Paragraphs, the Meatloaf of Writing

About paragraphing, Natalie asks,
To be able to do this succesfully in a novel would be a great skill. What would you say to newbie writers trying to hone their voice in regards to going this direction?


First, I would say that paragraphs are like meatloaf. Everyone's recipe is just a little different. And everyone ends up with a slightly different dinner. Does that mean it's not meatloaf anymore? Of course not.

Your paragraphing choices will bear the imprint of your voice. I think the key is to be aware of what you're doing and to be aware of other choices for paragraphing and the effect they might have on your prose.

An Exercise For Everyone

Let's all take out a manuscript that isn't entirely new. You want one you've been working on, one you may have spiffed up so that you feel it's in pretty good shape.

Now scan the pages until you find three paragraphs with at least three sentences each that contain no dialogue. Avoid dialogue paragraphs for now, because dialogue paragraphs are written differently than other paragraphs.

Compare these three paragraphs. What do you open with? Action? Interior monologue? Where is the description? Where is the emotion? What do you close with?

Look at the first line of the next paragraph. Does it link back to the paragraph you're analyzing?

Notice your sentence lengths and structures. Do you tend to end on a short note? Is your middle sentence always compound?

You're looking for patterns. You have patterns, whether you're sensitive to them or not. You may need to look at more than three paragraphs before you start to see your patterns emerge -- and you may find you have multiple patterns. Maybe you gravitate toward paragraphs that open with rhetorical questions when a character is wrestling with a decision. Maybe your action paragraphs all contain a one or two word fragment somewhere in the middle of the paragraph. Maybe you always pair interior monologue and description in a particular way.

Notice anything interesting? Let's hear about it! I'm willing to bet we hear about lots of different patterns!

Theresa

ps. I'm FLOORED by the results of that auction yesterday. Thank you to everyone who bid! And thank you to the winner -- I'll try my best to live up to your very generous bid!

Paragraphing: Ending With Emotion

One very common pattern in fiction paragraphs is to set up some action or situation and then end the paragraph with an emotional response.

So when the prisoners were sent back to England the dead Neopolitans remained with the Army. All that summer they travelled in a bullock cart and on Lord Wellington's orders they were shackled. The shackles were intended to restrict their movements and keep them in one place, but the dead Neopolitans were not afraid of pain -- indeed they did not seem to feel it -- so it was very little trouble to them to extricate themselves from their shackles, sometimes leaving little pieces of themselves behind. As soon as they were free they would go in search of Strange and begin pleading with him in the most pitiful manner imaginable to restore them to the fullness of life. They had seen Hell and were not anxious to return there.
~ Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

For those of you unfamiliar with this book, Strange has gone to war with Wellington and performs all sorts of magic tricks to aid the British army. But there are usually unintended consequences of the magic. In this case, after reanimating a group of Neopolitan soldiers, Strange is unable to restore them to death despite trying many spells. Nobody likes the dead Neopolitans, and nobody really knows what to do with them.

This paragraph comes near the end of the section of the book dealing with the Neopolitans. We already know that Wellington scorns them and Strange is befuddled by them. We already know that the other prisoners have protested at being kept confined with them. ("And really," observed Lord Wellington as he eyed the corpses with distaste, "one cannot blame them.")

What we don't know, until the very end of this paragraph, is that the dead Neopolitans themselves are having emotional reactions to their reanimation. They aren't zombies.

At the beginning of the paragraph, we are told how the army is dealing with the dead Neopolitans in broad brushstrokes covering a fairly large span of time. We get clues that they're little more than animals -- they ride in a bullock cart, they're chained like dogs to keep them from straying, they don't feel pain or even fear of pain. They're being treated dismissively, almost with contempt.

And then we get hit with the emotions. There are two emotion words -- pitiful and anxious -- at the end of the longish paragraph, and both cast a new shade over the situation. Not all paragraphs ending with emotion will change our perceptions of the events, as this one might. But in general, because we're so acclimated to this common form of paragraph (event --> emotion), the reader will adjust to this shift in perception very easily. We're used to receiving some kind of insight into emotions at the end of a paragraph. We've been trained. And Clarke is using that training to lead us in a new direction.

Theresa

Paragraphing For Comic Contrasts

Sometimes, we'll want to limit our paragraphs to one key notion and then break before moving on to the next notion. But other times, it's better to keep two contrasting notions in the same paragraph.

Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.
~Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The trend these days is to break the narrative into smaller, bite-sized paragraphs. More white space on the page means a faster-paced narrative, or so the theory goes. In Twain's paragraph, the first part recounts the Widow's notions of heaven, and the second part reveals Huck's personal response to that. These are two discrete ideas (albeit with one common theme), and a modern paragrapher might want to break them apart.

That would probably be a mistake. One of the hallmarks of comedy writing is setting up unexpected contrasts (between the Widow's happy view of heaven and Huck's scorn of the place she describes) or by leading us into unanticipated twists on common notions (a description of the wonders of heaven leads to Huck's sincere hope that he and his friend will avoid the place). The skilled comedy writer toys with our expectations and assumptions, and one of the ways to accomplish that is by putting unalike things right next to each other. The Widow longs for heaven. Huck does not. And that's the source of the comedy here.

If this were a standard joke with a punch line, the writer might want that punch line offset in its own paragraph as a way of highlighting it. But that's because punch lines are dramatic conclusions, carefully built up word by word over the course of the joke.

Twain's comedy in this paragraph is not of the punchline variety. Because the humor exists in the strength of the contrast between the two characters, running them right up against each other in the same paragraph heightens the comic impact.

Theresa

Two Paragraphs: Response, Then Stimulus

As long as we're looking at Fitzgerald, here's a strong pair of paragraphs that reverses the natural order of things.

He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window, then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his mouth--which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.

It was a girl in a red neglige, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet beside her was a cushion the same color as her garment and she was leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny areaway,where Anthony could hear children playing.

~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

Normally, we would get the stimulus and then the response, right? So what's the stimulus in this sequence? The sight of a beautiful girl in a negligee. What's the response? His mouth falls open. He pauses in his tracks. The cigarette hangs in midair. They're backwards: response, then stimulus.

We get a second response, too, when his whistle dies and he walks closer to the window. But look at what follows that: with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. This feels reversed to me, too. I think the impression of beauty is what makes him want to whistle in the first place.

So why does Fitzgerald set it up this way? Here's my guess. He wrote about people with outsized egos, people who were self-absorbed. What will be more important to a character like this, an external stimulus or his own response? Putting the response first throws more attention on it. Forgot about the hot little number in the red silk slip. What's important here is the character's response, what he says and does and feels. The beautiful girl matters only because she's the trigger for another opportunity for self-assessment.

There are times when you might want to weight the response a bit more than the stimulus, and this would be a handy trick to make that happen. But if you try this, pay particular attention to clarity. Make sure that the new information (that is, the stimulus which follows the response) doesn't supply entirely new information that changes our way of understanding the reaction. The reaction must be comprehensible even without the stimulus. In Fitzgerald's sentence, we have a character facing a window who becomes suddenly arrested. It's a safe bet that he sees something outside that window. If it turned out that the stimulus was a knock on the door, this passage wouldn't be as clear.

Theresa

A Self-Contained Paragraph

I probably shouldn't admit this. I should probably try to show more dignity. But you may have already guessed the truth, and what the heck, it's not like anyone suspects me of an overabundance of dignity, anyway.

Last night, I had a little moment of panic over the auction today. My worst childhood fear was being picked last in gym class, and wouldn't you know that this auction triggered that. Silly. Especially because I never actually was picked last in gym class. And because the auction is for a good cause, and that's what really matters. Not some flashback on a childhood insecurity.

Anyway, I figure the solution today is for me to pretend it's not happening. La-la, la-la, I can't see you!

So let's look at some paragraphs. I'm going to be hunting for good examples and posting them as the day goes on. That ought to fix me right up.

The Great Graphy

A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door. Amory stepped inside and divested himself of cap and coat. He was mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation from the next room, and he decided it must be quite formal. He approved of that--as he approved of the butler.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.

This paragraph begins and ends on the same noun, butler. That's not an accident, of course. Fitzgerald was far too controlled a writer to do something like this without intent. So why would he do it, then? The first and last slots in a paragraph have the most "weight" in a paragraph -- why would Fitzgerald fill those positions with a generic noun for a character unworthy of a proper name?

Look at what happens between the two butlers. Those of you who have read Joseph Campbell will grasp the significance of this right away. There's a door. There's a guardian at the door, and that guardian is a rare creature. The guardian gives our hero admittance, and our hero enters. Once inside, Amory notes immediately that things are slightly different than anticipated.

Crossing the threshold, right? In this case, quite literally. The echoed word, butler, in the front and back of the paragraph brackets the moment of crossing. It's nicely done.

The danger in this technique is that we don't generally want to create the impression that ideas are closed until the very end of the story. Normally, we set up our paragraphs so that one leads into the next into the next, in a long chain of small moments that build into something bigger. Closing ideas creates an illusion that we're at a stopping point.

Fitzgerald uses this technique in a moment of change and transition, so we don't get that feeling that it's okay to draw breath, to put the book down, to step out of the story. If anything, we get the feeling that what is about to happen, the changes in the new environment, are even more important because of the way they've been highlighted by the bracketing butler.

Editor For Hire. Cheep?

I've donated an evaluation of an entire manuscript to the Brenda Novak auction for diabetes research. This will be open for bidding for one day only, May 6, 2008. Go here to bid. (Please! Don't leave me hanging! See, I'll beg if I have to!)

If you're not familiar with this auction, it's something Brenda Novak started four years ago with great success. Her auction has raised at least $250,000 every year. This year's goal is $300,000. You can bid on everything from an African safari to autographed books to ... well, me.

Theresa

ps. The title of this post is a joke. I actually do know how to spell. Really.

Revealing too much

I'm reading a first-person sort-of detective novel (that is, the detective is an amateur), and I'm about in chapter 10, and I figured out who the murderer is. How? Not by assembling the clues or anything. But a secondary character (who seems benevolent) is mentioned twice in the same paragraph by another character. He's a forensic tech, and they're discussing who goes to a crime scene, and the ex-cop says, "Then the forensic tech does this. blah blah blah Then of course there's the forensic tech's work."

And I said to myself, "The forensic tech did it."

I yield to no one in my admiration for crime writers who have to somehow make it clear-in-retrospect that this man did the murder, and yet not let the reader guess that till the end. And it's just getting harder with readers like me, who guess not based on the meticulously planned clues, but on trivial little meta things in the narrative. ("If Grandma's pearls are mentioned three times, then that means Grandma must have killed him!" "Oops. The only person being nice to the detective is that banker, so he must be the murderer! The murderer is always the nice person.")

So... first, have you ever guessed the murderer in a mystery? And how did you do it? What triggered the realization?

And if you've written a mystery of some sort, how did you conceal and yet reveal?

And if you don't write a mystery, let's have some sympathy for those who do. :)
Alicia

End of paragraphs

I'm about to head out for Ireland, so don't expect me to put down the mug of Guinness long enough to type. :) Also this is a village remote enough that wireless doesn't reach. There is an internet cafe, so I'll check in, but ... holiday! (Well, I'm taking 4 mss to edit, and I'm sort of wondering how well that'll mix with the Guinness.)

Theresa's brilliantly handled this subject, but I'll just weigh in quickly with something Mary Buckham pointed out in a workshop-- that the end of a paragraph is important too, and it's effective to end on a word or phrase of conflict or tension. And it's worth rewriting the last sentence to get that tension.

So if you have:

It was torment for her.

Easy to revise it so that the "conflict word" comes last:

For her, it was torment.

Not every paragraph has to end this way, of course. But think about which paragraphs need more zing, like paragraphs of introspection or description. It might not even be conflict, but meaning or a concrete image that you want to leave with the reader.

And his airplane models dangled above it all.

And, dangling above it all, were his airplane models.

Notice that sometimes you sacrifice conciseness (bring on the reversed construction here!) to get this tension. But often that's good, as the length of the final sentence in a paragraph has meaning too. A longer sentence draws out the experience, while a shorter one cuts it short (longer or shorter than the other sentences nearby, that is). So go with a longer sentence there at the end if you want the meaning to linger, and shorter if you want emphasis.

Mary Buckham took us all through a few of our own paragraphs to experiment with this, and I was interested that frequently we decided the tension-word was a noun-- that is, the most concrete of word types. But verbs can work too:

So he ran.

Ran is a pretty ordinary word, but nonetheless, it's got power and tension. I thought of replacing that with a more evocative verb (dashed, sprinted), but they all seemed to require "away," and that isn't a tension word. Run has the benefit of simplicity. It's one of those "strong verbs" that are about as old as the language itself, and so has picked up multiple meanings (like "freedom"-- the "run of the place") which are embedded in there even if we're using the most basic meaning (walking very fast :). And of course, running is all about motion, escape, fear, excitement. It conveys emotion as well as motion.

Those strong hard Old English verbs can be good paragraph enders. We often want to replace them with the synonyms that have come into the language from other languages, to avoid repetition or convey nuance. But these are often the verbs with tension. They mean business.

So, anyway, must go pack (carry-on only! For two weeks!!!). But if you think your paragraphs are too long, or they end on a whimper instead of a bang, you might go through your sentences and find one that conveys that sense of tension, of conflict, of power-- and find the right word to end on. Then break there.
Alicia

Slam Jam Conference

I'm heading up to the Slam Jam shortly. If any of you are attending, be sure to say hello! The rest of you, please send me lots of "good pitch" vibes. I'd love to pick up a new writer or two over the weekend!

ETA: Also, before I forget, I've donated an evaluation of a full manuscript to the Brenda Novak auction. Go bid! If not on that, then on something else. It's for an excellent cause!

Theresa