When writing fast,\u00a0 I often write “what happened” and not “where\/when\/how\/why”–without much context.\u00a0 Sometimes whole important conversations, because I’m “hearing” the people talking to one another, without any guide to who said what.<\/p>\n
This requires backfilling.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Scenes must have context (physical, emotional, whatever else is needed) and transitions from previous scenes.\u00a0 Conversations that run on for a couple of pages with no “he said\/she said” or “[name] said\/ [othername] said”\u00a0 lead to reader confusion…and lack the cues to reaction to the previous speaker’s words.<\/p>\n
So last night I found a chapter that began with a confrontational conversation–and no context (I did at least say who was part of the conversation, but no more than that.)\u00a0\u00a0 I remembered that one and had gone looking for it.\u00a0\u00a0 Now it has location, weather (significant),\u00a0 emotional context, political context,\u00a0 and the really confrontational bit is a couple of manuscript pages in, which makes more sense.<\/p>\n
In the subsequent passages,\u00a0 I found many things to tinker with, most of it shortening overlong sentences (I think in long sentences.\u00a0 It comes from my admiration for Ruskin, probably.\u00a0 He wrote marvelous, half-page-long, intricate sentences which–if you read them aloud–are like watching a water lily unfold.\u00a0 Perfectly logical, inevitable,\u00a0 packed with meaning.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For the long sentences to function in fiction, though, they cannot be the dominant length.\u00a0 It occurred to me last night, in a conversation with a writer-friend who called (so of course we started discussing the craft) that a good chunk of prose is fractal, in that its “coastline”\u00a0 (in terms of sentence length) is jaggedy, and yet the same basic structure informs both the short and the long jags.<\/p>\n
At any rate, effective prose should seem to flow along…but within that flow are all the variables: long words, short words,\u00a0 long phrases, short phrases, etc, etc, up to and including paragraphs.\u00a0\u00a0 Readers need variation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It feels natural to have it; it’s more comfortable to read.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most writers (and speakers) have a natural “length tendency” to write or speak in short, medium, or long bursts, with much the same construction.\u00a0 My writer friend told me about\u00a0 a manuscript she’d critiqued in which the writer had ended every sentence with a gerund or gerund phrase…and when told that this was monotonous, had simply started putting some of the gerunds at the beginning.\u00a0 We all have quirks of expression–not exactly mistakes, but not effective in long works (such as books.)<\/p>\n
So there I was plowing through the chapters, with the editor-brain muttering to the writer-brain “Boy, you sure took your time getting to the meat of that one.\u00a0\u00a0 And look here, ANOTHER inverted word order sentence.\u00a0 And you don’t even speak German.\u00a0\u00a0 Wow…could you have made this more confusing?”<\/p>\n
Today–more of the same this morning so far and until noon, when I quit to get ready for the evening’s church services.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Pick up M- from his apartment and head for the early evening service at St. Matthew’s, where R-\u00a0 sings, grab a bite of their between-services choir food, then drive across the city to St. David’s, where I sing, for the late service, and then drive the 50 miles home.\u00a0 R- needs to be at St. Matt’s by 5 pm and it’s a solid 20 minutes from M-‘s apartment to St. Matt’s, so (backing up and allowing for traffic and the possible thunderstorms and hail) we should probably leave here about 3 pm.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When writing fast,\u00a0 I often write “what happened” and not “where\/when\/how\/why”–without much context.\u00a0 Sometimes whole important conversations, because I’m “hearing” the people talking to one another, without any guide to who said what. This requires backfilling.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Scenes must have context (physical, emotional, whatever else is needed) and transitions from previous scenes.\u00a0 Conversations that run on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,53,5],"tags":[62,112,107],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}