Tome Improvement

Unrequested writing advice to an unsuspecting audience

Know your sentence’s beauty and prune accordingly.

This is the one that finally made me write this article, full of advice specifically for writers I’ve read on Substack. How many times have I been blown away by the magnificence of imagery that’s embedded within a muddy sentence? Set it free. Focus on the good stuff.

If that’s your statement, let it be your statement. Too often, I’ll see its possibility in something like:

The tender mercies of her care for me left me more broken than before she nursed me back to health in the old hospital just outside St Louis. She left me a thousand jagged pieces scattered along a bloody hiking trail, like the one upriver, heading out of Grafton.

I exaggerate. Usually the only offending phrase is “for me,” and that’s easy to miss unless you have the time to go back and read your prose out loud. Now mind you, if you prefer it with the “for me” keep it. To me its understood and distracts from the beauty of the phrase.

by Will McPhail

A key to beauty in prose is contradictory juxtaposition.

This is also the key to making an adverb work. One such combination stumbled out of my Substack writing yesterday:

He strangled softly on an uncertain cough.

Softly works for me here because it’s unexpected and non-intuitive. Obvious adverbs are the enemy. He ran quickly tells me nothing, but if your character stumbled purposefully to the door, the reader’s mind perks up.

It’s also the strength of my first example sentence: the tender mercies of her care left me broken. The contradictory use of language entertains the brain with a few nanoseconds of verbal puzzle building.

Know where to place character names.

This is fundamental stuff, and if you try to get cute, you’ll give your reader a different kind of puzzle, one that triggers no pleasure or sense of beauty. Don’t do this:

He rose to his feet, and Zachary’s tendon throbbed.

Don’t do it, not if it’s Zachary who’s rising to his feet, because that’s not what the sentence tells me. The shift in a sentence from a pronoun to a proper noun tells me you’re introducing a new character.

Zachary rose to his feet, and the young man’s tendon throbbed.

Again, no. Be careful with the desire to replace pronouns with expository descriptors. Each change hints to the reader that a new subject is being introduced. I once beta read a story that had this huge crowd moving through Rome, only for me to realize the writer was talking about one guy the whole time. Not once did he ever refer to the character the same way, and I had no way of knowing we were staying with one character. He’d written a throng.

You don’t have to stick with just one tag for a character, but you have to be careful and mindful about how you make those changes, because in general:

The fundamental mechanics of communication aren’t boring.

Don’t worry about the wrong things. Don’t worry about using “said” too often. Learn to communicate dialog without tags, but don’t feel compelled to change said because you think said is boring. Said is mostly invisible. That doesn’t mean other tags are forbidden, but use them sparingly, in those moments where that’s the word you want to use. Otherwise, feel free to use said without worry.

Pronouns aren’t boring. If they are, it’s the sentence, not the pronoun. Don’t try to salvage a weak sentence by swapping out a pronoun for a descriptor like mentioned above. Salvage a boring sentence by starting fresh and building it on a better verb.

Note how I said that. The advice we often give is “use a stronger verb,” but people don’t understand what that means. They take a sentence like:

I am tired.

And they experiment, swapping out other linking verbs. I feel tired. That’s not it.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with: I am tired. That sentence can be exactly what’s needed in the context of the paragraph. If it’s not, then it’s boring.

If you’re struggling to improve a boring sentence, begin with a stronger verb. The first that comes to mind is languished. Build a new sentence around it. Doesn’t matter what it is; it’ll be an improvement.

Let me complicate my statement that there’s nothing wrong with “I am tired” by acting like I said exactly the opposite.

Tell points. Show actions.

Here’s the key to breaking the show don’t tell rule. There are times to tell, but they’re never the action unless your point is to rob the audience of the joy of the action. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you want to do. It’s ironic, anticlimactic, and quick.

If you’ve got a point to make about a character, feel free to tell it, but don’t be boring. You can make good use of boring sentences while showing action, but a boring sentence while telling a point about something is the kiss of death. That’s where you get slammed with the advice, don’t tell us he’s sad, show us. Despite this constant refrain. that’s not the only option. Just don’t be boring about it.

Remember my first example:

The first half of that, I’m telling a point which I then illustrate metaphorically. Even without the metaphor, though, it’s not boring. This is where you want to avoid those to be verbs and rely on tricks like contradictory juxtaposition. You want to engage the reader’s imagination, and there are ways to do that while telling a point.

A well-written interplay of show and tell creates rhythm and variety within a work, much as we learn to do by varying sentence length. And, by the way:

Variety is the spice, the meat, the whole damn thing.

It’s not just show and tell. It’s interiority and outward action. (Remind me to get back to that.) It’s sentence length and structure and the same for paragraphs. Its dialog and dialog-free paragraphs. Every component of our writing grows stronger through variety.

In many of those, too, you can use contradictory juxtaposition. We love to follow our longest sentences with the shortest ones. It rattles our creative minds awake when the tone of dialog somehow contrasts with the tone of the narrative. That variety and contrast stirs the creative instincts of the reader’s mind into better weaving your tale.

Pay attention to rhythm when you switch narrative positions.

One of the biggest issues I see are clumsy transitions between external narration and internal dialogue. Authors just drop a line of direct thought in italics, and it’s like felling a tree across the road. The reader can get over it and understand what happened, but the journey’s been interrupted.

I’m not saying don’t move between the two. My advice is to do so, but the verbal rhythm of your writing holds to certain rules, and those rules don’t change because you’re switching narrative positions. What’s one of these rules within rules?

A hard shift is camouflaged and softened by the break between paragraphs.

If you’re just dropping in a line of thought, the easiest choice is to give it it’s own line. Paragraph breaks hide a lot of clunk.

Within the paragraph, transitions should be smoother, subtle transitions where sometimes we’re not sure where the narrator ends and the character’s thoughts begin. It morphs and blends into one rhythmic flow.

Know when to start a story.

Everyone warns about starting a story too early. A few worry about starting too late, but there’s one key concept that can help you know where to begin.

Start with what your character wants. Introduce the character in a way that illustrates her want and do that as close to the inciting incident as you can. Too early is before the want is clear. Too late is throwing us into the inciting incident before we understand the character’s want. A strong opening is a strong desire, not high action driven by unclear or uninteresting wants.

For an example of me attempting that, see Sarah’s Doom, the story I wrote “live” for the celebration of Jimmy Doom’s 900th short story without missing a day.

The want I gave my character was mundane.

She was tired of cooking and wanted a break from her routine, but I hit her with it as strong as I could, dialed up to 11, because I wanted this to feel like a horror story, even though the action and subject matter is largely normal day stuff. I gave the story time to communicate that want and to settle into the awareness of the characters and setting, and then I brought in the inciting incident: the imagined exchange of her face for the porcelain mask. Changing faces was the idea behind the story, but what drove the narrative was the sense of the character’s want.

Please note: the inciting incident didn’t create the character’s want. The character’s want predated the incident and informed her reaction. Too often, we think the character’s want is going to be driven by the incident. Her daughter is kidnapped. She wants to save her daughter. It’s not wrong, just what they used to call basic. Spice it up. She’s a frustrated beauty queen who won first place in her county but could never advance beyond that. Now as a mother, her six-year old has the opportunity to go all the way, and through her, she feels her own dreams on the verge of being fulfilled, a possibility that outweighs everything, even her own daughter’s happiness.

And then her daughter is kidnapped.

What does she want now? Yes, she wants to save her daughter, but it’s so much more than that, and its complex and messy, and despite the heightened drama, it feels more specific and real than generic mother wants to save generic daughter. We relate to specificity and the confusion of emotions that creates.

Are there other options for knowing when to start a story? Sure. But this is one that works.

Don’t over explain or answer all the questions your story raises.

Kids are full of questions, and then we send them to school to be bored with the answers. Your reader is that kid. She loves a mystery and isn’t as interested in the reveal as she believes. Create questions and mysteries but when answering and resolving, give as little as you must. Be stingy. Be cruel.

— Thaddeus Thomas

If this was worthwhile and you want to see more of my thoughts on writing, let me know. Everyone has something to say about writing, and I want to know if this stands out enough from the crowd to capture your interest and leave you wanting more.

Sources:

For more from cartoonist Will McPhail: https://www.willmcphail.com/