Beauty and the Written Word

People rarely compare novels or the sentences composing them to sonnets or cathedrals, to sculpture or symphonies. Yet the artistry is parallel—meticulous engineering that results in capacity to mesmerize. Great plots amaze: A woman proves her loyalty by each night unraveling the tapestry she’ll reweave the next day; a man dooms ship and crew because he confuses the death of a white whale with justice; a boy travels down the Mississippi fleeing “sivilization” and finds it in a runaway’s heart, or a girl discovers how many kinds of mockingbirds exist and why they deserve protection.

What makes these plots gorgeous? For a start, each says something not just important, but profoundly so—about who people are and who they might become. Each plot synthesizes behavior and thought, proving its hypothesis with events both probable and essential—each incident leading inevitably to the climax. That has the haunting power of a symphony, no?

Novels depend on plot. But the best novels contain sentences rivaling the magnificence of scenario, scene, or theme. Here’s a tiny sample.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”  -- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“All he knew, really, was digging.  He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep.  He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it.  He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy.” -- T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Underground Gardens”

“The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned.” --Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

How do you start producing increasingly beautiful sentences?

• Know what you want to say—something original. Important. Yours alone.
• Listen for rhythm—in everything you read or hear. It begins with noticing.
• Explore all five senses, and “explore” never means the first thing that leaps to mind.
• Replace vague, distancing constructions like “There were” and “It is.” Tighten up. Get close.
• Take risks. But take them thoughtfully.
• Never rationalize the weaknesses you pretend not to notice in your prose. Ever.

 Tip: Aspire to beauty. You’ll never let your readers down.

Getting off the Ground

Planes taxi plenty before liftoff. Add a scheduling or weather problem, and they idle in their spot on the runway as passengers grow increasingly irritated. The passengers are stuck. Readers, however, are not.

Unless you get underway swiftly, readers might simply opt for a different journey. They don’t want to wait to hear the safety instructions or weather report at their destination. They simply want to be en route to it. Yet writers sometimes treat readers like trapped passengers.

Why not let readers feel they achieved altitude without all those preliminaries?

~ Establish what’s at stake.

Immediately. Infuse that opening trouble/conflict/problem with as much tension and emotion as you can muster--because it has to be big enough to build a book on.

~ Start with a straightforward event.

Self-explanatory incidents generate the greatest suspense. Avoid situations that necessitate lots of complicated set up.

~ Limit backstory.

Explain what you must. Stop there. As Don Maass once put it at a conference in Madison, “Once you’re 70% of the way through your novel, you can have as much backstory as you want.” Not before, though.

~ Make things move.

Not every novel includes adventure, or needs to. But contrast spilling the contents of a shopping cart with worry over some sort of trouble occurring in the supermarket. Big difference between those.

~ Add context.

But limit yourself to who, what, where, when, why. No one likes to be lost. But no one’s reading your novel to get directions, either.

~ Emphasize the physical.

Commenting on the protagonist’s problems is the equivalent of “telling.” Focus on what happens both to build scene and eliminate everything interfering with it.

~ Watch the metaphors.

Even if yours are great, don’t overwhelm at the start. The opening is a place to connect with characters and empathize with their troubles. Make that the focus.

~ Set the tone.

Don’t mislead by promising humor, sex, or adventure that never reappears after page two.

No one likes waiting.

Tip: Don’t request patience at your novel’s beginning. Instead? Just begin.

Please don’t shout!

Readers “hear” perfectly well and dislike what amounts to fiction that hollers: Bold, CAPS, italics, underlining, delineating, explaining what the scene will or did express.

Tip: Shouting is patronizing. Who appreciates patronizing?

And yet it’s rampant. Insecurity plays a major role. Consciously or not, many writers think, “I don’t write well enough to make my point, so I’ll just clarify. And in case someone reads extremely quickly, I’ll just clarify again. And slip in a bit of special formatting. How can that hurt?”

It can. Lots. Lower your voice, please. Did you ever notice how many people raise their voices with children, dogs, and English-as-a-Second-Language speakers? However inadvertent, even well-meaning, yelling comes across as insult. Its source is a different kind of mistrust—not of self but audience. Maybe they’re too young, too almost-American, or too downright canine. Yet people resent this, and perhaps even dogs feel the same way. If they don’t understand about asking to go out when they need to, yelling won’t clarify. This applies to readers, as well. Yelling isn’t more clear—just more annoying.

But don’t throw up your hands in despair or join Screechers Anonymous. A few super-serious questions might help.

~ Do you value your theme more than your plot?

That could make anyone scream, so evaluate your priorities.

~ Are you writing literary or mainstream?

Such readers are particularly quick to sniff out condescension.

~ Are you applying the speech formula to your novel?

Fiction gives you one shot, not hinting the point, making it, and then reviewing.

~ Does your scene require special effects for clarity and intensity?

If so, revise your scene. Use your words.

~ Aren’t italics or bold legitimate in some instances?

            Of course, but you’ll do better pretending no such instances exist.

~ Have you revised enough to feel good about your manuscript?

Then let it speak for itself. Please.

If you’ve ever stood in a bookstore or used book sale checking novel after novel to see which ones you want, consider why you put some back. Though cloaked in many disguises, the issue is often “Too condescending—and I get enough of that at work.”

Whispering, insinuating, suggesting, demonstrating all beat bellowing. Every time. Bury the megaphone. Unclip the microphone. Try whispering. Is there really a better way to make people lean in and listen?

Who’s Doing the Heavy Lifting?

People read fiction for various reasons—escape, entertainment, and illumination, information, or insight. But probably not one reader would add “enduring an exhausting workout” to that list. That’s what the gym—and the job—are for.

Tip: The less hard the writer works, the harder the readers have to.

Novelists can fatigue readers with what they put in or leave out. Here’s a partial list:

• Picturing context for the characters.
• Transitioning between moments, places, and external/internal realms.
• Shifting point of view.
• Including numerous characters.
• Assigning distracting character names.
• Introducing ambiguous metaphors.
• Isolating images, subplots, and themes.
• Composing lengthy sentences with multiple phrases and clauses.

Many readers enjoy ambiguity; that isn’t on the list. Readers don’t enjoy having to guess and compute. Sometimes that’s unvoidable. Attempt to make everything clear and easy, and you could wind up sounding graceless and boring. As often applies to the craft of fiction, balance is the key. These questions help test whether you make readers cope with something they needn’t.

• Do you ground your characters in physical space?
• Do you avoid unnecessary shifts, especially of short duration?
• Do you transition whenever you change time, place, point of view, etc.?
• Do you include the smallest number of characters you can get away with?
• Do your characters have accessible names, i.e. as close to familiar as credibly possible?
• Do taglines help identify characters, i.e. the one with green eyes or that oversized purse?
• Do character names start with the same letter or sound similar?
• Does every symbolic reference make complete sense on the literal level?
• Do you weave imagery into motifs, or recurrent patterns?
• Does every single subplot link to the central one?
• Are your themes tied both to the protagonist and to each other?
• Do you divide sentences for rhythm, variety, and clarity?

 Responding to all these questions sounds like a lot of work. It sure is. Novelists are supposed to work hard so readers don’t have to. Occasionally, you’ll have no choice: The plot or theme or psychological exploration simply demands a certain amount not of obscurity, but of complexity. Just be able to honestly justify asking your readers to “work.” And never put them on duty more often than you can help. 

Revision to Clarify Vision

At a recent critique group session, a very serious writer very seriously asked, “How am I supposed to think about things like transitions and context when I’m ‘in the zone’? The very serious answer, of course, is that you’re not supposed to. Few writers experience that magical, “in the zone” state of fiery creativity often enough. The words come as fast as you can get them down. If only you could capture them faster! It’d be wasteful to squander those rare, euphoric moments when ideas and images pour forth from someone you barely recognize as yourself.

Why do some writers find the first draft thrilling? You’re unsure where you’re going, so it’s delightfully mysterious. Lack of censorship plays an even larger role. How liberating not to concern yourself with clarity, imagery, tension—even what to keep or toss.

If you dislike revision, perhaps you miss the freedom of that “zone” even more than its electricity. Uncensored velocity rocketing you toward completing the first draft? That’s terrific stuff. Unbeatable.

So is revision. To see again, to see anew, to see better. Certain processes harness fire to fuse things, to get to the heart of the matter, to expose the best part. Revision is among those processes. What could be more molten than finally perceiving exactly what you want to say and exactly how to say it?

Tip: Revision is an opportunity to clarify the ambiguity of your original story idea.

Perhaps you find revision closer to icy censorship than more acute vision. If so, changing your approach might help.

Hot and cold.

Alternate between making lightning-fast, spontaneous changes and cautious methodical ones. Avoid counter-productive patterns.

Fast and furious.

Instead of revising cerebrally, speed along. You might discover that swiftly going through your manuscript many, many times pleases you more than painstaking progress. And the more pleased you are, the better results you’re likely to achieve. Don’t let bad habits control your approach to revision.

In the zone.

Revision involves labor, but of love. Rework your manuscript with the enthusiasm you felt for the first stage and—your changes will reflect that. Don’t let love of your story and yearning to witness its completion get you down.

Writing a novel is a continuous process toward greater vision for author, character, and reader. Why not savor every second of that process? There’s more than one way to reach “the zone.”

The Scope of the Story

Focusing a novel is a bit like poor Goldilocks struggling to find what’s neither too huge nor cramped but “just right.” Reviewing Scott Anderson’s biography of “Lawrence in Arabia” in “The Times Book Review,” Alex Von Tunzelmann had this to say: “Regardless of the relative historical value of these individuals, however, the multicharacter approach has the great virtue of opening up the story’s complexity.”

Few fiction readers consciously assess how much complexity they seek. But since most readers instinctively know, writers need to care. It’s the reason one likes an author or title enough to scan the opening online or in a store, yet rejects this one. The novel feels either like too much work or insufficient substance. Either boils down to “not worth my time.”

Several factors contribute to complexity. The point of view could be roving or omniscient. Maybe numerous subplots tangle up the story. Perhaps the sentences feel ridiculously short or long. The metaphors congregate like ants at a picnic. Or the cast of characters under- or over-whelms.

Tip: Use your cast of characters to give your novel “just enough” complexity.

Having too many characters resembles agonizing over who survived the aftermath of the hurricane on page one, but instead learning that little Tiffany, in room 478, has a cousin whose great-aunt passed when she was only ten, and perhaps because of that, there’s been a lot of divorce on that side of the family. In fact, Marcia, the step-daughter of the step-aunt’s fourth husband, is one of six children. Wait. Was Marcia in the storm’s path? Is she a major character? If not, why mention this?

Too many characters bloats the story badly enough to affect compassion for the characters we’re supposed to care about.

Yet a scarcity of characters builds a skewed world. In our dreams we’re often both protagonist and antagonist. In our memories or anecdotes, it’s a one-person show starring its originator. All of that’s kosher, because the goal isn’t constructing a completed story. When that’s the goal, however, you need enough characters to help the protagonist grow and change. Yet you don’t want so many characters that you blur what’s important.

How might you reach “just right”?

• Introduce characters in terms of the protagonist—and usually protagonist stress.
• Give every character a distinct voice and identity.
• Watch for arcs. Unless every minor character has one, bring out the ax.
• Use every character more than once. Cull those with bit parts.
• Merge if possible. You’ll produce one strong character instead of two weak ones.
• Assess complexity. Is this number of characters apt for the intended audience?

Whispering Really Is Okay

Please don’t shout!!! Hear those exclamation points shrieking at you? Of course you do! Annoying, isn’t it? We read fiction—and just about anything for that matter—for entertainment, information, illumination. But we don’t read so someone can tell us what to feel or think. Nor do we read to feel like a well-meaning but rather bad, stupid dog.

Yet most writers occasionally shout. Maybe we can’t help it. Our images, themes, and observations are that important. And if they are? Implication is the way to convey them. Because when someone shouts, folks stiffen up, cross their arms over their chests, grit their teeth, or flee—not a single response you want to evoke in your readers (or anyone else).

For most writers, the ending elicits the loudest shouting. Naturally. Almost as bad as reaching the end of the journey with your characters, you’re now at the end of your chance to convince readers of—whatever you desperately hope to convince them of. Truth is ambiguous. Love is better the second time around. Men are only physically stronger than women. War is almost never the answer. 

It doesn’t matter what you want to say, whether it’s true, how passionately you believe it, or even how well you communicated it in your novel. Inside a voice whispers, “They won’t get it.” Or, “They’re not convinced. Tell them again.” Or, “You’ve tried to show for three hundred pages. Now it’s time to tell.” Or, “Last chance! Go for it! Don’t lose this last chance!!!!!!!”

Alas, no. If there’s ever a time to whisper and insinuate, it’s the last chapter, page, paragraph, sentence. This isn’t the time, well, to be right. Rather, it’s the time to write well. It isn’t the time to prove your thesis. It’s the time to leave readers with an image—one as fleeting as the last dim colors in the evening sky. But equally memorable.

So no shouting just before “The End.” Also avoid these varieties of shouting:

Boldface.

Italics.

CAPS.

One-sentence paragraphs.

Explaining why tragedy is truly tragic.

Melodramatizing why tragedy is truly tragic.

Over-used, overwrought words like “anguish,” “yearning,” “smitten,” etc.

Telling what you showed or will soon show.

Exclamation points!!!

Tip: Hoping to convince or inspire? That’s only human. But novels do it with plot.