Though it in fact feels focused more on planning and outlining, there are some useful tips and resources in a supplement in the Guardian today: How To Write A Book In 30 Days.
But I didn’t realise it was a race.
Category Archives: Notes on Craft
Friday Writing Experiment No. 6: Writing Good Sentences
We can come up with brilliant ideas, storylines, and characters, but they’re unlikely to be much use unless we can bring them to life with elegant, vibrant, cogent, taut, muscular sentences.
I.e., unless we can write.
The book I recommend more than any other to writers and students is Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax, which is a lively and informative overview of all the grammar and usage we probably did not learn in English classes. I’m keen to acquire a copy of her new book Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch (one on the way, or rather, I’m on the way to one), which is – ahhhh! – devoted to verbs, those powerhouses of the sentence. I hope to review both of these books in the near future, but meanwhile take a look at Constance Hale’s newly designed website and blog, which has a ton of useful resources.
And inspired by St Constance’s love for ‘wicked good prose’ (and a day late – oops!), this week’s writing experiment is dedicated to writing powerful sentences.
Take any interesting sentence you’ve written lately – interesting as in a sentence you were pleased with, or maybe it’s a sentence that gave you a problem because it felt a bit clunky or did not quite express what you wanted. Or perhaps it’s just any old sentence from an email, or you can borrow one from someone else.
And if you are feeling bold and have the time: take a whole paragraph.
Now perform at least five different operations on that sentence/paragraph, i.e., rewrite it or modify it in at least five different ways.
Some suggestions:
* Change the word choices subtly, e.g., use a thesaurus to bring different shades of meaning out of each word in the sentence.
* Change the word choices radically, e.g., replace each word with another word that’s an equivalent part of speech acquired randomly – perhaps replace its first noun with the first noun you find in a newspaper story, then replace the next noun with the next noun you find in that same story, and so on. Understand word order, and words as placeholders of content.
* Express the action using passive verbs instead of active, or vice-versa.
* Remove all adjectives.
* Remove all adverbs.
* Change nouns to proper nouns, where you can (e.g., change ‘tea’ to ‘PG Tips’).
* If the/a sentence has more than one verb, remove unnecessary verbs (purging yourself of linking verbs and auxiliary verbs). If all the verbs seem necessary, let them take turns at being the only verb in the sentence. Change the verb if it seems necessary.
* Feel free to extend or develop sentences using content from other sentences from the original text, e.g., merging it with a nearby sentence to create a compound sentence and/or a complex sentence.
* Extend sentences by using a co-ordinating conjunction and another clause to make compound sentences. What effect does that have?
* Extend sentences by using a subordinating conjunction and a dependent clause to make a complex sentences. What effect does that have?
* Double the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.
* Halve the length of your sentence, without changing the basic meaning.
* Rewrite your sentence/paragraph as a text message or a Tweet (under 280 characters, or 140 in old money).
* Add more life to your sentence/paragraph.
* Think abstractly. Conceive of your original sentence/paragraph as an action: right now, is it a kiss, a kick, a projection, a hinge, or some other gesture? How can you make it into a different action: a flight, a decoration, a flick, a punch?
* Assess the elemental quality of your sentence/paragraph: is it mostly Fire, Water, Air, or Earth? Like an alchemist, translate it into another element through your sentence structure and word choices. Aim to keep close to the original meaning, perhaps, but also explore how the sense can be shifted.
* Invent your own sentence operations, and share them with the class. Let your imagination go a bit wild with sentences.
I suggest you do these exercises by hand in a notebook. You can of course do on screen as well. In fact, it might be interesting to explore these processes of composition in different media: on the screen of your phone, on a blackboard, on Post-its.
And then repeat over with a different sentence/paragraph. It can be a good constraint, though, to use the same sentence/paragraph for several different operations in order to explore the possibilities.
If you need to look anything up, and don’t have your own Sin and Syntax (why not?!), here are some useful resources:
* Mantex study notes on English language
* Parts of Speech Overview – from Purdue’s Online Writing Lab
Round-up, 28 September 2012: Rejected Manuscripts, Ghosts, Britishisation, J.K. Rowling, and Indexers
Apparently Penguin is asking some writers to return advances for manuscripts that were never delivered. Too right! (More for those who can deliver.) Some of the Guardian commentariat reveals a certain ignorance of what an advance really is. The posts by cstross usefully clarify things such as contracts and advances usually being broken down into payments on signature of contract, delivery of manuscript, hardback publication, and paperback publication. One agent quoted in the article refers to books rejected for editorial reasons, though the works referred to here seem to be books that were simply not delivered (which suggests the agent seems to be stirring things, as one comment suggests).
But it makes me think of the time when Joan Collins was taken to court for delivering an ‘unreadable’ manuscript. I remember seeing a super documentary on the trial, where ghostwriter Lucianne Goldberg, called as expert witness, wrily dismissed the manuscript’s inconsistencies as things that are fixed as a matter of course during the editorial process. (‘It’s a miracle’ was one explanation for, I think, someone returning from the dead – I thought the judge was going to say she was in contempt of court … but this was fiction, your honour.) If anyone knows where to find that documentary, let me know! But meanwhile enjoy Lucianne Goldberg discussing the trial and celebrity publishing with Judith Regan (e.g., note some fascinating arguments about fiction vs nonfiction writers using/needing ghost writers). I guess one major issue was that the perceived value of a Joan Collins novel, even if expertly rewritten/doctored, was diminished in the eyes of the publisher between the time the book was signed up and the time it was delivered. Writers: take note …
A good interview with Jeffrey Eugenides appeared in Salon this week. I enjoyed the discussion of his first sentences. It occurs to me they work as wonderful little elevator pitches.
Neologism alert! The BBC reports on the Britishisation of American English (and with an -ise ending at that).
A brief feature in Forbes on a boutique publisher using a subscription model, a form of underwriting production that’s also used successfully (to some degree or other) by, e.g., the wonderful Peirene Press and And Other Stories.
Apparently, there were some problems with the formatting of the ebook of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. Ow!
Following my own post earlier this week, more on the value of book bloggers in the Guardian. (You know, the more I think about it, I’m more likely to read – and trust – a books blog than a conventional book review.)
Also from the Guardian: John Sutherland on one of the great unsung heroes of publishing: the indexer. (Or should I say unsung heroines, as so often they are women. I never know whether women prefer to be heroes or heroines, actors or actresses, and whether it’s right/wrong to use either.)
And yay, the Kerouac Scroll is coming to the British Library! Next week, at that.
Final comment, amid all the coverage this week of The Casual Vacancy (which I’ve yet to read): aren’t we glad that J.K. Rowling 1. took pen to paper, and has 2. such a public profile, and 3. a voice that she uses to good purpose? I gather from those in the know that 4. she is a truly lovely person, too. Which just goes to show. (Haters: remember what Zadie said – we have to write from Love, not Envy.)
Ursula Le Guin: On Adjectives And Adverbs
– Ursula Le Guin, Steering the CraftAdjectives and adverbs are good and rich and fattening. The main thing is not to overindulge … I would recommend to all storytellers a watchful attitude and a thoughtful, careful choice of adjectives and adverbs, because the bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it’s going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.