July 20, 2009 at 11:38 pm — Fiction,Nonfiction — Tags: exercises, paragraphs, sentence length, sentences, wordforge

This is the second in a series of exercises designed by Melinda Morris and me for WordForge, our local writer’s group.

Introduction

This exercise focuses on sentence length and its effects.

The exercise requires multiple revisions, so allow yourself plenty of time.

The Excercise

First draft. Write a piece in 3rd person that includes activity of some kind, but no dialogue. Start your piece any way you like. Write the first draft using your usual process. Write it as long as you need it to be, but try for at least 500 words, to give yourself enough material to work with.

First revision: Short sentences. Rewrite the piece using sentences no longer than 10 words each. No sentence may be longer than 10 words. Write the best short sentences you can.

Second revision: Long sentences. Rewrite the piece using sentences no shorter than 25 words each. Every sentence must be at least 25 words long. Write the best long sentences you can.

If writing either of these lengths is easy for you, adjust the lengths until it becomes difficult. If you usually write sentences of 10 words or fewer, use a maximum of 7 words per sentence, or 5 words. If 25 word sentences are a breeze, try 30 words. The point is to challenge yourself by working outside of your comfort range in order to observe how sentence length effects a piece. Within these restrictions, write the best sentences, the best paragraphs, and the best piece you can.

Write each revision as long as you need it to be. Make sure that each sentence within each version make sense, and that each version makes sense as a whole.

Analyze the effects of sentence length. Analyze your three drafts (the first draft and the two revisions) to identify the effects of sentence length. Make notes about what you observe.

Final draft. Write your final draft however you wish, but give particular attention to sentence length. Really look at the differing lengths, and apply what you learned about sentence length during the first two revisions. Always use the sentence length and structure that best serves your piece.

Guidelines

As you revise, notice the choices you make about how to shorten, lengthen, slice, or combine sentences. Notice the effects of each choice, and whether you like each effect.

When you’ve finished revising, consider:

• What challenges did you experience? What was difficult? How did you solve the problems?
• What surprised you? What meaning do you make of your surprise?
• What patterns do you notice in the structures of your short sentences? Of your long sentences?
• What patterns do you notice in the types, lengths, and arrangement of phrases and clauses in your long sentences?
• In your final version, what similarities and variations do you notice in sentence lengths and structures? What patterns do you see in the arrangement of short and long sentences?
• Read each version aloud. What makes a sentence easier or harder to read?
• How did focusing on sentence length affect other elements of your writing?

Also, as you revise, keep in mind narrative flow.

Examples

First, a randomly selected long sentence from a randomly selected page of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror:

On reaching the palace, Marcel mounted with part of his company to the Dauphin’s chamber, where, while he made a show of protecting the prince, his men fell upon the Dauphin’s two Marshals and slew them before his eyes. [39 words]

Here is my favorite opening line ever, from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice–not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. [54 words]

Finally one from Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which I just started reading. Prior to this sentence, Clare has bumped into Henry in the library. She’s met him many times, but he’s never met her. (It’s a time-travel thing, yo.)  Clare asks Henry out to dinner. Then comes this:

We plan to meet tonight at a nearby Thai restaurant, all the while under the amused gaze of the women behind the desk, and I leave, forgetting about Kelmscott and Chaucer and floating down the marble stairs, through the lobby and out into the October Chicago sun, running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels, whooping and rejoicing. [59 words]

Invitation

Melinda and I would love to know how you use this exercise and what you learn from it.

If you have questions, suggestions, or anything else you’d like to say, please comment.

Comments (0)

July 20, 2009 at 7:08 pm — Fiction,Nonfiction — Tags: exercises, narrative flow, paragraphs, sentences, wordforge

This is the first of a series of exercises designed by Melinda Morris and me for WordForge, our local writers’ group.

### Introduction

This exercise focuses on **narrative flow**.

People use the term narrative flow to mean lots of different things. For the purpose of this exercise, we’re focused on a specific meaning: the connections among words, sentences, and paragraphs.

For more information, see the references section, below.

### The Exercise

**The prompt.** Start your piece with this: *I stepped out of my front door and walked down to the street. I looked around and saw everything I knew about the world*

**First draft.** Write the first draft in your usual way. Write it as long as you need it to be.

**Revise for narrative flow.** Revise what you’ve written, focusing on one goal: **Improve the narrative flow, the connections among words, sentences, and paragraphs.** Rewrite sentences, restructure them, rearrange them so that each follows naturally from the one before and each leads naturally to the next. Add, remove, or change words. Reorganize paragraphs. And don’t limit yourself to these suggestions. Change anything you can think of to improve the narrative flow.

**Maximum word count.** 500 words.

### Guidelines

**Give yourself plenty of time** for this exercise. Our writer’s group found it more challenging than we had expected, some requiring five or more hours of work, and as many as eight drafts. Each of the writers who did the exercise found the rewards to be worth the effort.

**As you revise**, notice the choices you make, and how each choice affects narrative flow. Notice what enhances narrative flow and what interferes. Make notes about what you notice.

**When you’ve finished revising**, consider:

* What challenges did you experience? What was difficult? How did you solve the problems?
* What surprised you? What meaning do you make of your surprise?
* What kinds of connections did you use in your writing? What kinds of connections can you identify in others’ writing? What effects do these connections create?
* How did focusing on narrative flow affect other elements of your writing?

**Discuss what you’ve learned** with other people who have completed the exercise. Use these guidelines to guide the conversation.

### References

Elisabeth George describes narrative flow in her marvelous book *Write Away*. The relevant section, available online via Google books, runs from bottom of page 159 through the middle of page 162. Particularly instructive is the excerpt from one of George’s novels, and her analysis of the connections from one paragraph to the next.

In “Creating Narrative Flow,” Sam Reeves describes one way to achieve narrative flow:

One sentence introduces part of a picture that baits the reader into subconsciously asking a question about the idea or action.  The writer, in turn, answers that question in the next sentence while simultaneously expanding information that prompts the reader into asking additional questions. And then the process repeats itself.

Reeves also shows a nice example of how he used this technique to improve the narrative flow of a bumpy paragraph.

### Invitation

Melinda and I would love to know how you use this exercise and what you learn from it.

If you have questions, suggestions, or anything else you’d like to say, please comment.

Comments (0)

October 24, 2007 at 9:50 pm — Fiction — Tags: sentences

I listen to a lot of audio books. Most are read by professional readers. Every now and then a reader stumbles and emphasizes the wrong word. It’s tempting to attribute such errors to the reader, but I’ve notice that when a professional reader stumbles, there’s likely a stumbling block in the writing.

Read out loud this passage from Scott Smith’s The Ruins:

Amy kept whispering the same thing. “It’s time.”

Stacy struggled first to grasp the words, then their meaning.

Did you emphasize any of the words, even slightly?

In the audio version of the book, Patrick Wilson, the reader, emphasized the word grasp. “Stacy struggled first to grasp the words, then their meaning.” Clearly this is the wrong emphasis. Better emphasis would be, “Stacy struggled first to grasp the words, then their meaning.”

What makes Wilson stumble? My guess is this: The sentence promises a parallel structure, and then fails to deliver.

The word first announces a sequence: First X, then Y. Readers expect the two parts of the sequence—the X and the Y—to have a parallel grammatical structure. For the structure to be parallel, the two items, whether words or phrases, must fulfill the same grammatical function. If one is a verb phrase, the other will be a verb phrase. If one is a noun phrase, the other will be a noun phrase.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty test for whether a structure is parallel:  Extract the X and Y from the sentence and put them in a list. Then ask yourself whether the items have the same grammatical function.

The X and Y from Smith’s sentence are:

• to grasp the words
• their meaning

Do these phrases have the same grammatical function? No. To grasp the words is a verb phrase. Their meaning is a noun phrase. The structure is not parallel.

If you aren’t sure of the grammatical functions of the items, try this. Create a new sentence by swapping the X and the Y and read again. The new sentence may not make sense semantically (after all, we’ve swapped the order of the sequence), but if it works grammatically, the structure is parallel. If the new sentence doesn’t flow grammatically, the structure is not parallel.

Let’s swap Smith’s X and Y: Stacy struggled first their meaning, then to grasp the words. That doesn’t flow grammatically, so the original structure was not parallel.

How could we fix this? One way is to add parts to the smaller phrase until it matches the structure of the longer phrase: Stacy struggled first to grasp the words, then to grasp their meaning. Now the phrases are both verb phrases, and the structure is parallel.

But there’s another piece to the puzzle of how Wilson stumbled. First is one of those words that invites us to emphasize the next meaningful word. The next meaningful word in Smith’s sentence is grasp, so we emphasize that. Even in our revised sentence, grasp is the wrong word to emphasize.

Another way to repair the sentence is to move parts out of the larger phrase, until it matches the structure of the shorter phrase: Stacy struggled to grasp first the words, then their meaning. This seems overly formal to me, but the structure is parallel, and first invites us to place the emphasis in the right place: first words, then meaning.

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