I was just doing a workshop about emotion, and we were talking about how to convey emotion in characters who aren't openly emotional, about making an emotional journey for them in the plot. That is, story emotion isn't just the immediate outburst following an event within a scene, but it can be a book-length exploration and dynamic, changing as the plot changes.
So let's think of the Three Acts of the story, and this is just the simple Aristotelian plot structure:
Act 1: Set up
Act 2: Rising conflict
Act 3: Climax and resolution
When I think of "book-length," I think in terms of "three" like above. How does this journey break into three parts? (My article about the book theme developed through the three parts, as an example of "the three.") So here's an "emotion journey" in three acts:
Act 1: Repression. (Protagonist starts out repressing an emotion like grief.)
Act 2: Suppression. (The rising conflict of the plot forces the protagonist to start feeling that emotion, and pro must actively suppress what previously could just be repressed.)
Act 3: Expression. (Finally, the climactic events in the end-- the crisis, the dark moment, the climax-- lead tha protagonist into accepting the need for that emotion, and expressing it.)
Example:
1. Willa had a complex relationship with her father, and the day after they have a big argument, he suddenly dies. Willa represses her grief, "surfacely" or ostensibly because she is involved with something important in the plot (solving a murder, finding a cure for this killer virus, run for election whatever) and grieving will interfere with her goal. But subconsciously, she repressed grief because grieving would reveal and force her to feel the guilt that she might have caused her father's death, or was never a good daughter.
How to show? Well, start at the funeral. She wears sunglasses ostensibly to hide her red-rimmed eyes, but in fact to hide that they are NOT red-rimmed (she hasn't cried). What else?
2. In pursuit of the goal, she gets right back to work, but every now and again, the "need for grief" arises in some "reminder" about her father, like a friend calls to ask how she's doing, or a sibling calls for a consult on the gravestone, or.... Just repressing isn't enough now. She has to actively suppress the emotion, focusing on work, refusing to answer the phone when sib calls.
But there are repercussions to suppression-- she gets blocked in her work. She drinks too much. Her sister is furious with her. The voters think she's cold and the polls show she's going to lose the election.
3. Something forces her into confrontation with the suppressed emotion. (A misdirected letter from Dad arrives a couple weeks late?) (And of course all the important stuff about her goal-getting external plot is coming to a head here.) She lets herself express the grief, or rather, lets down the suppression barriers, and grieves. Something in this grief, or the catalytic event-- the letter from Dad, whatever-- gives her the key or the will or the motivation to solve that external problem. Now that she is expressing rather than repressing or suppressing emotion, she can solve that murder or cure that virus or find an emotional connection to voters.
Okay, that's pretty simplistic, but you can see how "emotion" can be turned into a journey over the course of the story, so that the character's experience of emotion develops along with and braided into the plot. What do you think? The journey of course might be a different set of three parts than this (it might be Involuntary Expression, Resistance, Understanding, for example), but RSE is an example of one way to create an emotion journey in the story.
Have you tried showing emotional change in the story acts, and having the change affect the plot? Examples?
Alicia
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Something in the air
First, I read this HuffPo essay about historical fiction and accuracy online. Then I ran across a debate on Facebook about an historical novel which substituted a fictional character for a somewhat prominent public figure of the time. Now I just received an email from an author questioning just how historically accurate we must be in our fiction. Something in the air right now, people are thinking about this issue.
My take on this issue is somewhat fluid. I answer any questions about historical accuracy on a question-by-question basis. Some details are so important that they must be portrayed in accordance with the historical record, or people will become understandably upset, as they did when a blue-eyed actress was chosen to play Anne Boleyn. Anyone familiar with her story knows that she was famous for her flashing dark eyes, and for these people, choosing a light-eyed actress is something like choosing a brunette to play Farrah Fawcett. It just rings false.
But, by the same measure, as the HuffPo essayist notes, sometimes it's possible to err on the side of historical accuracy. Some things from the past are simply disgusting to modern tastes. We don't want to read about oozing flea bites and halitosis and whatever passed for medicine in the old days. We don't like to think about how they ate old meat dredged in cinnamon and black pepper to disguise the rancid taste. People died from splinters, and the streets were paved with feces. But do we want to fill our books with this stuff? Heck, no, because it's just not entertaining.
Exhibit A: The Libertine, a movie that could have been entertaining, but fell short. Between the "natural" lighting and the insistence on portraying every bit of squalor in London, the film's visuals were so distracting that people found it alienating. That wasn't the only problem with the film, but the selection of which historical details to include, which to leave out, and how to display them was a big set of bad decisions.
So this is how I evaluate historical information. It has to ring true, it has to appeal to modern readers, and it has to avoid distracting us from more important things. How do you evaluate historical information in novels?
Theresa
My take on this issue is somewhat fluid. I answer any questions about historical accuracy on a question-by-question basis. Some details are so important that they must be portrayed in accordance with the historical record, or people will become understandably upset, as they did when a blue-eyed actress was chosen to play Anne Boleyn. Anyone familiar with her story knows that she was famous for her flashing dark eyes, and for these people, choosing a light-eyed actress is something like choosing a brunette to play Farrah Fawcett. It just rings false.
But, by the same measure, as the HuffPo essayist notes, sometimes it's possible to err on the side of historical accuracy. Some things from the past are simply disgusting to modern tastes. We don't want to read about oozing flea bites and halitosis and whatever passed for medicine in the old days. We don't like to think about how they ate old meat dredged in cinnamon and black pepper to disguise the rancid taste. People died from splinters, and the streets were paved with feces. But do we want to fill our books with this stuff? Heck, no, because it's just not entertaining.
Exhibit A: The Libertine, a movie that could have been entertaining, but fell short. Between the "natural" lighting and the insistence on portraying every bit of squalor in London, the film's visuals were so distracting that people found it alienating. That wasn't the only problem with the film, but the selection of which historical details to include, which to leave out, and how to display them was a big set of bad decisions.
So this is how I evaluate historical information. It has to ring true, it has to appeal to modern readers, and it has to avoid distracting us from more important things. How do you evaluate historical information in novels?
Theresa
Friday, October 12, 2012
An ongoing discussion
Okay, so, here's the background on this post. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I'm detail-oriented. (I prefer "detail-oriented" to "OCD about everything inside the four corners," thank you very much.) Some time ago, in response to a post of mine about how to manipulate details within settings, another editor challenged me (privately, and no, I won't tell you which editor) by claiming that none of that kind of detail matters. Only the plot matters. If the plot works, the book works.
This has led to an ongoing, behind the scenes debate about whether a book with a good plot and bad mechanics can still be deemed good. Obviously, I disagree with her position. I believe that plot is just one of many story and narrative elements that must work in order for the book as a whole will work.
And I think I have found the book that will allow me to declare permanent victory in this debate. I'm not going to humiliate the author here, because I'm not into that sort of thing. But here's the short rundown on the good aspects of this book --
-- I cannot fault the plot. If I were editing this book, I would have only one plot note to make, and that has to do with a secret that should be revealed a bit earlier. You know the old saying -- if a conflict can be resolved with an honest conversation, it's not a real conflict. This book has one of those, but it is not the only conflict, so resolving it early would free up the plot to focus on the real conflicts. This is a fairly minor plot note, and fairly routine. The fact that it is the only plot note speaks pretty well of the plot.
-- In fact, the other aspects of the plot are sort of fascinating. The amazon comments that give the book 4 and 5 stars all focus on these aspects of the book, these plot aspects and the mystery angle. It works, and it works well. The book has sold semi-decent numbers, and I suspect it's on the strength of this aspect of the story alone.
Those are the pros. Here are the cons.
-- The pov fluctuates wildly. It took me about 30 pages before I knew who the heroine was, mainly because of the way the pov bounced around secondary characters at the beginning of the book. The character I assumed was the heroine died in the second chapter. Some of the 1 and 2 star reviews on amazon complain about their inability to connect to the characters, and I blame the pov for this. It's hard to cheer for a protagonist you can't even identify, and it's hard to relate to characters who keep bouncing in and out of the text and dying off.
-- Each page contains at least one, and usually several, strikingly difficult and awkward sentences. Nobody line edited this thing, I promise you. It's a mess. Again, the weak amazon reviews sometimes refer to this by talking about how they had to re-read passages to understand them. "Confusing" is a word that comes up over and over again in the bad reviews.
-- There are far, far too many characters, and at least half of them don't matter at all. One amazon reviewer spent a very long paragraph trying to explain the relationships between all these secondary characters, complete with lots of ??? and !!!. It's too much, and it's confusing. (This is aggravated by the fact that so many of these secondaries have pov sequences.)
-- The description was almost comically bad. Several poor reviews note the clumsy handling of setting descriptions and the strange fascination with describing body parts that aren't usually described at all, let alone in such detail and with such frequency.
-- Typos and mechanical errors abound, and the reviewers mock many of them. With good reason. Some of the homonym errors, in particular, are laughably bad. I can guarantee that this book was not edited properly.
-- The pacing was disastrous. I lost count of the number of reviews that said they'd skipped over major chunks of text or had read only dialogue or only the first line of each paragraph. Even some of these complainants mentioned that they enjoyed the plot, but found it took too long to unfold.
-- The major characters were a bit wobbly. Most readers approved of the heroine (once we all knew who she was), and most of them found the villain to be cartoonish and clumsy. I didn't see any criticism of the hero, not even in the good reviews, but I also didn't see any praise for him. He read like a placeholder to me, a character with a clear plot function but not much else. Both the hero and the villain needed revision.
Several of the reviews noted that they had received the book for free but would never download anything else by this author. Several of them noted that they had been unable to finish the book. I could go on, but will spare you. My point is mainly to show that I am not the only one reacting to the book this way. It doesn't take an educated reader to spot the flaws and still see that the plot is good. The bottom line? I win the debate. A good plot cannot save an otherwise bad book. So this is the part where I throw down the mic, yo.
Theresa
This has led to an ongoing, behind the scenes debate about whether a book with a good plot and bad mechanics can still be deemed good. Obviously, I disagree with her position. I believe that plot is just one of many story and narrative elements that must work in order for the book as a whole will work.
And I think I have found the book that will allow me to declare permanent victory in this debate. I'm not going to humiliate the author here, because I'm not into that sort of thing. But here's the short rundown on the good aspects of this book --
-- I cannot fault the plot. If I were editing this book, I would have only one plot note to make, and that has to do with a secret that should be revealed a bit earlier. You know the old saying -- if a conflict can be resolved with an honest conversation, it's not a real conflict. This book has one of those, but it is not the only conflict, so resolving it early would free up the plot to focus on the real conflicts. This is a fairly minor plot note, and fairly routine. The fact that it is the only plot note speaks pretty well of the plot.
-- In fact, the other aspects of the plot are sort of fascinating. The amazon comments that give the book 4 and 5 stars all focus on these aspects of the book, these plot aspects and the mystery angle. It works, and it works well. The book has sold semi-decent numbers, and I suspect it's on the strength of this aspect of the story alone.
Those are the pros. Here are the cons.
-- The pov fluctuates wildly. It took me about 30 pages before I knew who the heroine was, mainly because of the way the pov bounced around secondary characters at the beginning of the book. The character I assumed was the heroine died in the second chapter. Some of the 1 and 2 star reviews on amazon complain about their inability to connect to the characters, and I blame the pov for this. It's hard to cheer for a protagonist you can't even identify, and it's hard to relate to characters who keep bouncing in and out of the text and dying off.
-- Each page contains at least one, and usually several, strikingly difficult and awkward sentences. Nobody line edited this thing, I promise you. It's a mess. Again, the weak amazon reviews sometimes refer to this by talking about how they had to re-read passages to understand them. "Confusing" is a word that comes up over and over again in the bad reviews.
-- There are far, far too many characters, and at least half of them don't matter at all. One amazon reviewer spent a very long paragraph trying to explain the relationships between all these secondary characters, complete with lots of ??? and !!!. It's too much, and it's confusing. (This is aggravated by the fact that so many of these secondaries have pov sequences.)
-- The description was almost comically bad. Several poor reviews note the clumsy handling of setting descriptions and the strange fascination with describing body parts that aren't usually described at all, let alone in such detail and with such frequency.
-- Typos and mechanical errors abound, and the reviewers mock many of them. With good reason. Some of the homonym errors, in particular, are laughably bad. I can guarantee that this book was not edited properly.
-- The pacing was disastrous. I lost count of the number of reviews that said they'd skipped over major chunks of text or had read only dialogue or only the first line of each paragraph. Even some of these complainants mentioned that they enjoyed the plot, but found it took too long to unfold.
-- The major characters were a bit wobbly. Most readers approved of the heroine (once we all knew who she was), and most of them found the villain to be cartoonish and clumsy. I didn't see any criticism of the hero, not even in the good reviews, but I also didn't see any praise for him. He read like a placeholder to me, a character with a clear plot function but not much else. Both the hero and the villain needed revision.
Several of the reviews noted that they had received the book for free but would never download anything else by this author. Several of them noted that they had been unable to finish the book. I could go on, but will spare you. My point is mainly to show that I am not the only one reacting to the book this way. It doesn't take an educated reader to spot the flaws and still see that the plot is good. The bottom line? I win the debate. A good plot cannot save an otherwise bad book. So this is the part where I throw down the mic, yo.
Theresa
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Multiple adjectives
Help! What's your suggestion here?
The research topic has to allow you to find academic, scholarly, and professional source.
Okay, what I mean is-- academic sources. Scholarly sources. Professional sources.
I don't mean every source has to be all of those, but rather each source has to be one of those.
How would you make it clear?
Alicia
The research topic has to allow you to find academic, scholarly, and professional source.
Okay, what I mean is-- academic sources. Scholarly sources. Professional sources.
I don't mean every source has to be all of those, but rather each source has to be one of those.
How would you make it clear?
Alicia
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Horrible thoughts
I'm just going to jot down some thoughts coming out of a discussion over lunch with my son about Stephen King and horror fiction and stuff. Other thoughts or speculations?
1) Horror is not just a genre. Like "romance" and "mystery" and "suspense," it's an emotion that can be generated within a book about something else. Why would we want to have a scene or passage or more of horror in a non-horror-genre book? To deepen the darkness of the book? To heighten the relief of a happy ending? I do think that horror would provide contrast (in the color sense) to the rest of the book, as long as it doesn't overwhelm with darkness.
2) Horror is not about the dreadful event... it's about the dread of the event. As with suspense, the buildup becomes all-important, to create that sense of dread within the character and the reader. Scene design, word choice, pacing-- these must combine. Pacing will slow down, sentences will lengthen, so the scene can lovingly, almost lubriciously, develop the creepy horror-ness. Presentation (the development) will be more important than plot (the event).
3) Horror is created by -knowing-. You have to know what's coming to be horrified by it. (Looking back on a horrible event works too, because you -know- it can happen now.) Notice how in "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson builds the dread by making it clear that everyone in the village knows what's going to happen (even if the reader doesn't). Go ahead, read the story (it's only eight pages), and see how the relatively bright tone in opening paragraph becomes progressively darker as the festive mood gives way to anxiety. The villagers all know what's coming.
4) Horror is inspired by the writer taking access to his/her deepest fears. But the event doesn't have to be all that dramatic. What's important is that either it's a common fear, or the writer describes the feeling well to make the reader "know" it.
Stephen King, I remember, was asked what in his life prepared him to write horror, and he spoke of two very common, nearly universal events. Once, when he was a child, he had an ear infection, and (presumably this was before antibiotics were used routinely) the doctor was going to lance the eardrum to release the pus. The boy (King) knew what was going to happen and that it was going to be terrible, and ran and hid in a closet. And his mother and the doctor had to come and drag him out and perform the procedure. Maybe few of us get our eardrums lanced, but we all got shots (I have to inject myself with medicine, and no matter how often I have done it, every single time there's a moment of horror involved in the breaking of the skin).
(I'm writing from memory here, so tell me if I have the details wrong.)
Then the other incident was watching one of his children run into danger (collision with a snow plow? I forget) while King was too far away to rescue the child, and had to watch in dread (there's that word again). (Nothing happened, but every parent has memories like this.)
Just take it slow. Read King's horror scenes, or Dean Koontz's, and see how slooooow the scenes develop. You can't shorthand horror. Dread has to build, through gradually darkening events and prose. That takes time and probably several revisions. It's not adventure. It's slow-paced, not fast-paced. There really aren't any shortcuts to horrifying readers.
5) To get in touch with what will horrify, remember your nightmares, and study the most common nightmare types. If you can invent scenes that include some common nightmare element, you'll be making a direct connection to our subconscious, and to the collective unconscious.
For example, one of my recurrent nightmares is seeing a plane on fire in the night sky, and it sails over a ridge, and then I hear an explosion and see a fireburst on the ridge. I suspect most people have a nightmare where (as with King's example above) they know something terrible is about to happen and can't stop it. That would make a great horror scene (especially if at that moment, the character had a friend or loved one taking a flight).
Another recurrent nightmare I have-- and you probably do too-- is being chased. But with mine, there's an added terror. I run through a shadowy street to get to my own front door. I fall into my house, slam the door closed, stand there panting but relieved. And then, slowly, I become aware that whatever was chasing me is in the house. And I'm locked in with this evil.
Now if that sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it in a few horror movies.
6) Horror elements, as a conduit to the subconscious, can trigger strong emotion even in other types of scenes. An example is the famous burlesque scene "Slowly I Turn," which uses the slow, mechanical, and repetitive language of a horror film to comic effect.
(Here's Lucille Ball: Slowly I Turn, Step by Step.)
That horror scene of the chase through a shadowy street? Watch the end of Gone with the Wind. It's a romantic "horror"-- the terror that is "chasing" her is her fear of abandonment, and she gets home, and there is Rhett, and she sighs in relief-- she's home. She's safe. But then the terror is right there with her, in her own home: Rhett announces he's leaving.
If you want strong emotion, whether it's comedy or romance, try using the horror tropes in some way.
7) Horror is, at essence, about a fear of loss. Just as Scarlett feared losing love, a horror story character might fear losing control, or losing face, or losing trust, or losing some power. You know what's a great horror story? Flowers for Algernon. In that story, researchers manage to increase the IQ of a white rat (Algernon), and then try the technique on a man of low IQ (Charlie). Rapidly, he becomes a genius, and for the first time feels the great pleasure of learning and inventing and understanding. (And he falls in love.) But then Algernon begins to fade and lose his genius at running mazes. Charlie, witnessing this, realizes that he too will shortly be losing all the intellectual gains he made. This is the horror. He knows what is coming. He dreads the loss. He can't stop it.
That is how we create horror. Establish something of value, and then predict its loss.
What else? What do you think? Help?
Alicia
1) Horror is not just a genre. Like "romance" and "mystery" and "suspense," it's an emotion that can be generated within a book about something else. Why would we want to have a scene or passage or more of horror in a non-horror-genre book? To deepen the darkness of the book? To heighten the relief of a happy ending? I do think that horror would provide contrast (in the color sense) to the rest of the book, as long as it doesn't overwhelm with darkness.
2) Horror is not about the dreadful event... it's about the dread of the event. As with suspense, the buildup becomes all-important, to create that sense of dread within the character and the reader. Scene design, word choice, pacing-- these must combine. Pacing will slow down, sentences will lengthen, so the scene can lovingly, almost lubriciously, develop the creepy horror-ness. Presentation (the development) will be more important than plot (the event).
3) Horror is created by -knowing-. You have to know what's coming to be horrified by it. (Looking back on a horrible event works too, because you -know- it can happen now.) Notice how in "The Lottery" Shirley Jackson builds the dread by making it clear that everyone in the village knows what's going to happen (even if the reader doesn't). Go ahead, read the story (it's only eight pages), and see how the relatively bright tone in opening paragraph becomes progressively darker as the festive mood gives way to anxiety. The villagers all know what's coming.
4) Horror is inspired by the writer taking access to his/her deepest fears. But the event doesn't have to be all that dramatic. What's important is that either it's a common fear, or the writer describes the feeling well to make the reader "know" it.
Stephen King, I remember, was asked what in his life prepared him to write horror, and he spoke of two very common, nearly universal events. Once, when he was a child, he had an ear infection, and (presumably this was before antibiotics were used routinely) the doctor was going to lance the eardrum to release the pus. The boy (King) knew what was going to happen and that it was going to be terrible, and ran and hid in a closet. And his mother and the doctor had to come and drag him out and perform the procedure. Maybe few of us get our eardrums lanced, but we all got shots (I have to inject myself with medicine, and no matter how often I have done it, every single time there's a moment of horror involved in the breaking of the skin).
(I'm writing from memory here, so tell me if I have the details wrong.)
Then the other incident was watching one of his children run into danger (collision with a snow plow? I forget) while King was too far away to rescue the child, and had to watch in dread (there's that word again). (Nothing happened, but every parent has memories like this.)
Just take it slow. Read King's horror scenes, or Dean Koontz's, and see how slooooow the scenes develop. You can't shorthand horror. Dread has to build, through gradually darkening events and prose. That takes time and probably several revisions. It's not adventure. It's slow-paced, not fast-paced. There really aren't any shortcuts to horrifying readers.
5) To get in touch with what will horrify, remember your nightmares, and study the most common nightmare types. If you can invent scenes that include some common nightmare element, you'll be making a direct connection to our subconscious, and to the collective unconscious.
For example, one of my recurrent nightmares is seeing a plane on fire in the night sky, and it sails over a ridge, and then I hear an explosion and see a fireburst on the ridge. I suspect most people have a nightmare where (as with King's example above) they know something terrible is about to happen and can't stop it. That would make a great horror scene (especially if at that moment, the character had a friend or loved one taking a flight).
Another recurrent nightmare I have-- and you probably do too-- is being chased. But with mine, there's an added terror. I run through a shadowy street to get to my own front door. I fall into my house, slam the door closed, stand there panting but relieved. And then, slowly, I become aware that whatever was chasing me is in the house. And I'm locked in with this evil.
Now if that sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen it in a few horror movies.
6) Horror elements, as a conduit to the subconscious, can trigger strong emotion even in other types of scenes. An example is the famous burlesque scene "Slowly I Turn," which uses the slow, mechanical, and repetitive language of a horror film to comic effect.
(Here's Lucille Ball: Slowly I Turn, Step by Step.)
That horror scene of the chase through a shadowy street? Watch the end of Gone with the Wind. It's a romantic "horror"-- the terror that is "chasing" her is her fear of abandonment, and she gets home, and there is Rhett, and she sighs in relief-- she's home. She's safe. But then the terror is right there with her, in her own home: Rhett announces he's leaving.
If you want strong emotion, whether it's comedy or romance, try using the horror tropes in some way.
7) Horror is, at essence, about a fear of loss. Just as Scarlett feared losing love, a horror story character might fear losing control, or losing face, or losing trust, or losing some power. You know what's a great horror story? Flowers for Algernon. In that story, researchers manage to increase the IQ of a white rat (Algernon), and then try the technique on a man of low IQ (Charlie). Rapidly, he becomes a genius, and for the first time feels the great pleasure of learning and inventing and understanding. (And he falls in love.) But then Algernon begins to fade and lose his genius at running mazes. Charlie, witnessing this, realizes that he too will shortly be losing all the intellectual gains he made. This is the horror. He knows what is coming. He dreads the loss. He can't stop it.
That is how we create horror. Establish something of value, and then predict its loss.
What else? What do you think? Help?
Alicia
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
More sentence stuff
Nothing deep here. I was just trying to create a handout out for conclusions in literature reviews (and you thought my life was dreary, huh?) and had this lumpen-prol sentence:
While the current research is comprehensive when describing the
technical and technological processes involved here,
Got that far and realized that was going to be a "Dolly Parton sentence"-- top-heavy. And what was coming next was going to be the end, the big conclusion (we need more discussion of XYZ before we proceed). And the big zinger should generally be in a sentence of its own, as it will "sound" more final then. So I went instead with two sentences:
The current research is comprehensive when describing the
technical and technological processes involved in digital manipulation. However, before we proceed further into this venture, we should discuss the philosophical issue of how we can determine reality once seeing is no longer believing.
Actually, I think there needs (for rhythm and finality) to be a couple more syllables around "reality". Will fiddle.
Anyway, this is an example of why, when a sentence becomes long and complex, we should always consider breaking it into two sentences. We might not want to, but there are often good "sound" reasons to make the big point its own sentence.
Alicia
Saturday, September 29, 2012
More about long sentences
I promised to show you some lovely long sentences and give you some more tips on how to wrangle long sentences. So let's start by looking at this trio of beauties from Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth." She tends to write long, languid sentences, and her writing never loses its lucidity. So she's always the first writer I reach for when I'm looking for ways to manage long sentences without mangling the meaning. We'll highlight the clauses this time as we did before -- yellow for subjects, green for the verbs, and blue for direct objects.
Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news, to make sure there hadn't been a plane crash anywhere in the world.
It was a one-sided correspondence; his trips were brief enough so that there was no time for Ruma to write back, and besides, he was not in a position to receive mail on his end.
She'd slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now.
The first thing you should notice is that she always keeps her clauses together. You don't see anything that splits a subject noun apart from its verb, such as --
She each time kept the printout....
She in shabby pensions had slept...
Right away, we can see how dividing those clauses would weaken the sentences. Even with just a few words (six words in each example above), the meaning is a little harder to grasp. Imagine what would happen if those intervening pieces were extremely long --
The car which refused to start on a warm day let alone on a cold day like this snowy January Tuesday that found the elderly lady huddling deep into her old wool coat coughed sluggishly.
(My example. Lahiri would be incapable of such an abomination.) By the time we get to the word "coughed," we have no idea which noun is sick. We've lost track of the subject through all those dependent bits shoved in the middle there. The car is the subject noun, and coughed is the verb that forms the main clause with that subject noun. It's not a fragment. It's just a mess. There are, what, maybe 30 words between the subject noun and its verb? But even if the intervening word soup is brief -- "each time" is only two words in the scrambled bit of Lahiri's sentence above -- the basic sentence will be weaker because the sturdy foundation of subject-verb will have been broken.
So that's our first observation, which we had already started to discuss in the last color-coded post on this topic. Keep the subject nouns and their verbs close together. She does the same thing with the direct objects of the verbs -- they're kept snuggled tight to their verbs. If you break those apart, you also hurt the sentence, like so--
Each time, she kept behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator the printout of his flight information ,
This isn't a technical error. It's just not as graceful. It's a little harder to read, and the readers will probably have to slow down their reading speeds to absorb the meaning. This isn't usually the effect we want.
So, keep that basic foundational unit of the clause -- subject/verb/direct object -- locked tightly together, and the writing gains clarity. There are a couple of other things we see here that are likely to help, too. Notice, for example, that when she has a piece to create a temporal orientation for the clause, she puts it before the subject:
Each time, she kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she watched the news
The temporal cues help orient the reader toward exactly how the events unfold. This is particularly important in a long sentence like this one, which has two temporal orientations. "Each time" refers to an event that occurs at one span of time, and "on the days" refers to a specific point within that span. The sentence would lose some clarity if those temporal modifiers were moved --
She kept the printout of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the refrigerator each time, and she watched the news on the days he was scheduled to fly
A subtle difference, perhaps, but one with an evident effect on clarity. There is an exception in the final sentence, which ends with the temporal modifier placed directly next to the verb it modifies:
She'd slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now.
That temporal modifier doesn't describe any part of the sentence other than the part it's right next to. And what is the golden rule of modifiers? Modifiers go next to the words they modify. So we couldn't really move that adverb "now" to any other spot in the sentence without either damaging the meaning or, in the case of "her father now sent," losing some grace.
In most of the sentences, most of the descriptive bits follow the clauses. Alicia and I have observed plenty of times before now that certain forms of dependent pieces just seem to work better when they follow the independent clauses. This is particularly evident with cumulative present participial phrases, such as the pair in that last sentence --
She'd slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now.
The purple-ish words are present participles leading into present participial phrases. This form of phrase is ripe for abuse, and if you've been reading this blog for any stretch of time, you've certainly heard us rant about the numerous problems they can cause. In this case, the first (practicing) is a cumulative modifier that adds meaning to the entire independent clause it follows. So that works, I think -- and in general, these kinds of cumulative modifiers work best at the end of a sentence. Look what happens when we try to reverse that--
Practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, she'd slept in shabby pensions, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now.
It's not dreadful, but now we have a problem with that final phrase ("buying"), which feels misplaced because it actually modifies the first present participial phrase rather than the independent clause. So we would have to move that, too--
Practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now, she'd slept in shabby pensions.
And that doesn't work because it throws the postcards and the pensions right next to each other, and that is a little disruptive to the meaning.
Anyway, this all boils down to three tips for long sentences:
1. Keep the clauses together.
2. Put temporal modifiers before the clauses when you have more than one time element to contend with.
3. Back-load the sentences with the other additional material, including cumulative modifiers.
None of these rules are carved on stone tablets, but I think you'll find that they help more often than they hurt.
Theresa
Friday, September 28, 2012
Prioritizing prepositions
The smell reminded her of her schooldays near Boston back in Amherst when she had worked in the library on the quadrangle in front of the admin building at the circulation desk.
Prepositions are those little words that show some "positioning" in time, space, or idea. Usually they connect two nouns-- with the main noun modified a prepositional phrase with the other noun as an object. Problem is, prepositional phrases, as modifiers, should be adjacent to the modified noun. But what happens, as so often does, when we have a series of prepositional phrases? We end up with monstrosities like the above sentence.
First:, recognize the problem. Learn what constitutes a prepositional phrase: (preposition word) (noun or phrase). Notice that stacking any prepositional phrases in a sentence almost always results in chaos-- why? Because prep phrases have to modify a noun, and the further they get from that noun, the more likely there is to be confusion. Accept that and try to avoid the whole stacking problem. Also notice in revision and resolve to fix.
Second, understand that the object of the preposition is a noun too, usually, and can sprout its own modifying prepositional phrases. So IN the LIBRARY modifies worked (yeah, I know, that's an adverbial function, and I have to think why... the verb is probably "worked in," but I'll come back to that after lunch when I can think).
But "library" has its own modifier:
NEAR the quadrangle
And "quadrangle" has its own modifier-- this is the quadrangle near the admin building.
IN FRONT OF the admin building.
That's sort of clunky, but understandable, until we stick in "at the circulation desk" which modifies not admin building, not quadrangle, but 'library" (where in the library she worked). (Would you put that before or after? She worked at the circ desk in the library, or She worked in the library at the circ desk? Why?)
Third, prioritize. When there are so many prepositional phrases, the reader is going get lost even if they're assembled in the right order. What's important to this moment of the story? She's looking back nostalgically at her schooldays. There's also some smell that reminds her (so she might think about a smell). She might be nostalgic about working in the library, but the positioning of the library on the campus probably isn't that important. So why put it in, if there's no need? Try changing a prep phrase to an adjective word-- "in Amherst" becomes "Amherst schooldays" or "Amherst library." Strip this down to essentials, and if you want to deepen the texture, give more sense of the setting, well, don't draw a map. Talk about the ivy on the stone walls or the dust on the library shelves or something evocative (and, given the sentence opening, something olfactory if possible).
The smell reminded her of her Amherst schooldays when she had worked at the library circulation desk, stamping books and breathing in the ink and dust.
This is a common issue with good writers who know they have to imbed information into each sentence so it adds to the meaning and the texture of the passage. That is, the more accomplished you are, the more likely your first draft will occasionally have one of these preposition-bristling sentences. Here's one modeled structurally on one I just saw in a generally well-edited news magazine:
The firing happened a little more than two weeks after Luigi's mistake of telling his boss to take a flying leap while at work in a meeting with the whole staff in the conference room.
Have at it. This is actually tougher than it looks. :)
Alicia
Prepositions are those little words that show some "positioning" in time, space, or idea. Usually they connect two nouns-- with the main noun modified a prepositional phrase with the other noun as an object. Problem is, prepositional phrases, as modifiers, should be adjacent to the modified noun. But what happens, as so often does, when we have a series of prepositional phrases? We end up with monstrosities like the above sentence.
First:, recognize the problem. Learn what constitutes a prepositional phrase: (preposition word) (noun or phrase). Notice that stacking any prepositional phrases in a sentence almost always results in chaos-- why? Because prep phrases have to modify a noun, and the further they get from that noun, the more likely there is to be confusion. Accept that and try to avoid the whole stacking problem. Also notice in revision and resolve to fix.
Second, understand that the object of the preposition is a noun too, usually, and can sprout its own modifying prepositional phrases. So IN the LIBRARY modifies worked (yeah, I know, that's an adverbial function, and I have to think why... the verb is probably "worked in," but I'll come back to that after lunch when I can think).
But "library" has its own modifier:
NEAR the quadrangle
And "quadrangle" has its own modifier-- this is the quadrangle near the admin building.
IN FRONT OF the admin building.
That's sort of clunky, but understandable, until we stick in "at the circulation desk" which modifies not admin building, not quadrangle, but 'library" (where in the library she worked). (Would you put that before or after? She worked at the circ desk in the library, or She worked in the library at the circ desk? Why?)
Third, prioritize. When there are so many prepositional phrases, the reader is going get lost even if they're assembled in the right order. What's important to this moment of the story? She's looking back nostalgically at her schooldays. There's also some smell that reminds her (so she might think about a smell). She might be nostalgic about working in the library, but the positioning of the library on the campus probably isn't that important. So why put it in, if there's no need? Try changing a prep phrase to an adjective word-- "in Amherst" becomes "Amherst schooldays" or "Amherst library." Strip this down to essentials, and if you want to deepen the texture, give more sense of the setting, well, don't draw a map. Talk about the ivy on the stone walls or the dust on the library shelves or something evocative (and, given the sentence opening, something olfactory if possible).
The smell reminded her of her Amherst schooldays when she had worked at the library circulation desk, stamping books and breathing in the ink and dust.
This is a common issue with good writers who know they have to imbed information into each sentence so it adds to the meaning and the texture of the passage. That is, the more accomplished you are, the more likely your first draft will occasionally have one of these preposition-bristling sentences. Here's one modeled structurally on one I just saw in a generally well-edited news magazine:
The firing happened a little more than two weeks after Luigi's mistake of telling his boss to take a flying leap while at work in a meeting with the whole staff in the conference room.
Have at it. This is actually tougher than it looks. :)
Alicia
Friday, September 21, 2012
Today at RU
Today at Romance University, I'm looking at an opening that's told in journal form. It's not a favored form these days. What do you think of it?
Theresa
Theresa
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