zion of arcadia
too much of my own quietness is with me
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If you're in one of the PMD discord servers with me you're probably seen this before, although I made a few tweaks and clarified a few points based on feedback.
“The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this….
“The technical implications of the continuity principle—the idea that the reader should never be distracted from the image or scene—cannot be treated so briefly. In the work of beginning writers, especially those weak in the basic skills of English composition, the usual mistake is that the writer distracts the reader with clumsy or incorrect writing. Characters, of course, can speak as clumsily as they like; the writer’s job is simply to imitate them accurately. But the standard third-person narrator can never miss. If the narrator slips into faulty syntax, the reader’s mind tacks away from… [the problem] to the problem of figuring out what the sentence means. The distraction is almost certain to be emotional as well as intellectual, since the reader has every right to feel that a writer’s business is to say what he means clearly. In good fiction, the writer never has to go back over a sentence just to find out what it says. He may read a sentence twice because he likes it, or because, through no fault of the author, his mind briefly wandered, musing, perhaps, on the larger implications of the scene; but if it’s the author’s carelessness that makes him read twice, he has a right to feel that the author has violated the fundamental contract in all fiction: that the writer will deal honestly and responsibly with the reader. (This, it should be mentioned, does not rule out use of the so-called unreliable narrator, since the unreliable narrator is a character inside the fiction.)” - John Gardner
Gardner’s points boil down to five basic tenets regarding good, solid, fundamental prose:
Vivid prose is achieved through concrete detail. If someone says “monster” instead of “arbok”, a fancy yet broad term like “hostile maneuvers” instead of sharp verbs like coil/writhe/hiss/spit, if they describe the arbok’s home as an “inhospitable abode” rather than a jungle filled with trees and brush, the reader will struggle to conjure an accurate mental image of the scene.
Examples:
An auxiliary verb is a verb used in forming the tenses, moods, and voices of other verbs. They consist of: be (am, are, is, was, were, being, been), can, could, dare, do (does, did), have (has, had, having), may, might, must, need, ought, shall, should, will, would.
Example: “Two arbok were fighting.”
Verbs without modifying auxiliaries are generally considered more concrete. If we change the above example to “Two arbok fought” we indicate a given instant instead of an indefinite passage of time.
Description through an Observing Consciousness
Another common error is the needless filtering of an image through some observing conscious. Phrases such as “she saw” and “she noticed” should be suppressed in favor of direct presentation.
Example: “I watched the torterra approach.” vs “The torterra approached.”
Or
“He saw trees stretch in every direction.” vs “Trees stretched in every direction.”
Active Voice
Active voice is almost always an improvement over passive voice. Active voice is when the subject performs the action. Passive is when the subject is acted upon by the action (the verb).
“Poochyena bit me” as opposed to “I was bitten by the poochyena”. Remember the three main parts of a sentence--subject, predicate, and object. While “I” might be the main voice of the narrative, on the micro-scale of the individual sentence, “I” is the object while “poochyena” is the subject.
Active vs passive voice in more detail: https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/activepass.htm
Infinite-Verb Phrases
Infinite-verb phrases often open a sentence. Phrases such as, “Rolling away from the attack, Pikachu cried out…” or “Holding the pan over his head, Brock said…” They are, more often than not, a mistake. The reason is temporal--infinite-verb phrases cause unclear and abstract shifts and/or blatant illogic.
“Quitting Team Rocket and blowing up the base, Jesse and James went back to Viridian City.” The sentence implies that all three things are happening simultaneously. The visual image is out of sequence, which breaks the reader’s suspension of disbelief and distracts them from the scene.
When used properly, infinite-verb phrases slow down the pace of a scene and heightens tension, such as “Slowly raising the rifle barrel…” They are rarely used well, and instead chop action sequences out-of-order and weaken the overall sentence.
Infinite-verb phrases in more detail: http://www.lanediamond.com/editorsdesk/infinite-verb-phrases-give-readers-an-act-without-an-actor/
Diction Shifts and Inappropriate Diction
Diction is the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing. To understand diction at its most basic level, it’s important to understand there are three underlying meanings:
Denotation is the term used to mean the dictionary meaning or meanings of a word—the direct, specific meaning of a word or phrase: the literal meaning. Thus, when we read the word “pikachu,” we mentally picture a furry, yellow rodent capable of emitting electricity.
Connotation is the term used to capture the fact that words also have implied meanings—meanings and associations that are suggested indirectly by a word which greatly affect our understanding of an author’s message. Connotation suggests that there is a “personal side” to words in that they carry emotional force and shades of suggestion. The words we use indicate not only what we mean but how we feel, and we choose words that we hope will engage others emotionally and persuasively, in conversation and daily usage as well as in essays, novels, and poems.
Etymology is the origin of the word and the development of its meaning. Words rooted in Anglo-Saxon are usually simpler and more colloquial in comparison to Latinate words (looked vs surveyed, for example). Why does this matter? Because there are four levels of formality to writing diction.
1. Formal diction–a dignified, impersonal, and elevated use of language. It is exacting in its adherence to the rules of grammar and complex vocabulary.
2. Middle diction–still follows the rules of correct language usage, but is less “elevated.” It reflects the way most educated people speak.
3. Informal diction–the plain language of everyday use. This often involves idiomatic expressions, slang, contractions, and simple or common words.
4. Poetic diction–Poets sometimes use an elevated diction that is significantly different from the common speech and writing of the time period. These can be words that are chosen (or sometimes created) by the poet because they have a special “poetic” quality, an ability to communicate a complex thought in a word or phrase.
Let’s look at this paragraph, as provided by John Gardner:
“Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time.”
The diction is inconsistent, sliding from standard (“Her lips were thick and smooth…”) to stilted (“... held a healthy natural red color...”) to formal (“... extended to the intersection of her lips…”) and then colloquial (“... most of the time.”).
High style and formal diction are not for everyone, much like Bach; direct, colloquial language is just as entertaining if not more so for many. But to try and mash the two together is to create an unholy abomination in which both the reader of highbrow and the reader of lowbrow work will find little enjoyment. The most important thing is to be consistent, and if you switch it up, have a good reason for the change.
The Periodic Sentence
Sentences in English have recognizable patterns: meaning units or syntactic slots. They usually break down into two common patterns:
Subject, verb, object
OR
Subject, verb-modifier
We can now use this understanding of the basic, periodic sentence to examine several issues often found in writing:
“Riolu almost lost his balance. He turned toward her. She smiled at his embarrassment.”
Note how the subject and the verbs thud along when spoken aloud. Everything reads at a monotone, unbroken pace—it’s simple. Boring.
One can get rid of the thudding subjects and verbs by using compound predicates: “Riolu almost lost his balance and turned toward her”; by introducing qualifiers and appositional phrases: “Riolu almost slipped—arms thrown wide like a braviary landing—his eyes wide, trembling, ears pricked and expression incredulous” (etc.); or by finding some appropriate subordinate clause, perhaps: “After Riolu caught himself, he turned toward her”—a solution that gets rid of the thudding by lowering (hastening) the stress of the first “he.”
The incorrect use of the infinite-verb phrase is often found in situations like these to force sentence variety. Most writers implicitly understand that they need to vary their sentences, they just don’t always achieve it in the best possible way.
Another bad cure is stretching out a sentence with a “that” or “which” clause. What happens to such sentences is that they trail off and lose energy.
Example: “Leaping to his feet, he readied a thunderbolt that would take several seconds to charge.”
OR
“She turned, screeching, standing atop the table in terror at the kangaskhan that had arrived that morning from Kanto, which had formerly been its home.”
A big, threatening kangaskhan should be scary, and the prose should reflect that. But because the focus shifts toward the irrelevant detail explaining where the kangaskhan came from, the tension in the sentence is lost.
Lack of Sentence Focus
The search for sentence variety often leads to another problem, the overloading of sentences and the loss of focus. Observe:
“The dark waters of the Lake Verity were very peaceful as the pinkish glow of pre-dawn light turned the horizon’s gray clouds to shades of orchid and lavender. The clear, cool air breezed through the tops of the enormous pine trees as they waved along the length of the lake’s shoreline.”
These sentences are packed with too much information. As a rule, if a sentence has three syntactic slots, as in
The charmander (1) walked down (2) the road (3)
—we can load one or two slots with modifiers. Any more and it risks becoming a jumble of details. There are several permutations a writer can play with. For instance, they can load down slot one and leave the others alone, thus:
The charmander, stooped, bent almost double under his load of books, yet smiling with good cheer and humming a simple tune under his breath (1), walked slowly (2) down the road (3).
Or we may load up slot two:
The charmander walked slowly (1), lifting his feet carefully, sometimes kicking one forward in what resembled a dance, then slamming the foot down, grinning and humming under his breath (2), making no real progress down the road (3).
If we’re feeling frisky we can even risk filling both slot one and two. For instance:
The charmander, stooped, bent almost double under his load of books, yet smiling with good cheer and humming a simple tune under his breath, walked slowly (1), lifting his feet carefully, sometimes kicking one forward in what resembled a dance, then slamming the foot down, grinning and humming under his breath (2), making no real progress down the road (3).
If interested in toying with literary stunts, we may even spruce up slot three with something like “the bumpy, crooked road.” Playing around with a sentence in this fashion is part of the joy of writing. Of course, eventually, a writer must recognize when enough is enough.
Faulty Rhythm
Prose isn’t metered like poetry. However, prose does still have a rhythm to it (unless a writer is being intentionally arhythmic), often called flow. To quote Gardner:
“Many writers, including some famous ones, write with no consciousness of the poetic effects available through prose rhythm. They put the wine on the table, put the cigarette in the ashtray, paint in the lovers, start the clock ticking, all with no thought of whether the sentences should be fast or slow, light-hearted or solemn with wedged-in juxtaposed stresses.”
A stressed syllable is a syllable that has emphasis within a word (or within a line of poetry). So the best way to tell is to say the word in an overly dramatic way, choosing different syllables to emphasize. For example, let's say we have the word "emphasize," and we want to figure out which syllable is stressed. So we try saying it a few different ways. Try reading the following line, and shout whenever you see a capitalized syllable (or, if you're in a library, whisper when you see a lower-case syllable).
EM-pha-size, em-PHA-size, em-pha-SIZE.
Clearly the middle one sounds wrong. So we know that the middle syllable is unstressed. But the first and last ones, neither of them sounds horrible, but EM-pha-size definitely sounds better than em-pha-SIZE. EM is the stressed syllable in the word, and the other two are unstressed. You could argue that SIZE has a secondary stress, but the general rule is, only one syllable in a word has the primary stress.
Notation for Syllabic Stresses:
/ Wand. Marks the stronger (louder, longer, or higher pitched) syllables
u Cup. Marks the weaker (softer, shorter, or lower-pitched) syllables
\ Reversed Wand. Marks syllables that are only partially accented. It should be used very rarely, if at all; save it for cases where you are completely stuck over how to mark a syllable or in group situations where there is strong disagreement over whether a syllable is stressed or not.
/ u u / u u / u u / / u / u / u u u / u / u
“No one was looking when Kaiser’s gun went off, killing Ash Ketchum and maiming his friends.”
The writer thus unintentionally produces a form of sprung verse—that is, jammed stresses one after another—when what he needs, to reflect the moment’s rush, is lighter rhythms, anapests (a metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable) or dactyls (a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables or (in Greek and Latin) one long syllable followed by two short syllables). For example, he may write:
/ / / / / / / / / / / / /
“Stop, thief!” Brock cried. “Stop! Can’t some good man stop that thief, please?”
By understanding and manipulating syllables, the writer can create a flow and tempo to their writing that more accurately reflects the mood they want to create for the reader. This is also the reason many teachers recommend writers learn poetry even if they have no interest in pursuing it.
Accidental Rhyme
“When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high—me too.”
The rhyme is obvious and irritating here because both “blew” and “too” are stressed syllables. Make one an unstressed syllable and it will sound better to most people.
“The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” In this version the word “blew” gives away stress to “sky-high,” and the “blew-too” rhyme drops toward background effect. Now, however, we have a new stressed rhyme—“sky-high” and “flying” (well, close enough for rhyme in prose)—and we notice an odd thing: it sounds decent.
If we analyze the sounds, trying to understand the reason, we perhaps come up with this: First, the two-element rhyme “sky-high,” with a hovering stress, is resolved by a feminine rhyme (a word ending with an unstressed syllable) followed by a phrase, “me too,” that functions as a pull-away; the result is that the rhyme-word “flying” hits lightly in comparison with the rhyme base “sky-high,” the voice hurrying on to the pull-away. “The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” Second, the phrase “me too” faintly recalls the unstressed base “blew” and at the same time rhythmically recalls “sky-high,” with the result that the “sky-high—flying” rhyme is slightly muted. Let us turn the sentence around one last time, this time suppressing “blew”:
“The rig went flying, and everything shot sky-high—me too.” If we mentally substitute “blew” for “shot,” we see—or, rather, hear at once that it won’t do—an extremely heavy, awkward rhyme of the kind certain to distract the reader; that is, make him stop thinking of the images for a moment to wonder why the sentence reads strangely.
On the other hand, with “shot,” the “flying—sky-high” rhyme seems acceptable. The sentence’s opening (loosely iambic) accelerates to its midsection (“flying, and everything”), and then suddenly the sentence opens out like a huge, slow firework, with repeated jammed stresses to balance the quickness earlier and the “sky-high” rhyme rising like a crown.
This kind of poetic effect in fiction distracts only in an acceptable way. The reader may pause and read the sentence twice, savoring the way sound echoes sense, but if he has turned for a moment it is only in the way we pause sometimes to admire the technique of an animal trainer—the flourish with which he lowers his head into the jaws of the crocodile—after which we throw ourselves back into watching the act. Writers very sure of their technical mastery—tour-de-force writers—may make a kind of game of seeing how far they can go, winking and leering at the reader, before breaking the fictional illusion.
Needless Explanation
This falls back on the old concept of ‘show, don’t tell’. Why tell us that the blaziken is old and crabby because of his troubles with sciatica when it can instead be conveyed through action and dialogue? We should have seen him yelling at the children playing out in the street, rubbing his hip, and complaining to his family at dinner about the rowdy neighbors.
It’s worth noting that a clear, defined voice from the writer can sometimes distract from the fact that they’re essentially explaining their character to the readers. Finding a character’s ‘voice’ is a lot of fun, but it can also be used as a band-aide to cover up an issue. As an example:
Detective Looker was very drunk. Sitting that morning in the parked truck, he couldn’t tell reality—or, at any rate, what you and I call reality—from the shadows and phantoms produced by his delirium tremens. His sense of responsibility, his courage, his nobility of heart, his native chivalry, all these were as keen as ever; but his eye for mundane truth was not what it might have been. And so, believing he saw something, and thinking himself called upon for heroic action, he threw down the bottle, snatched out his revolver, ran into the house where the girl had just gone, and once again proved himself a fool.
Some exceptions occur when the explanation itself holds interest to the reader. Americans in particular love to figure out how things work, and much world-building in fanfiction revolves around the explanation. Philosophical works are another example where the explanation holds interest.
Psychic Distance
Psychic distance is a rather advanced concept. John Gardner defines it as, "the distance the reader feels between himself [or herself] and the events in the story". He breaks it down into five levels of distance:
1. "A young woman stepped into the forest."
At its farthest point, characters don't have names, they are figures in a landscape. This character isn't Misty to us, not yet, she's just 'a young woman'.
2. "Misty Kasumi had never liked bugs."
Now we know her name and have thus moved one step closer to her. But we're still a fair distance away from the character, it's quite formal.
3. "In fact, Misty hated bugs."
Now we're on a first-name basis, and we've changed the verb to better reflect the character's feelings. This middle ground is where much of a story will take place, distance-wise.
4. "Arceus, how she loathed those fucking bugs."
Now we've moved even closer due to pronouns and even stronger language.
5. "Fuck this bullshit, I’m out."
This is the closest we can get—inside a character's head. The thoughts aren't being paraphrased.
Think of psychic distance as a camera. My words, and how close they bring me to the character or characters, acts as a lens. Cinematography utilizes concepts such as close-ups, wide shots, establishing shots, dutch angles, and more to better evoke a reaction or a feeling out of the audience. I can format my sentences in such a way to mimic this process.
"Misty Kasumi hated bugs. (2) Arceus, she thought, they drive me crazy. (5) The young woman had only ever had one bad experience with them. (1) But Misty never forgot it. (3)"
This is all over the place in terms of psychic distance, moving in and out without any sort of rhyme or reason. It's like a yo-yo for the reader. Or we'll be using a character's name and their appropriate pronoun, and suddenly we get self-conscious of repetition and replace a pronoun with an epithet. Suddenly the reader is thrown way out of the story. Most of the time we should be hovering between 3 and 4, unless the change exists to make the reader feel something specific.
Conclusion
Writing well is a skill like any other. It takes practice and effort. Don’t be discouraged if you walked away from this feeling uncertain or less confident in your own abilities. Write what you love, accept criticism with grace but don’t be beholden to it, always look to improve, and feel comfortable in the elements of your writing that are a clear strength, as opposed to changing them wholesale to mimic another style.
Thank you for your time.
Ways to Improve Prose
“The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this….
“The technical implications of the continuity principle—the idea that the reader should never be distracted from the image or scene—cannot be treated so briefly. In the work of beginning writers, especially those weak in the basic skills of English composition, the usual mistake is that the writer distracts the reader with clumsy or incorrect writing. Characters, of course, can speak as clumsily as they like; the writer’s job is simply to imitate them accurately. But the standard third-person narrator can never miss. If the narrator slips into faulty syntax, the reader’s mind tacks away from… [the problem] to the problem of figuring out what the sentence means. The distraction is almost certain to be emotional as well as intellectual, since the reader has every right to feel that a writer’s business is to say what he means clearly. In good fiction, the writer never has to go back over a sentence just to find out what it says. He may read a sentence twice because he likes it, or because, through no fault of the author, his mind briefly wandered, musing, perhaps, on the larger implications of the scene; but if it’s the author’s carelessness that makes him read twice, he has a right to feel that the author has violated the fundamental contract in all fiction: that the writer will deal honestly and responsibly with the reader. (This, it should be mentioned, does not rule out use of the so-called unreliable narrator, since the unreliable narrator is a character inside the fiction.)” - John Gardner
Gardner’s points boil down to five basic tenets regarding good, solid, fundamental prose:
- Prose should be vivid
- Prose should be clear
- Prose should be continuous
- Prose should never break the reader’s suspension of disbelief
- There are always exceptions to the rules in a creative medium (in Gardner’s own words: “... no laws are absolute in fiction...”)
Vivid prose is achieved through concrete detail. If someone says “monster” instead of “arbok”, a fancy yet broad term like “hostile maneuvers” instead of sharp verbs like coil/writhe/hiss/spit, if they describe the arbok’s home as an “inhospitable abode” rather than a jungle filled with trees and brush, the reader will struggle to conjure an accurate mental image of the scene.
Examples:
- “The beach was amazing” (abstract) vs “The beach was hot” (concrete)
- “The dress is pretty” (abstract) vs “The dress is purple” (concrete)
- “The pikachu was different” vs “The pikachu was missing a leg”
A. Even more concrete: “The pikachu limped into the room, wooden peg thudding against the steel floor, filling the silence.”
An auxiliary verb is a verb used in forming the tenses, moods, and voices of other verbs. They consist of: be (am, are, is, was, were, being, been), can, could, dare, do (does, did), have (has, had, having), may, might, must, need, ought, shall, should, will, would.
Example: “Two arbok were fighting.”
Verbs without modifying auxiliaries are generally considered more concrete. If we change the above example to “Two arbok fought” we indicate a given instant instead of an indefinite passage of time.
Description through an Observing Consciousness
Another common error is the needless filtering of an image through some observing conscious. Phrases such as “she saw” and “she noticed” should be suppressed in favor of direct presentation.
Example: “I watched the torterra approach.” vs “The torterra approached.”
Or
“He saw trees stretch in every direction.” vs “Trees stretched in every direction.”
Active Voice
Active voice is almost always an improvement over passive voice. Active voice is when the subject performs the action. Passive is when the subject is acted upon by the action (the verb).
“Poochyena bit me” as opposed to “I was bitten by the poochyena”. Remember the three main parts of a sentence--subject, predicate, and object. While “I” might be the main voice of the narrative, on the micro-scale of the individual sentence, “I” is the object while “poochyena” is the subject.
Active vs passive voice in more detail: https://webapps.towson.edu/ows/activepass.htm
Infinite-Verb Phrases
Infinite-verb phrases often open a sentence. Phrases such as, “Rolling away from the attack, Pikachu cried out…” or “Holding the pan over his head, Brock said…” They are, more often than not, a mistake. The reason is temporal--infinite-verb phrases cause unclear and abstract shifts and/or blatant illogic.
“Quitting Team Rocket and blowing up the base, Jesse and James went back to Viridian City.” The sentence implies that all three things are happening simultaneously. The visual image is out of sequence, which breaks the reader’s suspension of disbelief and distracts them from the scene.
When used properly, infinite-verb phrases slow down the pace of a scene and heightens tension, such as “Slowly raising the rifle barrel…” They are rarely used well, and instead chop action sequences out-of-order and weaken the overall sentence.
Infinite-verb phrases in more detail: http://www.lanediamond.com/editorsdesk/infinite-verb-phrases-give-readers-an-act-without-an-actor/
Diction Shifts and Inappropriate Diction
Diction is the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing. To understand diction at its most basic level, it’s important to understand there are three underlying meanings:
Denotation is the term used to mean the dictionary meaning or meanings of a word—the direct, specific meaning of a word or phrase: the literal meaning. Thus, when we read the word “pikachu,” we mentally picture a furry, yellow rodent capable of emitting electricity.
Connotation is the term used to capture the fact that words also have implied meanings—meanings and associations that are suggested indirectly by a word which greatly affect our understanding of an author’s message. Connotation suggests that there is a “personal side” to words in that they carry emotional force and shades of suggestion. The words we use indicate not only what we mean but how we feel, and we choose words that we hope will engage others emotionally and persuasively, in conversation and daily usage as well as in essays, novels, and poems.
Etymology is the origin of the word and the development of its meaning. Words rooted in Anglo-Saxon are usually simpler and more colloquial in comparison to Latinate words (looked vs surveyed, for example). Why does this matter? Because there are four levels of formality to writing diction.
1. Formal diction–a dignified, impersonal, and elevated use of language. It is exacting in its adherence to the rules of grammar and complex vocabulary.
2. Middle diction–still follows the rules of correct language usage, but is less “elevated.” It reflects the way most educated people speak.
3. Informal diction–the plain language of everyday use. This often involves idiomatic expressions, slang, contractions, and simple or common words.
4. Poetic diction–Poets sometimes use an elevated diction that is significantly different from the common speech and writing of the time period. These can be words that are chosen (or sometimes created) by the poet because they have a special “poetic” quality, an ability to communicate a complex thought in a word or phrase.
Let’s look at this paragraph, as provided by John Gardner:
“Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time.”
The diction is inconsistent, sliding from standard (“Her lips were thick and smooth…”) to stilted (“... held a healthy natural red color...”) to formal (“... extended to the intersection of her lips…”) and then colloquial (“... most of the time.”).
High style and formal diction are not for everyone, much like Bach; direct, colloquial language is just as entertaining if not more so for many. But to try and mash the two together is to create an unholy abomination in which both the reader of highbrow and the reader of lowbrow work will find little enjoyment. The most important thing is to be consistent, and if you switch it up, have a good reason for the change.
The Periodic Sentence
Sentences in English have recognizable patterns: meaning units or syntactic slots. They usually break down into two common patterns:
Subject, verb, object
OR
Subject, verb-modifier
We can now use this understanding of the basic, periodic sentence to examine several issues often found in writing:
- Lack of sentence variety
- Lack of sentence focus
- Faulty rhythm
- Accidental rhyme
- Needless explanation
- Careless shifts in psychic distance
“Riolu almost lost his balance. He turned toward her. She smiled at his embarrassment.”
Note how the subject and the verbs thud along when spoken aloud. Everything reads at a monotone, unbroken pace—it’s simple. Boring.
One can get rid of the thudding subjects and verbs by using compound predicates: “Riolu almost lost his balance and turned toward her”; by introducing qualifiers and appositional phrases: “Riolu almost slipped—arms thrown wide like a braviary landing—his eyes wide, trembling, ears pricked and expression incredulous” (etc.); or by finding some appropriate subordinate clause, perhaps: “After Riolu caught himself, he turned toward her”—a solution that gets rid of the thudding by lowering (hastening) the stress of the first “he.”
The incorrect use of the infinite-verb phrase is often found in situations like these to force sentence variety. Most writers implicitly understand that they need to vary their sentences, they just don’t always achieve it in the best possible way.
Another bad cure is stretching out a sentence with a “that” or “which” clause. What happens to such sentences is that they trail off and lose energy.
Example: “Leaping to his feet, he readied a thunderbolt that would take several seconds to charge.”
OR
“She turned, screeching, standing atop the table in terror at the kangaskhan that had arrived that morning from Kanto, which had formerly been its home.”
A big, threatening kangaskhan should be scary, and the prose should reflect that. But because the focus shifts toward the irrelevant detail explaining where the kangaskhan came from, the tension in the sentence is lost.
Lack of Sentence Focus
The search for sentence variety often leads to another problem, the overloading of sentences and the loss of focus. Observe:
“The dark waters of the Lake Verity were very peaceful as the pinkish glow of pre-dawn light turned the horizon’s gray clouds to shades of orchid and lavender. The clear, cool air breezed through the tops of the enormous pine trees as they waved along the length of the lake’s shoreline.”
These sentences are packed with too much information. As a rule, if a sentence has three syntactic slots, as in
The charmander (1) walked down (2) the road (3)
—we can load one or two slots with modifiers. Any more and it risks becoming a jumble of details. There are several permutations a writer can play with. For instance, they can load down slot one and leave the others alone, thus:
The charmander, stooped, bent almost double under his load of books, yet smiling with good cheer and humming a simple tune under his breath (1), walked slowly (2) down the road (3).
Or we may load up slot two:
The charmander walked slowly (1), lifting his feet carefully, sometimes kicking one forward in what resembled a dance, then slamming the foot down, grinning and humming under his breath (2), making no real progress down the road (3).
If we’re feeling frisky we can even risk filling both slot one and two. For instance:
The charmander, stooped, bent almost double under his load of books, yet smiling with good cheer and humming a simple tune under his breath, walked slowly (1), lifting his feet carefully, sometimes kicking one forward in what resembled a dance, then slamming the foot down, grinning and humming under his breath (2), making no real progress down the road (3).
If interested in toying with literary stunts, we may even spruce up slot three with something like “the bumpy, crooked road.” Playing around with a sentence in this fashion is part of the joy of writing. Of course, eventually, a writer must recognize when enough is enough.
Faulty Rhythm
Prose isn’t metered like poetry. However, prose does still have a rhythm to it (unless a writer is being intentionally arhythmic), often called flow. To quote Gardner:
“Many writers, including some famous ones, write with no consciousness of the poetic effects available through prose rhythm. They put the wine on the table, put the cigarette in the ashtray, paint in the lovers, start the clock ticking, all with no thought of whether the sentences should be fast or slow, light-hearted or solemn with wedged-in juxtaposed stresses.”
A stressed syllable is a syllable that has emphasis within a word (or within a line of poetry). So the best way to tell is to say the word in an overly dramatic way, choosing different syllables to emphasize. For example, let's say we have the word "emphasize," and we want to figure out which syllable is stressed. So we try saying it a few different ways. Try reading the following line, and shout whenever you see a capitalized syllable (or, if you're in a library, whisper when you see a lower-case syllable).
EM-pha-size, em-PHA-size, em-pha-SIZE.
Clearly the middle one sounds wrong. So we know that the middle syllable is unstressed. But the first and last ones, neither of them sounds horrible, but EM-pha-size definitely sounds better than em-pha-SIZE. EM is the stressed syllable in the word, and the other two are unstressed. You could argue that SIZE has a secondary stress, but the general rule is, only one syllable in a word has the primary stress.
Notation for Syllabic Stresses:
/ Wand. Marks the stronger (louder, longer, or higher pitched) syllables
u Cup. Marks the weaker (softer, shorter, or lower-pitched) syllables
\ Reversed Wand. Marks syllables that are only partially accented. It should be used very rarely, if at all; save it for cases where you are completely stuck over how to mark a syllable or in group situations where there is strong disagreement over whether a syllable is stressed or not.
/ u u / u u / u u / / u / u / u u u / u / u
“No one was looking when Kaiser’s gun went off, killing Ash Ketchum and maiming his friends.”
The writer thus unintentionally produces a form of sprung verse—that is, jammed stresses one after another—when what he needs, to reflect the moment’s rush, is lighter rhythms, anapests (a metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable) or dactyls (a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables or (in Greek and Latin) one long syllable followed by two short syllables). For example, he may write:
/ / / / / / / / / / / / /
“Stop, thief!” Brock cried. “Stop! Can’t some good man stop that thief, please?”
By understanding and manipulating syllables, the writer can create a flow and tempo to their writing that more accurately reflects the mood they want to create for the reader. This is also the reason many teachers recommend writers learn poetry even if they have no interest in pursuing it.
Accidental Rhyme
“When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high—me too.”
The rhyme is obvious and irritating here because both “blew” and “too” are stressed syllables. Make one an unstressed syllable and it will sound better to most people.
“The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” In this version the word “blew” gives away stress to “sky-high,” and the “blew-too” rhyme drops toward background effect. Now, however, we have a new stressed rhyme—“sky-high” and “flying” (well, close enough for rhyme in prose)—and we notice an odd thing: it sounds decent.
If we analyze the sounds, trying to understand the reason, we perhaps come up with this: First, the two-element rhyme “sky-high,” with a hovering stress, is resolved by a feminine rhyme (a word ending with an unstressed syllable) followed by a phrase, “me too,” that functions as a pull-away; the result is that the rhyme-word “flying” hits lightly in comparison with the rhyme base “sky-high,” the voice hurrying on to the pull-away. “The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” Second, the phrase “me too” faintly recalls the unstressed base “blew” and at the same time rhythmically recalls “sky-high,” with the result that the “sky-high—flying” rhyme is slightly muted. Let us turn the sentence around one last time, this time suppressing “blew”:
“The rig went flying, and everything shot sky-high—me too.” If we mentally substitute “blew” for “shot,” we see—or, rather, hear at once that it won’t do—an extremely heavy, awkward rhyme of the kind certain to distract the reader; that is, make him stop thinking of the images for a moment to wonder why the sentence reads strangely.
On the other hand, with “shot,” the “flying—sky-high” rhyme seems acceptable. The sentence’s opening (loosely iambic) accelerates to its midsection (“flying, and everything”), and then suddenly the sentence opens out like a huge, slow firework, with repeated jammed stresses to balance the quickness earlier and the “sky-high” rhyme rising like a crown.
This kind of poetic effect in fiction distracts only in an acceptable way. The reader may pause and read the sentence twice, savoring the way sound echoes sense, but if he has turned for a moment it is only in the way we pause sometimes to admire the technique of an animal trainer—the flourish with which he lowers his head into the jaws of the crocodile—after which we throw ourselves back into watching the act. Writers very sure of their technical mastery—tour-de-force writers—may make a kind of game of seeing how far they can go, winking and leering at the reader, before breaking the fictional illusion.
Needless Explanation
This falls back on the old concept of ‘show, don’t tell’. Why tell us that the blaziken is old and crabby because of his troubles with sciatica when it can instead be conveyed through action and dialogue? We should have seen him yelling at the children playing out in the street, rubbing his hip, and complaining to his family at dinner about the rowdy neighbors.
It’s worth noting that a clear, defined voice from the writer can sometimes distract from the fact that they’re essentially explaining their character to the readers. Finding a character’s ‘voice’ is a lot of fun, but it can also be used as a band-aide to cover up an issue. As an example:
Detective Looker was very drunk. Sitting that morning in the parked truck, he couldn’t tell reality—or, at any rate, what you and I call reality—from the shadows and phantoms produced by his delirium tremens. His sense of responsibility, his courage, his nobility of heart, his native chivalry, all these were as keen as ever; but his eye for mundane truth was not what it might have been. And so, believing he saw something, and thinking himself called upon for heroic action, he threw down the bottle, snatched out his revolver, ran into the house where the girl had just gone, and once again proved himself a fool.
Some exceptions occur when the explanation itself holds interest to the reader. Americans in particular love to figure out how things work, and much world-building in fanfiction revolves around the explanation. Philosophical works are another example where the explanation holds interest.
Psychic Distance
Psychic distance is a rather advanced concept. John Gardner defines it as, "the distance the reader feels between himself [or herself] and the events in the story". He breaks it down into five levels of distance:
1. "A young woman stepped into the forest."
At its farthest point, characters don't have names, they are figures in a landscape. This character isn't Misty to us, not yet, she's just 'a young woman'.
2. "Misty Kasumi had never liked bugs."
Now we know her name and have thus moved one step closer to her. But we're still a fair distance away from the character, it's quite formal.
3. "In fact, Misty hated bugs."
Now we're on a first-name basis, and we've changed the verb to better reflect the character's feelings. This middle ground is where much of a story will take place, distance-wise.
4. "Arceus, how she loathed those fucking bugs."
Now we've moved even closer due to pronouns and even stronger language.
5. "Fuck this bullshit, I’m out."
This is the closest we can get—inside a character's head. The thoughts aren't being paraphrased.
Think of psychic distance as a camera. My words, and how close they bring me to the character or characters, acts as a lens. Cinematography utilizes concepts such as close-ups, wide shots, establishing shots, dutch angles, and more to better evoke a reaction or a feeling out of the audience. I can format my sentences in such a way to mimic this process.
"Misty Kasumi hated bugs. (2) Arceus, she thought, they drive me crazy. (5) The young woman had only ever had one bad experience with them. (1) But Misty never forgot it. (3)"
This is all over the place in terms of psychic distance, moving in and out without any sort of rhyme or reason. It's like a yo-yo for the reader. Or we'll be using a character's name and their appropriate pronoun, and suddenly we get self-conscious of repetition and replace a pronoun with an epithet. Suddenly the reader is thrown way out of the story. Most of the time we should be hovering between 3 and 4, unless the change exists to make the reader feel something specific.
Conclusion
Writing well is a skill like any other. It takes practice and effort. Don’t be discouraged if you walked away from this feeling uncertain or less confident in your own abilities. Write what you love, accept criticism with grace but don’t be beholden to it, always look to improve, and feel comfortable in the elements of your writing that are a clear strength, as opposed to changing them wholesale to mimic another style.
Thank you for your time.
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