I’ve already done the rant on passive voice, so today I’m going to talk about verbs in general, and why there’s so much confusion about “passive verbs,” “weak verbs,” and so on.

First off, there’s no such thing as a passive verb. There’s passive voice, but that’s a construction that can be used with nearly any verb. Saying “He was hit by a truck” does not somehow make “to hit” less of an action.

What there are, are verbs that are a state of being and verbs that are actions. To hit, to stand, to jump, to buy, to taste are all action verbs. To want, to need, to owe, to hate are all states of being.

You can watch somebody running, or buying something, or hitting a baseball, and you can usually tell what he is doing. If you were asked, you could say “He ran across the street” or “She stood there and looked at the clouds.” States of being, however, are not necessarily visible or obvious. That woman who’s standing there looking at clouds – is she thinking? Wishing for something? Worrying? Feeling ill? You can’t tell from observing her behavior; all you can see her doing is standing there.

When writers are advised to dramatize scenes – to “show, don’t tell” – they’re usually advised to get rid of all the verbs except the action verbs, on the grounds that “showing” means describing what the reader would see if the reader were somehow able to hide in a corner or up a tree and actually watch the scene unfold. This works fine in a fight scene or a chase, when what’s going on is action. It gets a lot more problematic when most of the “action” is internal to various characters, and can only be “shown” through facial expression and body language.

The other big difficulty is, I think, a misunderstanding of some older terms of grammar that have mostly been superseded. When I was in grade school, what are now called “regular verbs” (that form the past tense by adding –ed or –d, such as owe/owed, hate/hated, burn/burned, jump/jumped) were known as “weak verbs,” while irregular verbs (that have a different past tense, such as run/ran, write/wrote, tell/told, feel/felt,) were known as “strong verbs.”  

This obviously had nothing to do with the effect the verb in a sentence, or with whether the verb was an action or a state-of-being (there are both sorts on each list). It certainly had nothing to do with how desirable it might be to use one sort over the other. But “weak verb” sounds as if it ought to be a bad thing, and “strong verb” sounds as if it’ll make your sentences more effective, and both phrases are short and punchy. Over time, as regular/irregular replaced weak/strong in grammar terminology, I think people ran across or half-remembered the older terms and started misapplying them.

Another major mistake is in identifying “to be” as passive, weak, and undesirable, especially when it’s part of the verb form. I recently saw a paragraph written in present progressive tense (“They are now running along main street; the office workers are gaping as the race is going by…”) which someone had marked as being “too passive” while circling every “are” and “is” in the paragraph. The critique was half right; a whole paragraph in present continuous made for awkward reading.

But the problem was a tense problem, not a problem with overusing “to be,” and I nearly went ballistic when I saw the critic patting himself on the back for “changing weak verbs into strong ones” and “eliminating passive verbs” when not one verb changed. Only the tense did (“Now they run along main street; the office workers gape as the race goes by…”) Yes, the revised paragraph is much more readable and flows much better, but not for the reasons the critic gave. And in my experience, showing people a good fix and then giving them a bunch of incorrect information about what was done and why only ends up confusing them, at best. At worst, the writers fixate on the wrong things and end up making their own prose far worse than it was when they began.

What it all comes down to is that authors can’t simply apply a bunch of rules. They have to think – think about what they’re doing, what effect it has, and what effect they want it to have. Is this a chase scene? Then lots of action verbs are probably appropriate. Is it an internal monolog by the viewpoint character? Then there’ll probably be a few more state-of-being verbs. Is it the dialog of the radio announcer, commenting on a race? Then “Now they are running along main street…” probably is the right tense to use, and the author will have to find some other way of eliminating the awkwardness of too much present-progressive in a row.

Back in the day, one of my earliest beta-readers took me to task, at some length, for using the sentence “It was going to take her twice as long as usual” on the first page of Daughter of Witches. (“What was?” said the beta reader. “This pronoun has no antecedent!”) As you may guess from the fact that, thirty years later, I still remember this so clearly, I was not amused (and that person didn’t remain a beta reader for long).

At the time, I was quite clear that the comment was wrong-headed, but I couldn’t explain why, or figure out why the beta-reader got something so obvious so very wrong. Now, I can. That particular beta-reader had taken a basic college-level composition course, designed to pound the fundamental rules of formal standard English into the heads of freshmen, and internalized all of them without really understanding them. She’d also never heard of the expletive pronoun usage “when a clause or sentence lacks a plausible subject.” (Thank you, Karen Elizabeth Gordon.)

Basically, that particular beta-reader was applying rules and advice for formal writing to what was, at most, semi-formal. It was a bit like making a big fuss about using the proper fork at a barbecue.

Formal English is the standard we learn in school – all the rules of usage and syntax and grammar, and some of the less hard-and-fast rules for good style. The grammar-and-syntax rules are things like “The subject of the sentence must agree with the verb” (“He am” is incorrect, as is “I is”) and verb conjugations (“had went” is wrong, no matter how many words intervene between the two parts of the verb form). The stylistic rules are things like “Do not use contractions in writing” and “Sentences always have to be complete.”

These are the rules of basic English; these are the rules for writing an A-grade essay or college paper; these are the rules that most people in the adult world, from business to science to politics, are expected to have at least some grasp of (though judging from some of the business memos I’ve seen, there are an awful lot of people who don’t have a clue about apostrophes, much less proper sentence construction).

These are also the rules that people mean when they say “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” (And all that training in importance of those basic rules of English, I think, is what gives so many of us such enormous respect for and fear of Da Rulez of Writting, as promulgated by so many workshops, web sites, and wannabes. But that’s another rant for another day.)

The thing about all these rules is, there is a continuum for applying them. Different kinds of writing require different spots on the continuum from formal to informal. If you are writing a legal document, a science article, or a paper for your English class, the Chicago Manual of Style, current edition, is your best friend. If you are texting your sister about that movie you both want to see tonight, you can let proper sentence structure, punctuation, and even spelling go hang, as long as you’re sure your sister will understand the message.

I bet a lot of you are waiting for me to say that fiction falls more toward the informal end of the continuum, and therefore fiction writers can get away with not paying attention to a lot of those rules. Not quite.

Fiction does not fall on a point on the continuum at all. Fiction makes use of the whole range, depending on exactly what it is the writer is doing.

An analogy: English and all the various rules for using it, from “Keep it simple” to “Never open a book with the weather,” are tools in the writer’s toolbox. If you wish to build a wooden deck, you use a saw and a hammer and nails; if you wish to build a concrete block wall, you use a trowel and a mason’s hammer and chisel; if you wish to make a ladder-back chair, you need a lathe and a wood chisel and some sandpaper. The trowel won’t help you build the deck or the chair; the saw and the sandpaper won’t be much good for building the concrete block wall.

Most fiction is, indeed, somewhere in the middle of the formal-to-informal range. Dialog is usually less formal than narration (unless the book is in first person or the character who’s speaking is intended to be a prolix stuffed shirt). But every novelist gets to decide, at the start of every book, exactly where on the continuum that story needs to be…and the decision will be different from writer to writer and book to book.

This is where knowing the rules comes in. If you don’t know the rules for formal English, your writing is perforce limited to the more informal end of the range. It’s not so much a matter of “when to break the rules” as it is knowing what tools you want to apply – knowing whether you need a hammer and saw or a trowel and chisel.

This particular comment involved a total misunderstanding of verbs, tenses, and voice – specifically, the use of ”was.” The critiquer asserted, among other things, that “was” is a weak verb, that “was” is always passive (by which, from context, he appears to have meant not merely passive, but passive voice), and that every use of the verb “was” could and should therefore be cut or rephrased so as to use some other, presumably stronger verb instead. Like “is.”

This is complete nonsense, even before I point out that “is” and “was” are the same verb, just different tenses.

The verb “to be” in all its forms is not an action verb (like swim or climb), but it isn’t weak. It simply does a different job, grammatically. Action verbs tell you what something or someone is doing. A string of action verbs can imply a whole scene without adding any other words at all (Sneak. Steal. Hide. Trip. Scramble. Run!). To be is a linking verb; without a subject and an object, it doesn’t imply much of anything (Is. Was. Am. Are. Huh?). It doesn’t do the same job as an action verb – and while it is true that sometimes you can phrase a sentence either way (“His voice was a whisper” vs. “He whispered”), sometimes you just can’t (“Marley was dead, to begin with.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”)

Moreover, “to be” functions as an auxiliary verb in a number of different tenses. Denying a writer the use of the progressive tenses and the perfect tenses cripples the prose. For those who aren’t sure about the difference (and I had to look up the names repeatedly for years and years) the tenses work like this:

You can’t replace “He was dying” with “He died” just to take out the “was.” The sentences don’t mean the same thing. “Was” isn’t in there as a stand-alone verb that you can remove or change; it’s part of the grammatical form. Yet over and over I meet people who want to tear through a manuscript crossing out forms of “to be” on principle, without paying any attention to what the writer is saying, how she is saying it, or why she said it that way. (This is particularly annoying when the person on the rampage is a copyeditor who keeps changing what the sentences mean in pursuit of some stylistic ideal that eliminates “was,” but that’s a whole different rant.)

Which brings me to the infuriating obsession that some people have with banishing passive voice from fiction. Passive voice is a sentence construction which puts the emphasis and the focus of the sentence on what is being done or the thing that it’s being done to.  “She hit him” is active voice; “He was hit by her” is passive voice. It’s a tremendously useful construction for any writer whose characters are facing a puzzle, because you can leave out the “by whom:” “The necklace was stolen.” Who stole it? Neither the reader nor the detective knows just yet.

Passive voice gets a bad rap because it’s often used in dense scientific papers and badly-done business memos to make the subject under discussion look objective. Instead of saying “I injected the mice with a 2% saline solution,” the scientist says “The mice were injected with a 2% saline solution,” implying that anyone could have done this and the results would be the same. The corporate executive says “The budget was exceeded by $3 million” in hopes of distancing himself from the problem. Unless your viewpoint character is a scientist or businessman, you usually don’t want to do this in fiction.

There are, however, things that one does want to do with passive voice in fiction. Take the sentence “The child, having been abandoned in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” The parenthetical phrase “having been abandoned in the corner” (by whom?) is passive voice; it has to be passive voice in order to have “the child” as its subject. You could rephrase it in active voice, but only by adding someone else to the sentence: “The child, whose mother had abandoned her in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” There’s nothing wrong with the latter sentence, but in a novel or story, it’s probably clear already who it is that’s abandoned the kid in the corner. The second, active version also splits the focuse of the sentence; it’s half about the child and half about the mother.

I’ve already mentioned the usefulness of passive voice in hiding a thief, murderer, etc., but it can also shift the focus to someone or something: “She was murdered by her brother” puts more emphasis on her and on the murder than on the brother, because you could just say “She was murdered” and leave the brother out entirely. “Her brother murdered her” puts the emphasis on the brother. Sometimes, you want it one way, sometimes you want it the other way, and it’s silly to overlook so useful a tool as passive voice for doing this.

And then there are the stylistic considerations. Sometimes, using passive voice allows for a more elegant sentence than active voice. “The duke was attacked four times: once by an assassin, twice by bandits, and once by his four-year-old daughter.” reads much better, to my ear, than “One assassin, two sets of bandits, and his four-year-old daughter attacked the duke.”

Fiction (and the English language generally) is built up by combining smaller units into larger and larger ones according to various rules and principles, the same way you build large, intricate Lego models by putting a few relatively simple blocks together into more and more varied shapes.

Moving from smallest to largest, the basic building blocks of fiction are: words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Each building block has properties that writers can use to make their prose more effective. So far, I’ve talked about specificity, sound, and strength/significance; position/order, rhythm, length, and contrast; variation, and complexity.

And I’m only up to sentences, and I’m not done with them yet.

There are two more properties of sentences that I still want to mention, and the first of them is pattern. It’s a little more complicated than some of the other properties, because you can create a pattern out of any of the properties I’ve talked about so far, and not just one at a time, either. Even in a short, simple sentence like “he hunted,” you have the alliterative pattern of the opening h’s. More commonly, you see patterns of repetition made by using the same words or structure in the phrases and clauses that get put together to make a complex sentence:  ”He hunted them with sharpened forks, with crumbling sealing-wax, with enameled thimbles, and with opaque glassware.” “I told you in French; I told you in German; I told you in Japanese and Arabic and Thai.”

Patterns, especially simple, repetitive patterns, give more emphasis and strength to whatever is included in the pattern. Setting up a pattern and then breaking it, partially breaking it, or extending it, can make a sentence work even better, especially if there’s a subtle pattern underlying an obvious one. In “I told you…,” I was deliberately setting up a repetitive structural pattern: “I told you X, I told you Y” – and then extending it with “I told you A and B and C.” What I didn’t realize until I got to this paragraph and looked back at it was that I also had a pattern of syllables going, from one-syllable “French,” to two in “German” to three with “Japanese” and “Arabic.”

And as soon as I realized that, I tried changing the last one to “Mandarin,” to carry the syllable pattern one step further, but I didn’t like it. I tried a couple of other languages…and then I realized that the problem was that following the pattern of syllables had set up a rhythm, and that the reason I wasn’t happy was that all of my three-syllable language choices meant that I was ending the sentence on a weak beat. Going back to a one-syllable language brought the whole pattern back around to the beginning while also providing a more emphatic closure by ending on a strong beat.

In a story, which word I’d pick would depend on what came next. If it was “…And you didn’t listen, not once!”, I’d go with “Thai,” because the stronger ending shuts off the list of languages in preparation for moving on to the next part of the complaint. If what came next was “I sent you notes, I sent you letters, I sent you articles and novellas and haiku,” then I’d probably go with “Mandarin” at the end of the first sentence, because I wouldn’t want to shut off the pattern just yet.”

Which brings me to the last property of sentences that I want to talk about: content. It’s last because it’s the thing most people think about first when it comes to writing sentences. After all, the whole point of a sentence is to get an idea or image across to the reader.

What people sometimes forget is that you can look at content in much the same way as any other property of a sentence: as a way of adjusting how much impact you want a sentence (or paragraph or scene or whatever from there on up) to have on the reader. People tend to react more strongly to sentences about exploding volcanoes than they do to sentences about doing the dishes. Yes, you can use other properties and word choices to make the exploding volcano feel less important and the dishes feel more important, but you have to work at it.

As you move further up the levels, into paragraphs and scenes, content (like variation and complexity and contrast) becomes more and more important because there are so many more ways to use it over a wider and wider range. The context – the wider content of the paragraph and the scene and the overall story – has a lot to do with whether the volcanic explosion is a sudden, high-impact shock, or whether it comes as almost a relief after a long, slow build-up of expectations, or whether it’s just one more disaster in a string of disasters that’s gone on so long it’s become the norm.

I can stop here, or I can do one or two more posts. Really, from sentences on up, it’s more about what kinds of things you want to build with your Legos than it is about the individual blocks and groups of blocks.

The difference between a dependent clause and a sentence is that a dependent clause can’t stand alone. Putting a period at the end of a dependent clause doesn’t make it a sentence, because it isn’t finished. It needs an independent clause to prop it up and finish it off, the same way a string of adjectives needs a noun at the end in order to be more than a random collection of words. “The giant red cold blinking artificial” is just a collection of adjectives until you add “goldfish” to the end, whereupon it becomes a phrase. “When the volcano exploded” and “because he knew” are both dependent clauses; sticking them together doesn’t make a sentence until you add an independent clause like “George ran” or “she would escape.”

If you leave a dependent clause or a phrase lying around all by itself, like “if Helen had set off the bomb” or “to swallow unwary travelers,” you have a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments aren’t really a separate level; they’re broken-off bits of other building blocks. Like half a Lego, fragments can still be useful to achieve certain effects, but you have to be careful where and how you use them, because a broken-off bit of a block isn’t as strong as a whole one and doesn’t look as nice. If I ever get to paragraphs and scenes, maybe I’ll talk some more about fragments then.

Like a tower of Legos, sentences are built up from smaller pieces and units – words, phrases, and clauses – and as with Legos, the properties of those units stack. Sentences, like words, can be specific and concrete, or they can be fuzzy and abstract. The position of words and phrases within a sentence affects their strength, impact, and effectiveness. The length of the sentence as a whole affects the kind of effect you can get with it, as does the overall rhythm of the sentence and the way all the words and phrases fit together. Just as with phrases, the first and last elements of a sentence tend to be more memorable and/or have more impact than the elements in the middle; establishing a rhythm and then changing it calls attention to the part of the sentence where the rhythm change happens; and short sentences tend to have more impact than long ones (unless you use too many of them in a row and wear the reader out). Within a given sentence, shorter elements tend to be more memorable than longer ones.

With the sentence level come some more key properties of prose, two of which are variation and complexity. Sentences can be simple and straightforward, or run on for a page of complicated interlocking clauses. Starting from a single, short, simple independent clause like “George ran,” you can pile on phrases and descriptors: up the hill, away from the airport, after the bomber, into the glowing forest, next to the fairy hill. You can add a few dependent clauses, or link your first independent clause to a second one to make a compound sentence. Or you can do all of those things at once: “When the volcano exploded, George ran quickly up the hill and away from the airport, because he knew that if Helen had set off the bomb, she would escape into the glowing forest next to the fairy hill, where the giant red blinking artificial goldfish waited to swallow unwary travelers.”

And you can vary all of the elements you use within a given sentence (that is, if it has multiple elements; it’s kind of hard to get much internal variation out of a short, simple sentence like “George ran.”). In the above example, there are short clauses (“because he knew”) and longer ones (“George ran up the hill and away from the airport”), different types of phrases and clauses, and every part of speech from noun to conjunction (except for interjections). The rhythm changes, but not too often (and the pauses indicted by commas fall in places where there’s a missing beat, for the most part).

Variation is immensely important for fiction, because fiction is entertainment, and no matter what kind of entertainment you are looking at, if it gets boring, it has failed. If your writing is all the same at any level – if all the phrases are the same length, or all the sentences have the same rhythm or complexity, or all the words are one-syllable, the reader starts to get used to it. If this goes on too long, the readers can get bored or irritated, which is why you want to vary different elements from time to time. On the other hand, too much variation has the same effect as trying to work in too much contrast – you get a hard-to-read confetti effect if you try too hard.

As you can see, the further up the levels you go, from words to phrases to clauses and sentences, the more options and properties one has to juggle, and the more complex things can get. This continues up through paragraphs and scenes and chapters and so on, which is one reason why juggling all this stuff to get to a more effective outcome gets harder and harder. You can micro-manage every word and phrase and sentence in a poem (you pretty much have to micro-manage everything in a haiku), but if you try to juggle all this stuff consciously at all possible levels of language in a 100,000 word novel, you will go crazy.

Back to phrases.

I’ve already talked about position and rhythm. The third key property of phrases is length. Theoretically, you can string together as many nouns or verbs, or stuff in as many adverbs and adjectives, as you want in a phrase, but it doesn’t take long to overload something this short. If you have to wade through six or seven adjectives/adverbs to get to the noun, you can lose track. On the other hand, you can manipulate how much impact a phrase has by making it longer (less) or shorter (more).

Length gets more important the further up the chain of units you go, in part because the amount of flexibility you have increases. A phrase can only get to five or six words before it starts to collapse under its own weight and becomes useless; two words is as short as you can get (I think; I’m not sure a single word counts as a “phrase,” no matter how much information and context is packed into it). But sentences can be as short as one word or go on for hundreds of words, and so can paragraphs, allowing the writer a lot more room to create different effects by changing the length of a sentence or paragraph (of which more when we get there).

Next on the “properties” list comes contrast. At the phrase level, most of the contrast comes from word choices – putting a long word next to a short one, or a color adjective next to one for smell; changing the rhythm in a longer phrase; and so on. But once again, the further up the levels you get, the more possibilities for contrast you have – not just word choice within phrases, but the contrast between two phrases, between phrases and sentences, between different kinds of sentences, and so on.

Many writers think of contrast (if they think of it at all) as a matter of content- the difference between action scenes and emotional ones, for instance. That’s certainly one aspect of contrast, but it only becomes important when you get way up in the middle levels and start talking about types of scenes. Contrast can be really useful at much lower levels of structure. Think of that big red Lego dinosaur. Now picture it with just two of the red Legos replaced by pale pink ones. You can get this same effect in prose by suddenly changing one or more of the properties (rhythm, length, etc.) through a change in word choice.

Contrast loses most of its impact if there is too much of it, too often. Two pale pink Legos on a giant red dinosaur would stand out because of the contrast. If, however, the dinosaur is built of Legos that change color every two or three blocks, none of the colors would stand out much and instead you’d get a confetti effect. I’m not sure what you’d call this in prose, but it certainly happens now and again, and if for some reason the writer is actively trying to make contrast less important in a piece, using a confetti effect is at least as useful as trying to avoid any contrast at all (and possibly much easier to do).

Phrases and their properties are important because they are a big part of what creates complexity in clauses and sentences, and all of their properties – position/order, rhythm, length, and contrast – apply to every unit of English from phrases on up. In other words, just as the first word in a phrase is a little stronger because of its position, so is the first sentence in a paragraph, the first paragraph in a chapter or scene, the first chapter of a book (hence the whole concept of the “hook”), etc. There’s a rhythm within phrases, within sentences, within paragraphs. Shorter sentences and paragraphs have more impact than longer ones (if they aren’t used so much that there’s no contrast, see confetti effect, above). I’ll talk about this more when I finally get to some of the things you can do with all this stuff, which will probably be after the next post, if people are still with me.

On to clauses and sentences. I warned you this was going to be long.

With both Legos and words, you can get along reasonably well with just the basic parts, but as soon as you want to make something complicated, you really want those pieces that are triangular or round or trapezoidal or long and skinny, to link things together or put the pointy tops on the towers or teeth or party hats. That’s what the rest of the parts of speech do – the pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. None of them are particularly strong on their own, but they are invaluable once you start putting words together into phrases.

Phrases are the next level of English, up from “words,” and this is the point where things begin to get interesting. Because as soon as you put two or more words together to make a phrase, they not only interact with each other, but they suddenly develop a couple of new properties that affect the impact they make.

The first of these is position or order. At the phrase level, the order that the words go in doesn’t have a lot of flexibility in English. You can say “the red flower,” but not “red the flower” or “flower the red.” If you move a preposition to a different position, you often change the meaning of the phrase; “of the African jungle” is not the same as “jungle of the African” or “African of the jungle.”

Nevertheless, position in phrases is where the writer starts being able to control what is going on in his/her prose. Words are what they are; unless the writer goes to the same extreme as J.R.R. Tolkein and invents whole new languages, the only control the writer has is over which words he/she chooses to use. The order the words go in is something the writer does have control of, at least to an extent, and that control grows with every level from phrases on up. You may not be able to move prepositions or conjunctions around without changing the meaning, but you can choose between “bedknobs and broomsticks” and “broomsticks and bedknobs” or between “on his champagne-polished black boots” and “on his black, champagne-polished boots.”

The reason you want to control position or word order is that, as a general rule, the first element in a phrase or clause or sentence has the most impact and is the most memorable; the last element has second-most; and the ones in the middle have the least. “Bedknobs” has slightly more weight or strength than “broomsticks” in the phrase “bedknobs and broomsticks,” for instance.

Position stacks on top of whatever strength the word has on its own. “Bedknobs” and “broomsticks” are both nouns, so they start off more-or-less equal in strength; it’s only the relative position in the phrase that makes one a little stronger than the other. But the first word in “to boldly go” is a preposition, which is a relatively weak linking word; the fact that it comes first doesn’t add much strength because it doesn’t have much of a base to add onto. “Go,” on the other hand, is a verb, the strongest part of speech, and it comes in the second strongest position, at the end of the phrase. Putting “go” in the middle (so as not to split the infinitive) weakens it significantly.

The second key property of phrases (as compared to words) is rhythm. Multi-syllable words can have rhythm because of the differing emphasis on the syllables; this is what makes some words fun to say (like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”), but it’s built-in and the writer can’t do anything about it. As soon as there are multiple words, as in a phrase, the writer can control the rhythm by choosing words carefully and positioning them properly. By doing so, the writer can increase or decrease the natural strength and impact of any shorter unit that is part of a longer one (that is, you can use rhythm to put greater or lesser emphasis on a particular word in a phrase, or a particular phrase in a sentence, sentence in a paragraph, etc.).

Rhythm stacks with position and the other things that give a word strength. For example, with “bedknobs and broomsticks,” the rhythm (DUH-da-da-DUH-da) is the same, whichever noun you put first. But “to boldly go” has a nice, regular rhythm – da-DUH-da-DUH – and ends on a strong beat. So the phrase has a verb, at the end, on a strong beat – three strengths all stacked together. “To go boldly,” on the other hand, puts two strong beats together in the middle (“GO BOLDly”), interrupting the rhythm, and ends on a weak beat as well as with a weaker part of speech (the adverb). This is why “to boldly go” has so much more of a ring to it than “to go boldly” (for everyone except really strict grammarians, anyway). Poets do this kind of thing all the time, but it’s useful in prose, too.

More on phrases coming up. I did mention that this was going to be long, yes?

I define strong words as “the ones people pay more attention to.” They have more weight in the reader’s mind, and therefore make more of an impact. Since fiction is usually about making an impact on the reader, strength is probably the most important property and word, phrase, sentence, etc. can have.

What makes strength really useful, though, is that it isn’t an absolute property – it’s affected by a whole lot of other things that come along as words get strung together in different ways to make larger and larger units. This means that a writer can adjust the impact that a word or phrase or sentence has, by adjusting some of its other properties.

A word’s basic strength begins with the first four basic parts of speech that we all learned (one hopes) in school:  noun, verb, adjective, adverb. Think of them as different sizes and shapes and colors of Legos. Put the right ones together in the right order, and you get a cool dinosaur; opt for ones that are the wrong size or shape, and you end up with an awkward unidentifiable lump.

So, parts of speech. The strongest one – the largest Lego – is the verb. Verbs are where the action is in any given sentence. Even so-called “passive verbs” indicate that something exists or is ongoing. A verb on its own can be an entire sentence, and a command, at that. You can tell a story with verbs alone: Look! Scream! Flee! Hide. Peek. Shoot. Duck. Explode. Cheer! 

This is the reason so much writing advice puts so much emphasis on using dramatic, active verbs. Verbs are the strongest type of word, by nature, and using a vivid, specific, concrete one can double up that strength. By the same token, if the writer wants a word to have less impact (perhaps so that an upcoming plot twist will not be obvious, or because the writer wants more focus on some other part of a phrase or sentence, or just to give the reader a rest for a moment), choosing a verb that is abstract or general may be the way to go.

Next in terms of strength come nouns. Nouns and verbs are the basic bricks that everything else gets built with. Nouns aren’t as strong as verbs because until they have a verb to go with them, they just sit there. On the other hand, the more precise, clear, and specific you can make your nouns, the stronger they become. A red flower by any other name could be a carnation or a rose or a trumpet flower, but a rose is a rose is a rose.

Adjectives and adverbs are the weakest of the four basic building blocks, because they can’t stand on their own. “Small cold blue” doesn’t tell you anything until it has a noun like “elephant” or “shotgun” attached to it. In addition, some of time the right noun or verb can eliminate the need for one or more adjectives/adverbs; if so, you’re generally better off using that noun or verb because they’re stronger to begin with.

Another difficulty with adjectives and adverbs is that the more of them one uses, the weaker they become. This applies whether one is overloading just one noun or verb with four or five descriptors, or whether one has a modest one descriptor for each and every noun or verb on a page.

Because of all this, and because too many writers overuse them, adjectives and adverbs get a bad rap in a lot of writing advice. In its most exaggerated form, this becomes the “never use adverbs/adjectives” rule. But even if you are trying to pack your prose with as many dramatic, high-impact words as possible, ignoring adverbs and adjectives is not automatically your best choice. Yes, they are weaker than nouns or verbs, but the concrete/precision property still applies: the more precise and specific the adjective, the stronger it tends to be.

And if you have an adjective or adverb that makes its noun more concrete and precise in a way that can’t be done with just a concrete noun, you have a winner. “Holy book” is a generic noun plus an adjective; “Bible” “Koran” or even “prayerbook” would be stronger in most cases. But “scarf” is a generic noun; “silk scarf” is more specific, and there isn’t a noun that would do the job. Likewise, adjectives and adverbs that are unexpected are usually Good Things: “Wonderful,” he said glumly.

So the best advice is, as always, not to just delete all the adverbs and adjectives indiscriminately, but to think about the desired effect and whether the adverb/adjective is really necessary. “‘I hate you,’ she said angrily.” doesn’t really need the adverb because the angry tone is consistent with the dialog; “she snarled” would be better, and it would be fine with just “she said.” But “‘I hate you,’ she said cheerfully” isn’t a sentence that can drop the adverb and still mean the same thing. Neither is “The band played badly.”

Notice that a lot of what I’m talking about here is the way that words relate to each other. Because face it, the important thing about Legos is not the shape of each piece; it’s how they fit together and what you can make with them. That really begins with the next level up from words: phrases. Which is what comes next.

What units am I talking about? Starting small and working up: letters, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Most of the time, creative writing advice focuses on things that matter at the middle levels: stuff like plot and characterization and setting that build up over the course of a scene or a chapter or a book. The assumption seems to be that everyone has already learned all they need to know about the words-to-paragraphs level of writing back in grade school, so that by the time people get to the point of trying to write a novel, they can jump right in learning about scenes and chapters and plot skeletons and so on.

Now, what I learned from Sr. Agnes and Sr. Winifred back in grade school was essential and invaluable, and I got a long way on just those basic rules of grammar, syntax, etc. Eventually, though, I came to a point where those basics weren’t enough. I knew how to build letters into words and words into phrases and phrases into clauses and so on, but I wanted more. I didn’t just want to build large, square Lego houses. I wanted to build Lego dinosaurs and airplanes and astronauts. And to do that, I needed to understand more than just how to snap one block into the next. I needed to know how and why they fit together, starting from the smallest units.

Yes, from the smallest. Most people don’t even think about letters; they’re just sort of there. They string together to make words, but as long as you run the spelling checker and aren’t making up your own language, you’re probably right.

Yet letters have the first key property of all these building blocks that’s important to writers: sound. It’s predefined, and the only way the writer can control it is by choosing words carefully, yet the sound of a word can be just as important as what it means. Words with gutteral or harsh sounds give things an unpleasant feel; they’re a good way to add a creepy undertone to a description or a conversation without being too obvious. More smooth, liquid sounds, like oo’s and l’s, tend to make things flow peacefully.

Sound provides all sorts of tools, from alliteration to puns to rhyme. And sound gets really important when it comes to dialog. You don’t want to give your characters impossible tongue-twisters to yell in mid-battle, or hand a talking snake a line like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” “She sells sea shells,” on the other hand, would fit a snake just fine…if the snake has a thing for alliterative tongue-twisters.

Some people are extremely sensitive to the sound of words, even when they are reading silently; others only notice the sounds if someone is reading the story aloud. Writers who fall into the second category need to remember that there are plenty of sound-sensitive readers out there, and do occasional checks (reading aloud) to make sure they haven’t chosen words that don’t sound right for the situation, or that don’t fit together properly.

You have probably noticed that I’m talking mainly about the sounds of words, even though I’m supposed to be talking about letters. This is going to happen a lot in this series of posts, because many of the key properties of a particular unit of fiction only become useful to writers at the next level up, when you start snapping the Lego pieces together. You can’t change the sound a particular letter is supposed to make, or the standard spelling of a word, but you can choose words with an eye to their sound, as well as their meanings.

Which brings us to words.

What you do with words is, you build phrases, clauses, fragments, sentences, etc. Most people do this more or less instinctively, once they’ve learned to talk, but the real nitty-gritty of how writing works starts with words, with how they work, with how they relate to each other, and, later on, with the different effects you can get because of the different properties they have.

The very first key property of words is one that most writers have heard over and over: specificity. Specific, concrete words nearly always have more impact and are more effective  at conjuring up an image than abstract words or general words. A “flaming sunset” has more impact than a “beautiful sunset;” a “brown car” has less impact than “a brown Lexus” or even “a brown convertible;” “he went away quickly” is less evocative than “he fled.” This doesn’t mean a writer can/should never use abstract words like “beautiful” or generic ones like “car;” only that if one does, one should probably examine them to see whether the “low impact” effect is what the writer really wants (and, if not, whether there’s a less abstract, more specific word that will do the job instead.)

Next up: more about words, with specific reference to parts of speech.

“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
- Mark Twain

One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to a publishable standard. It is possible that I am overstating this; perhaps many of them merely know for sure that what they write is correct, or at least allowable. Whichever it is, it comes under the last part of that Twain quote: what these writers think they know for sure simply isn’t so, and it’s killing them…or at least, it’s killing their stories.

A glance through the various websites that allow writers to upload their fiction without any pre-screening requirements should be enough of a demonstration for anybody. I don’t know what some of these people are thinking. It’s obvious that they didn’t even bother to run the spelling checker before they put their stuff up for everybody to see. And I really don’t understand those writers who blast any reviewer who dares to mention the fact that they obviously don’t know what a run-on sentence is, or how to correctly punctuate dialog, or the difference between “affect” and “effect.” Are they trying to drive readers away?

But incomprehensible as this behavior is when I see it in amateur arenas, it pales beside the would-be professional writers who blithely send their un-proofread, un-reviewed, un-spell-checked work off to editors in hopes of selling it. What are they thinking? (Answer: They aren’t.) This is like going to a job interview for Ambassador to France dressed in stained and badly worn blue jeans, a muscle shirt, mismatched socks, and filthy old running shoes with the laces in knots. It doesn’t matter what your credentials are, or how well you might actually be able to do the job; you aren’t going to get in the door for the interview.

I have some sympathy for the writers who truly don’t know any better. It is very hard to improve your skill set when you don’t yet realize that it needs improving … and I’ve run into an unfortunately large number of younger writers who were never really taught grammar, punctuation, or syntax because their teachers were more concerned with encouraging them to be creative and get their stories down on paper. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging creativity, but in the long run, you still have to know the rules. At a bare minimum, you have to know that there are rules and that you don’t know what they are, or you will never realize that there are helpful things you still need to learn.

I have no sympathy at all for the prima donnas who do know their work is full of errors, but who are convinced that it doesn’t matter. “It’s fiction,” they say. “I don’t have to follow any rules.” (Wanna bet?) Or: “Oh, it’s the copyeditor’s job to fix all that.” (It isn’t.) Or “Editors are used to seeing unpolished manuscripts.” Well, yeah – editors see a lot of  manuscripts full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect punctuation. They see them in the slush pile. And what they do with them is, they pick them up out of the slush pile and move them into the “rejections” pile as fast as they can possibly manage. It’s an obvious and easy filter: if the writer didn’t care enough about the work to clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the writer probably didn’t care enough about it to do a decent job on the plot, characterization, and setting, either.

The real trouble, though, isn’t with the inevitable editorial rejection. It comes earlier than that. The real trouble with ignoring the basic rules of English is that it limits a person’s ability to write effectively.

A writer whose work is littered with sentence fragments and run-ons because he/she doesn’t really understand what a sentence is (much less what fragments and run-on sentences are) cannot make effective use of sentence fragments to increase tension or pacing or emphasis, because there are already so many fragments in his/her stuff that another one isn’t going to have any effect at all. He/she can’t use a run-on sentence to give a breathless feel to a particular character’s dialog, because run-on sentences are all over the place already, and one more isn’t going to be a change. In extreme cases, such writers aren’t even aware enough of syntax and sentence structure to get adequate variation in their sentences, resulting in prose that just plods along, regardless of whatever exciting or emotional thing is happening.

It’s the contrast from standard English that makes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other non-grammatical techniques work. If everything else is in standard English, dropping some unusual syntax, punctuation, or grammar into the text has an impact because of the change. The less often the writer does it, the bigger the impact. Lots of non-standard syntax, grammar, etc. means no change, no contrast, and no effect.

Those problems are a severe handicap while writing. Even if the writer (or their tame English major best friend) goes over the story later on and fixes the punctuation, grammar, and spelling, the story won’t be as effective as it could be. The writer has lost the chance to get the maximum possible impact from his/her writing, because a bunch of really basic tools are missing from his/her toolbox and some things are nearly impossible to retrofit during revisions. Besides, if the writer doesn’t know what a run-on sentences is, and that they need to avoid it most of the time unless they’re looking for a particular effect, they aren’t going to be able to get that effect any better during revision than they were during the writing phase.

Of course, if a writer doesn’t care about doing the best work, or even about doing a good job, that “writer” doesn’t have to know the basic rules of English (or whatever language they’re using) and doesn’t need to think about learning them. I don’t really understand why such people want to write, though.