Ready, Set, Action!

If you're interested in learning how to pace your story, you might take a look at The War I Finally Won, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s sequel to The War That Saved My Life. 

The pacing is worth studying to learn how a writer sustains a reader’s attention from page to page. 

Notice the way Bradley relies on strong, active verbs and short, rapid sentences:

Coming out of the ether was harder. My right leg was pinned, trapped. I couldn’t move. I broke into a sweat, struggling to pull myself free. I’d been caught in a bombing, buried in rubble. I couldn’t move my leg. Then somehow I was trapped again in the dank cabinet beneath the sink, in our old flat in London. Mam had locked me inside. The cockroaches—

Bradley also introduces a strong, underlying emotion that gets under the skin of the reader in the same way it gets under the skin of the character. (Can you identify the emotion?)

Here are a few more examples of the way Bradley uses short sentences, active verbs, and an underpinning emotion to drive the story’s pace: 

The galloping horses made Butter wild. He wanted to race. I held him tighter while he fought me, snatching at the bit. Sweat streaked his sides. I braced my hands against his neck. “Stop it, stop it, “ I said to him. “You idiot, behave!”

 The passage continues: 

We came to a ditch full of water. Ivy plonked into it and waded through. Butter hesitated, then leaped. I flew with him, up, out of the saddle, miles from the saddle. He landed on the ditch’s far side. I kept going. 

And it finally reaches its conclusion:

I dropped the reins, pulled my arms in, and took the fall on my shoulder like Lady Thorton had said. I rolled across the grass, unhurt. Butter pranced in place, his feet tangled in the dangling reins. He’d break the reins next, the wretched pony. I scrambled to my feet. 

Again, you can see how Bradley relies on active verbs, short sentences, and an underlying emotion. How would you describe the emotion in the passages excerpted above? Fear? Loss of control? Shame? 

In the following passage, you can see again how the pace moves within the passage itself from a relatively calm moment to sudden fright:

A week or so later, all of us except Lady Thorton, who had gone early to bed, were sitting by the fire at night, listening to the nine o’clock radio news. Suddenly someone hammered on the door. Susan leaped up. I leaped up too. A telegram, at this hour? 

It was Fred. He gagged, groaned, and vomited in a wide arc across the floor.

You can pick out the verbs—sitting, listening, hammered, leaped, gagged, groaned, vomited.— and can see that no word is used half-heartedly. For Bradley (and her readers), it’s almost always full-steam ahead, although you can see that she slows the story where it’s important to go deeper into the emotional challenges a character might be facing.

If you want to capture your reader’s attention, too, and hold it on every page, just remember to focus on the verbs that you select for your sentences and on the length of those sentences. 

Not every sentence needs to be short. Mixing up the length of sentences can offer an interesting rhythm to the pace. It gives the reader a chance to speed up or slow down, according to where the character is emotionally in the story.

And when you combine the emotional undercurrent with active verbs and short sentences, you'll have created an undertow that your reader cannot resist… a sure-fired way of persuading your reader to dive into your story and stay there. 

For more info about pacing in a story, visit: 

https://writersedit.com/fiction-writing/7-quick-tips-for-mastering-pacing-in-your-story/

https://www.writersdigest.com/improve-my-writing/7-tools-for-pacing-a-novel-keeping-your-story-moving-at-the-right-pace

https://blog.reedsy.com/pacing-in-writing/

https://www.writerswrite.co.za/5-essential-exercises-for-pacing-a-story/

What Makes a Sentence Work?

How does a sentence, a string of words, hold a reader’s interest and compel a reader to keep turning the pages?

In the hope of finding an answer, I pulled a book off my shelf at random and opened it (to a random page) and selected a few sentences, just to see what I might be able to learn about the construction of sentences. Here they are:

“Rachel catches a whiff of toothpaste and onions. Izzy is a big, bulky man with wild gray eyebrows. His hands are broad, grayish from cement, and still strong-looking, although it’s been almost twenty years since he has worked as a stonemason.” (from Norma Fox Mazer’s After the Rain, page 38)

What do you notice about these sentences? Would you say they're compelling? Do the sentences work? Do you want to read more of the story after reading them?

Let's take a look at the first sentence: "Rachel catches a whiff of toothpaste and onions."

It doesn’t seem earth-shatteringly important, does it? And yet the unusual combination of aromas—toothpaste and onions—piques the reader’s imagination. The combination is kind of odd, isn’t it? A unique juxtaposition of smells that you don’t smell every day.

What else is unique? Not just the smells, but we have a character—Rachel—who notices this unusual combination of smells. And the act of noticing these smells is framed as “catching a whiff.” Why not simply say “Rachel smelled toothpaste and onions.” What does “catching a whiff” do for the reader? It’s a compelling expression, I suspect, because the act of smelling is described as an active rather than passive act. Rachel doesn’t sit back and let the smells come to her. She catches them. Like catching butterflies. Or lightening bugs.

So, this first sentence paints an interesting portrait, and we read on, curious about what we’ll find next.

In the second sentence we see how Mazer continues her skilled crafting of sentences. She keeps each sentence short. She uses a minimum number of words to create maximum effect: “Izzy is a big, bulky man with wild gray eyebrows.”

Again, we aren’t given anything earth shattering, per se, in terms of details, are we? But the details are offered in a way that makes for an interesting picture: a big, bulky man and wild gray eyebrows. The repetition of the “b” sounds in big and bulky. The echo of Izzy and the “y” sound in bulky. The echo of the “g” sound in big and in gray.

Six words. But we have a strong picture of Izzy in our minds. It’s a picture that is as clear as if he is standing in front of us. And we are now curious about him. We know he is big. Not just big but bulky. How does his bulkiness change our view of big? And what about his eyebrows? Not just gray but wild gray. As if the man himself has something of this wildness about him. Again, Mazer has intrigued the reader with her descriptions.

And then comes the third sentence, which happens to be much longer than the first two, but Mazer has earned the reader’s trust with the first two sentences. We trust the author’s vision of the world, and we understand that the descriptive words that Mazer has selected not only serve as descriptors but as ways of understanding the story, the characters, and the underlying plot.

So, perhaps, this is one of the keys to understanding how a sentence works: it can operate on multiple levels simultaneously.

Let’s take a look at the third sentence: “His hands are broad, grayish from cement, and still strong-looking, although it’s been almost twenty years since he has worked as a stonemason.”  

Here we are given a more detailed description of Izzy, with the focus on his hands, and the description gives us a deeper understanding of him and of his life, which involved working as a stonemason with cement. His hands are a workman’s hands, and they are still strong, even though Izzy hasn’t worked for almost twenty years.

They are hands that are “broad, grayish” and “strong-looking.” These details build on the earlier details that we were given, adding to the picture in our mind of Izzy with his wild gray eyebrows. And they create a kind of bond between Izzy and the reader, as well as a kind of sympathy for a man who has worked and aged and is now gray and a little wild still.

And we feel a bit of the same feelings that Rachel feels toward him. And the reason we feel these emotions is because of the way that Mazer has crafted these sentences.

What is it about any sentence that compels you to keep reading the story?

Word choice, pacing, emotional weight, sentence length and rhythm of the words… these are only some of the reasons why a sentence might work (or fail to work).

Do you have an author whose work you admire? Why not take a look at a few of his or her sentences and see if you can explain why the sentences work so well.

If you get a chance, share your favorite sentence in the comment section, and remember to include a brief explanation of why you think the sentence works.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by.

Wading Through Sludge

When I lose interest in a book after the first paragraph or after the first five pages, my impulse is to close the book, make another pot of coffee, and go off in search of a more compelling story.

If the writer hasn’t succeeded in grabbing and holding my interest– if he or she makes me feel like I’m wading through sludge–why should I keep reading?

But over the years I’ve learned that I should keep reading, not just to see if the author can regain my interest (and trust) but to understand why the author lost my interest in the first place.

Sometimes reading further feels like I’m sinking in quicksand or hacking my way through a mangrove swamp. But, even so, I try to stay with the writer in the hope of detecting what’s missing on the page.

I’m looking for the essential ingredient that the story lacks or that the author inadvertently may have overlooked but which is necessary to hold a reader’s interest in the story.

Most often, the missing ingredient is conflict, or, equally often, the main character’s inner motivation.

But sometimes the author uses too many words, camouflaging the conflict or motivation, or else he relies on language that is too flowery or too descriptive, lost in itself, and fails to realize that the story’s forward momentum, under the weight of such language, has come to a halt.

Excessively long flashbacks are another impediment to a story’s forward motion, especially when an author forgets to return to the main story.

If I keep wading through sludge, though, I’ve discovered that I can see where an author came to a crossroads and can sense where she may have resisted the opportunity to explore further a character’s need to struggle with difficult emotions.

Or I may begin to understand how the story might have captured my interest if the author had chosen a different path, altered the pacing, for instance, or opened a chapter with a different scene, setting altogether different expectations.

This process of analyzing stories that we may not find compelling is crucial to developing as a writer, just as it’s essential to analyze the many stories that do inspire us to keep reading.

If you force yourself to keep reading a story that doesn’t grab you, you’ll find, I suspect, that learning how you feel about a story (and why it doesn’t work) will help you begin to look at the drafts of your own work differently so that, with each revision, you (and your reader) can move more easily into open water.

For more information on holding a reader’s attention, visit:
http://blog.liviablackburne.com/2010/05/how-to-get-and-keep-peoples-attention.html
http://www.be-a-better-writer.com/scene-questions.html
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Use-Conversational-Hypnosis-to-Hold-Any-Audience-in-Rapt-Attention&id=4946316
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_keep_a_reader_interested_in_your_book
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/32969/tips_for_authors_keeping_the_readers.html?cat=38
http://www.underdown.org/slush.htm