by playing up the times the hero fails but survives to try a different plan or fight a rematch. These are less powerful than times the reader’s come to care about someone or something besides the hero’s life, and that is permanently lost (or really could have been).

#5: Choice

Games are built around players’ choices: the next move, when to attack or retreat, how to solve a problem.

Stories can be stronger by leading the reader into a sense of why the character has to take the choice he does: why he’s so driven, how many choices he has and why all the others don’t work, at least for the kind of person the reader understands he is. (Gamers choose their action based on a clear situation; readers want to see the situation so well they’d choose the character’s action too.)

(Then, be sure those choices have good pacing, variety, and sometimes lead to real losses.)

#6: Everybody’s Choices

Role-playing gamers are used to letting other people’s characters share the spotlight; this is good practice for writing a protagonist with supporting characters.

Board games also remind us: an exciting game has to be against a skilled opponent, so villains ought to be smart enough to challenge the hero.

More than that, hero and villain should be watching each other’s moves and reacting to them– especially if there’s a sense that one side makes the other escalate. Also, let the supporting characters react as if they had the freedom other players would: who tries to join up with who because of what’s happened, or who betrays them, or tries to step in at the last minute and steal the prize.

#7: Details for Choices

Games show how eager players can be to learn any amount of game rules and details, while writers worry about giving too much detail and bogging down the story.

The difference is that gamers use that information to choose their next moves. So, a writer can make the most use of any detail that’s a factor or hint about what a character chooses– what about the forest helps an ambusher hide in it? what traditions of the royal court help him win allies?

#8: Dialog

Gamers have a chance to practice dialog by listening to other players. Of course most speech patterns at a game table aren’t right for most stories, but a writer can listen for specific patterns: getting excited makes who speak faster and makes who babble? who says “Got it” vs “Okay”?

(And watch for any interesting catchphrases someone has, to inspire what you can give your characters.)

#9: Fun Now

Games are always at risk of going off on a tangent (side-discussions of what’s going on, or general chitchat), so gamers get practice in luring other players back onto course (eg with clues or immediate challenges). Develop the sense of when you’re losing the players’ interest, and apply it to writing.

As that sense improves, it can also help in planning a story or a chapter. What’s a good starting place, a fun arc, and a satisfying ending?

#10: People

Gamers get used to sitting with fellow players. A writer needs to get comfortable asking people what in a story works and what doesn’t.

Also, gamers learn different players just prefer different parts of the game; writers should keep in mind not all writing will appeal to everyone. But at the same time, the other people are still there because they want the story to be good, just as the writer does.

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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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A Few Words More–or Less?

Does the line need a little more, does a description need an adjective, or maybe a little about a thing’s sound or motion as well as its shape? It all comes down to words.

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

After all, if the writer doesn’t mention something, the reader may never suspect that part of his grand vision was there, or that quirk of dialog that shows how unique the character is… but at the same time, that word might be a misstep or simply a distraction from what’s more important.

One great perspective on finding that balance is the Five Principles of the Puppeteer. –Yes, puppets, an interesting way to look out of the rut writers may be in. Mary Robinette Kowal thinks of words the way she moves her puppets, taking responsibility to choose which motion to emphasize (and what other motions to give the puppet the illusion of how real muscles would react) and what would be a distracting “head-bobbing.”

Another model I like is a certain mobster’s girlfriend’s advice about the right clothes–that they “should call attention to you, not themselves,” that it’s all about the total effect. Or think of a film camera: what objects, what balance of light and shapes, what symbols does the director want to get in the frame and what would clutter it up? (A more exact image might be storyboarding: you choose which things are worth sketching in and which to just leave out, to be implied by the rest.)

Every line written has an opportunity to add another small touch or two to bring to life just what’s there and why. The person or object in the moment’s center might be obvious, but do you fill in what’s behind that, or what’s lying in the corner? you probably work in some sounds with all the sights, but do you mention how the floor feels, or any smells? And do you mention them when setting the scene or later, or drop a mention early and then remind the reader?

And in dialog this applies twice over. On the one hand you have all the things a character might say on the way to his point, and just the pauses and halts that give another glimpse at his personality, and on the other you still decide how many expressions, gestures, and full “walk and talk” descriptions to mix in to keep the moment from becoming pure Talking Heads.

But, keeping the balance… we all know what happens if writing tries to cover everything in a room, or every wasted word that real conversation has.

One trick is, sometime, to not wedge more things into view but color the thing there with an extra word or so. Instead of spelling out how loud and powerful a motorcycle is as it moves in, is it enough to make it a “black motorcycle” or “Harley” and just let that give a sense of vividness to everything around it? A world made up of Harleys and the asphalt is more colorful than bikes on the road–unless it reflexively uses the fancier words every time, not caring when a thing’s less important or already established.

The classic form of that choice is adverb vs verb, and adjective vs noun. If a sentence comes out “John ran down the road,” an easy way to amplify it might be to make it “ran desperately”… but that draws the reader’s eye a little to that second word, a slight distraction compared to some more direct “dashed down” or “panted down.” Also, we all know adverbs and adjectives are the easier way to think of an image’s flavor, so they make the writing look a little more ordinary.

Still, again, not everything deserves the stronger verb or noun–and if they’re still just important enough to not leave out, a throwaway adverb or adjective can do the job. Then of course come the moments when the modifers are the only natural ways to show something (how much do you want to zigzag just to avoid calling the bike “black”?), or when the occasional explosive modifier could liven things up without making the phrasings seem modifier-heavy. For that matter, a style that uses too few adverbs and adjectives can start the reader thinking something’s odd about it, another distraction.

Dialog tags might be the most intense form of this, because the structure of dialog makes tags so conspicuous. Each adjective and adverb there gets framed by quote marks, in what may be pages of short-ish paragraphs to show any patterns of overuse… but the same spotlight makes flashier verbs like he snarled conspicuous too, and at least as easy to overuse. And even though “said” is called an “invisible” tag in comparison to all those, too many of those get noticed too, when many of them might not be needed at all or could be replaced with a separate “He gulped his drink” sentence.

Like the puppets or clothes, it all comes back to priorities. What’s most likely to change the story (of course the big villain doesn’t arrive on just “a motorcycle”), especially if it’s still new? Setting a part of the scene is good, but if those shadows just might have someone setting an ambush or the walls make it harder to run, the view starts falling into place.

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The Toolbox – what goes Around the Words

Choosing the words… picking which shapes to fit around your prose gems to really show them off, and when not to try as hard… It means juggling paragraphs, “said” tags, adjectives, punctuation, and yet still managing to be creative in the middle of it all. No wonder that, no matter how ready we are to write something, the biggest parts are probably still the actual writing and rewriting to get the words themselves into place.

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

More, the devil’s in the details, so this is the final acid test to our skill: Do we come off as more wannabes that have fun ideas but whose words don’t quite “have it”? Or do we make that reader think “Not a bad line… okay… keeps moving… yeah, fun moment and… yeah… oh she needs to DIE—” until we’ve earned his trust enough to turn that page?

Honestly I think half the would-be authors who don’t pull it off are the ones who fail the Resume Test: give the reader some reasons to like you, but know it only takes one reason for him to put the paper down and go with somebody more reliable. One failed word, one aspect of weakness than runs on too long, and it can all be over.

–Bad blogger! Writers already know that, there’s no point in my reminding you all about how many things can go wrong, especially when dwelling on it can just freeze us all up. Besides, you’ve probably already learned the tools, and now you’re focusing on your sense of what makes your writing sing, with the precision slowly coming with practice, right? Good. That’s probably how it has to be.

Still, there’s no reason to let your options unsettle you. The more we all get familiar with what the structures for those words can really do, the more we can let them line the writing up in a better way, and maybe even make it come out easier.

Mind you, these will only be the highlights. For the real bible to most of this—yes, I’m going to say it—be sure you have Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style handy. (And if that sounds too nitpicky, consider that this is the same E. B. White that wrote Charlotte’s Web. They get it.)

Now: let’s say you have enough ideas in your head to start a scene. Whether it’s from planning or from trusting that your mind is open, you think you can give the scene a direction of suspense or fun or whichever it is. (In fact, I think “suspense” is a good model for working with any kind of scene; you can use the same kinds of hints and buildup even about whether a great pleasure or an ordinary thing is going to turn out a little better or worse. Anticipation is good for anything.) You have your characters, and the kind of things that might happen, and you’re ready to describe it all. So…

Pace

How fast should the scene be going? Is this the time to dwell on how your hero’s fingers notice the feel of the design in the coffee cup… or is the only important thing that you touch base by saying he “got to work eager and freshly caffeinated”?

Think of both what pace to start the scene at, and whether it’s best for the story to change speeds in midscene; maybe starting at a quick summary and slowing down when something important shows up.

And when things start slowing down you could end the scene right then, or you can linger a while over the consequences, maybe not ending at all but just keep on going with a few lines or even a few pages of thoughts and lesser events to lead to the next event. (Classic example: When the hero leaves one place, do you then say “When he arrived–” or follow him on the road?)

Note: if you do officially end the scene, you can make it the chapter’s end too, but if not you should skip a line and put in a mark such as * * *. I’ve seen writers who left that mark out really confuse the story when the line break wound up at the page top/bottom and readers didn’t know the scene had changed.

Also, how much does your style depend on you mostly staying at one pace or another? Hopefully if you love details, that means you also know how to reach the next thing before you bog down, or your fast-paced style includes enough twists that you don’t end the fun too soon.

Actually, there are “pacing” questions about every level of writing, from chapters to syllables. For every kind of point we just might add in to amplify or clarify something, there are options of trimming more away if you think that bit of detail or oomph is starting to distract the reader from the key part story of the story, whether it’s starting the scene before the good stuff or one word fancier than it needs to be. Any seasoned writer knows much of the work is streamlining the writing from how it first came out—sometimes even taking a whole scene they slaved over and replacing it all with one mention in another scene that the thing happened.

“Stories fly like birds. Their wings have strong muscles where they need them, but their bones are hollow wherever they can save weight. Build your bird right.”

Paragraph

The next level of choice depends on pace too. Paragraphs are a marvelous extra chance we writers get, to show which ideas the reader needs to understand as a set before moving on—what one room looks like, or that one set of actions is about one thing and different from the next few that are about something else. I always think of the reader as holding his breath when he starts reading a paragraph, and taking a new breath as he comes out of it and pauses an instant to take in what it means.

You can use that idea of a set to make the most of each paragraph. Start it with a sense of what unit it’s covering—as in, do you need a paragraph to capture the sound of a woman’s voice before going on to her face, or is the paragraph a five-line way to say he spent a year waiting to see her again? Either way that choice makes what might be a clearer statement than the words themselves do, about what’s important enough to make which things into just its building blocks. And the reader will notice that you keep making that structure clear for them.

They can’t miss it.

One caution about paragraph sizes: It’s always best to have some mix of sizes, so the reader can sense that the longer paragraphs are for the more complex or stacked-together subjects, with the shorter ones for what’s simple or emphasized.
–Especially, larger paragraphs are harder to follow, and worse, they stop demonstrating to our readers that we’re still pointing out what’s about one thing and what might really be better as several. Look at a paperback page; you’ll see maybe nine lines might be as long as they get before they start looking bulky, depending on the style. If I see a paragraph over that, I really hope it’s a “long morning on the road” that’s supposed to drag on, or else a Powerful Instant of frozen time.
“The axe-heads lesson” is the other way to look at paragraph sizes: like a double-bitted axe, a paragraph’s middle might add some weight to it, but its real impact comes from those two sharp lines at the top and bottom. A lot of picturing the paragraph you’ll write is knowing where it starts and then what to climax it with.

In fact, if you put a specific fact anywhere but the start or end of a paragraph, you’re taking some risk that the reader won’t notice it. Well, unless it’s standing out with quotes or italics.

Dialog or no?

Yes, it would take dozens of posts to explore what makes dialog work. But what I’m thinking about here as that, as we narrow our sense of options from the scene down to the word, we come to how putting any kind of quotation marks near characters changes the flow of things.

Dialog can be some of the most efficient writing there is. It’s almost always the fastest way to cover several different things, especially about someone’s attitude–or better yet, several someones’ in conflict. In fact, it’s so handy at this, writers have to resist the urge to invent silly conversations as the obvious way to explain things or proclaim people’s emotions. Medieval plays always opened with gossiping servants filling us in—it’s so obvious, we should all know better than to overuse it.

Just look at how conspicuous a bit of talk is on the page—how it draws whole sections into rhythms of what’s probably shorter, faster-alternating paragraphs, and those themselves are structured by tags and other signposts. That’s how much of a pattern it adds to that writing, how easily it clarifies what part is a different person and most likely a different attitude on things, each one played off the previous ones. Too many pages without this can start to look like all the same thing; pure description may be the best way to pull the reader into a mood or set of actions, but it can still help to let someone grumble a moment or overhear a few words, just to make one bit stand out in dialog. Or if you have trouble keeping a longer stretch of description together, you might be one of those writers who do better with some dialog to structure it all.

And of course, the longer the dialog runs without a few breaks, the more its cramming together of points can look crowded or feel tiring. Again, balance matters, and just how to balance depends on your style and story.

(There’ll be more about dialog later, as we get deeper into the bits and pieces of things.)

Transitions

So we’ve gone from scene to paragraph to whether a sentence should start with quotes, and we’re down to the sentences themselves. —But first, about “But.”

Yes, sentences are a key building block of writing. And often each sentence simply adds to the one before it; more facts or reasons to think the situation is the same, same mood, same balance that it seems better for people to do X than do Y. But, sometimes the next thing contradicts that or sends things off in a whole new direction (you know, the fun parts). So as we write we want to keep a sense of what the direction is just now, and consider starting any sentence that breaks too sharply with the last with a But.

—”Consider” it, I said; be sure not to use it every time you could. It’s most needed when there’s a definite change from one sentence to the next, but it’s just enough shift that the reader might think you didn’t realize it. The more obvious changes are often the ones that don’t need the marker, and might look overdone if they had it.

Or, if you aren’t really contradicting a thing but showing some variations on the theme, you could start it with Or.
Still, if something is a re-but-al that counters a But, its marker is usually Still or Then Again.
And if points keep moving in the same direction, and seem like not quite the next thing in line but a variation of the one before, starting that with something like an And or Also smooths that along nicely.
Then you have other mild but helpful transitions like Then, Because, Therefore…

You get the point. And again, since writing is always balancing between paces, you want to point out some of these shifts to the reader, but not mark out every last step.

Note: these transitions may be most needed in starting a sentence, but they may be needed in mid-sentence too.

Sentences

In the end, writing always comes down to the sentence. That’s where the real magic happens, where words do or don’t line up with that shape and first start to become something real. And, knowing the sentence is our best chance to get into the flow of picking the words.

I think each sentence amounts to a change. It might be one piece of the story acting on another piece (“Alice slapped Zoey”), or it could be you changing something the reader didn’t know into something he now does (“She wore battered leather gloves”).

And I think that’s the question to ask as you write: what is changing next? Especially, at this moment, what is the pace of that change? And specifically:

How “far” is the subject up “ahead” or “to the side” of the last sentence? And then, how far apart are the subject and object, and how much happens within their interaction?

I don’t mean how many words are between two nouns. I mean, looking at the direction the scene is going in: should the new sentence be focused on an action by or a revelation about a thing (that is, the subject) that’s the same as in the sentence before, or else on one that’s similar to it, or should it be taking up something very different? And then how does the thing’s action/revelation about which other thing move it further in the scene’s direction?

I think that’s the process, even though we use it different ways at different times. A cautious writer might range around a lot, using a lot of different sentences with different subjects trying to discover what’s in a scene and what’s going to happen next. A hurried or inspired writer might rush straight toward what’s most promising, and hopefully go back to add in some scene-setting and might-get-involved factors later.

Either way, if you think Alice (as a subject) should soon be slapping Zoey (object), should a sentence you write first have a subject of:

general background of what’s nearby, just clarifying the scene?
specific background, any facts that might affect what’s coming—are there other people there that won’t approve of the slap? does Alice still need a reason to slap Zoey, or else is it worth a sentence to remind us of the reason?
the object you’re aiming toward, Zoey herself—have you already taken a sentence to establish that she’s there? do you need another about her right now (such as, does she or doesn’t she look like she deserves what’s coming)?
things related to the subject you want, Alice—maybe a group of friends she’s with, the door opening to let her in, or some aspect of her such as her expression or those gloves she wears?
the real subject herself, Alice, taking action?

For a slower pace, you can work through more of these options as sentences in their own right, covering more bases and trying to build more momentum at the price of losing speed and bulking up the word count. For a faster pace, the sentence is simply Alice—

—and whatever she’s acting on. As with the subject, Alice’s object could be Zoey, or it could be taking time for her to “take a deep breath” or “shove past Betty” on her way, or any of the other options as things to interact with or be revealed in relation to Alice’s sentence.

—And of course, even if it is Zoey as the object, Alice might still “look at” her before she slaps her. The action within the sentence is still a chance to pause and say something else before the payoff, and that may be a cue for a few more sentences going back and forth with different subjects.

Naturally, half of deciding all these is picking what things to use in a sentence after this one. If Zoey does have a friend right between her and Alice (“Megan,” maybe) and you know you want to involve her before the slap is delivered, is this sentence of Alice’s a glance at Megan, or do you want that glance (or something with Megan as the subject) to be somewhere after this sentence but before the slap?

The best news may be that, when you’re especially in tune with your writing, you may start to get a sense of how to balance these options for several sentences ahead. Whenever you can see the scene’s pacing needs as “maybe it’s two Alice-sentences mixed with one Zoey, and that means one or two background things’ sentences between them,” you’ve gone from a vague sense of how to write what’s next to a real picture of the next paragraph or two, one that lets you cover all the things there and keep the right speed. Suddenly all that’s left is to pick the words themselves.

As I see it, this is the mental balancing act we go through that defines each sentence we write. Whether we’re searching for what might happen next, exploring what else is connected to it (“is there a Megan in the mix? yes there is!”), or fleshing out the things we know a scene needs, we:

look at where we’re headed, whether it’s a clear event or an impression we have,
decide how to balance quick pace versus working in other things, and
put the sentence in terms of how quickly it moves the subject, object, and connecting verb toward that goal or off to those tangents we want.

(You know, if Mrs. Davis in 5th grade had taught parts of speech using the Alice/Zoey smackdown…)

Speaking of picking the subject, two warnings here:

don’t, don’t, DON’T lose track of which thing is more active than which and should be the subject, and find yourself writing the dreaded passive voice. “Zoey was slapped by Alice” just might be the most conspicuously amateurish way there is to write. Although, you might get away with “Zoey reeled back as Alice slapped” if the reeling is more important for the moment than the slap itself.
don’t start too many sentences in a row with the same subject, even when most of what’s going on is one person doing different things. A rut of “Alice… She… She… She…” is just too easy to fall into; better to let other things take their turn as subject, or at least mix in a new term for Alice (“the bounty hunter”—we knew she was a tough lady, didn’t we?) if that term isn’t overused. But since the main problem is the same word appearing at the start:

Of course there are other wrinkles beyond picking a subject, object, and action.

“As the crowd stared, Alice marched forward toward…”

The crowd could have been its own sentence there, and maybe it deserved one. But if it doesn’t, tucking it in at some part of Alice’s sentence speeds up the pace specifically by making that one thing seem less important. In fact, by pairing the crowd’s staring to Alice’s movement, we’ve implied that one is affecting the other—or in this case, that Alice isn’t making them do more than stare, and none of those witnesses is slowing Alice down at all. It’s one of the surest, yet quickest, ways to add an extra spin on things.

It works at least as well when saying two things about the same subject, tucking background or parameters right into someone’s action without breaking stride. “Pushing past Betty, Alice…”

(Remember to learn the proper rules for different tools here. Sometimes you can just And or But or Or a few more words in, or adding things with commas is usually close enough to appropriate—but other punctuation can make some parts of the sentence stand out more. So you can have dashes (as shown in the previous sentence), or a semicolon (;), and sometimes the more finicky elipse (…) or colon (:). But keep in mind that all of them are a little conspicuous on the page… using a lot of them or of one favorite looks repetitive… even if you call it just your own style… or if you scatter a lot of them through different places. As with anything, it’s its own kind of balance against overuse to work out.)

There’s one extra reason to use compound sentences like this. You don’t want to have too many simple sentences in a row. These things are great for a simple fact. And they can add special emphasis to a single point. But they don’t do either of those well unless they contrast with other sentences that have more than just a single subject, verb, and object; they need to be part of a variety. Worse, any time there’s more than a couple of those in a row, it starts to look like that’s the only way you know how to write.

A related point: a good sentence may want a strong word right at its end… but that can be trickier than it looks. I have a few thoughts on that combined with a guest post, at Order of a Sentence – with Maralys Wills.

Words (or, a few of them)

No, there’s no easy way to pick exact words, even as you get into the flow of picking what to make a sentence about. But there is one easy tip, that just might be the most useful ultraspecific lesson in writing:

Get comfortable with verbs.

The verb, the action (or revelation) word, is the real reason the sentence exists. Except for some handy fragments like “No!”, every sentence is centered more on its verbs than on the subject and object nouns (or pronouns) at their ends.

What this means is that if you’re looking to add oomph to a sentence, consider your options:

The cat ran silently across the road.
The tabby ran across the road.
The cat padded across the road.

The first is an adverb, a whole extra word grafted onto the sentence to clarify something—worth using sometimes, but mainly when there’s no easy other way to get it in. The second is jazzing up one of the nouns, more natural but certainly something that could be used too often. The third, refining the verb, does a lot more to bring the whole sentence to life without becoming awkward.

Having a wide range of verbs ready is doubly useful if it lets you do an active description. A bridge may not be “doing” anything when you put it in view, but any bland “There was a bridge” can be outdone by saying “a bridge loomed” or “spanned” or (for those ominous rope bridges) “swayed” in its place. You might think of every use of the words “was” or “were” as a placeholder, for reconsidering later for a verb upgrade. Just by getting practice with your different verbs, you can cover almost anything well, without much risk of overdoing it unless you’re actually trying to. –Well, one exception: the verbs in dialog tags can be handy, but they’re easier to overdo.

To say again, nouns are certainly worth giving some attention to as well. If you need to get a detail in, clarifying the word for the thing itself may be the smoothest way, and in any case it’s a good place to add some color. But it’s also easier to write yourself into a style where every line is littered with full “Alice”s or “the bounty hunter”s and all shoes are “the Nikes.” Just “she” and “shoe” can do the job at least every other time, if it isn’t those halves that you need more clarity.

On the other hand, adjectives and adverbs (as Mr. Stephen King says) are not our friends. In fact, I think of those words as hired hands, subcontracted in if they’re the best way to cover a point but hopefully not my first choice. Almost every word we put down is a temptation to think it out as “the cat RAN… well, I already said ran, but ran SILENTLY” instead of strengthening that word into “padded.” Adjectives and adverbs don’t make us lazy writers in themselves, but we should be always working toward that balance of a decent modifier versus an improved noun or verb–and the times we just don’t need either. (If we aren’t working on setting a mood, do we need to mention that cats are quiet?)

Of course, if one adjective is bulky, two look awkward. But do we really need to mention the clumsy, ungainly, overblown effect of letting three adjectives pile up in one place? Critical mass.

And, not that I especially hate adverbs, but I’ll take one more cheap shot at them: I think every writer should consider how easy any kind of modifier is to overuse, by dabbling once and a while in the old “Tom Swifties” word game. Just come up with an absurd use of a dialog-tag adverb, such as

“Voldemort split his soul into pieces,” Tom said half-heartedly.

Which brings us to:

Dialog Tags and such

Of course dialog doesn’t just change the tone of how the narrative’s going, or plug it deeper into the characters’ heads. Part of its effect also comes from how it visibly lines up different people’s words separate from each other’s, and also separates talk from what’s being done or thought. That’s the opportunity we writers can make the most of, as we make our choices about things like tags and extra actions.

“Of course the best way to tag dialog is with ‘said,'” said Mr. Said.

“But it doesn’t tell you anything!” yelled the Shouter. “There are more exciting tags than that!”

Mr. Said said “Isn’t the dialog itself supposed to do that? Besides, ‘said’ never tries to upstage anything, when the other tags are a lot easier to overuse. After all, the whole shape of dialog paragraphs draws the eye to how many times overdone tags are in there.”

“But—” the Shouter spluttered.

“That ‘said’ is so boring…” he moaned sadly.

“How could real tags ever be too much…” he whined. And at last: “Okay, I guess after using a couple you could look like you’re putting more work into the tags than the dialog. After all, we want to Show, Not Tell.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Said.

“Unless… unless the speech isn’t giving the whole picture of how it’s said. Got you!” whispered the Shouter.

“Oh,” said Mr. Said.

Just then Visitor spoke up. “But how long do you keep using tags at all? Each time a couple of people settle in to talking, everyone assumes just those two will keep going for a while. If nobody else speaks up to break that pattern, all tags start looking redundant—whether they’re ‘said’ or not.”

The others looked at the floor, embarrassed.

“But remember, Visitor: a paragraph with no dialog breaks patterns too. After that, you have to start tagging again or nobody will know who’s speaking.”

“Why use tags at all?” And Active grinned from ear to ear. “People don’t stop doing things when they talk; besides, those Walk-And-Talk combinations are half the fun. Putting in an ‘extra action’ is more natural than making the tag do the work, and a lot more powerful too, without having to keep using the same Said all day.” He looked at each of the others, waiting to see who blinked.

“But writing all that would be WORK!” the Shouter burst out.

“And sometimes it’s too much emphasis,” said Mr. Said. “Not every statement needs it.”

Active sighed, and was silent.

“Oh, one more thing. No matter how interesting a paragraph is, or especially if it’s a really exciting thing, take a look at how the paragraphs are alternating. And unless it’s obvious from the start who’s saying what, don’t let that paragraph go over a line or two without a tag or an Extra Action. You want to keep the reader enjoying each word as they come to it, not going crazy waiting to see who’s actually saying it,” put in the armadillo.

Of course, the real point of dialog is to give each person a speech style that has such a different kind of fun, the readers could keep them straight with no help at all… as long as you don’t actually skip those signposts, naturally.

One particular warning: watch out for those odd rules about punctuating some dialog sentences’ ends:

“Like this,” he said. “You’ve seen those periods that turn into commas, right?

“Or like that missing quote there, if the same person says another paragraph.”

You’ve seen it in writing, and you’ve probably seen (or been) one of the writers who got it wrong once and a while. If you have any doubts, pull out Strunk & White, or at least dig around Wikipedia.

Since we’re at the end of the sentence, I’ll also finish this “Toolbox” with one note about final punctuation. If it isn’t dialog (or thoughts that are supposed to sound like someone’s inner dialog), you end most sentences with a simple period (.), or maybe a dash (—) or elipse (…) or sometimes a question mark (?) if you’re closer to that internal dialog. But no exclamation points; they look like the writer is stopping to hype up his own work!

“Then again, all of these are okay for dialog. Just keep an eye on the tone it’s taking, so that—” and suddenly he shouted at the top of his lungs— “you don’t use a mark that doesn’t fit.”

But maybe that’s all we can ever do in writing: see what we want, and try to find what fits.