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.

In the meantime… Back when I was doing literacy tutoring, one of the training classes they sent us to was about learning styles. They divided them up into three: visual, aural, and kinesthetic (that is, people who learn most easily by seeing an example or reading, people who learn most readily when they are told how to do something, and people who learn best when they actually do it themselves). This has lots of implications for education (our current system is heavily biased toward the first two learning styles), but what I want to talk about is the implications for writers and readers.

Reading is fundamentally a visual experience. Yes, there are audiobooks, but most readers are readers, not listeners…and most books meant for persons over the age of five or six are not written to be read aloud. Nevertheless, there seem to be at least two common types of readers: those who “see” the story as a movie in their heads, and those who “hear” the story in their heads as if someone were reading it. There are also the rare types who “feel” the story as they read it – who lean forward and tense up when the protagonist is running or jumping, and sometimes even fall off the chair if they’ve become too involved in the action.

Ideally, one would like to write stories that appeal to all three types of readers (and however many other categories are out there). The difficulty begins with realizing that this is something one needs to pay attention to. After all, every writer has his or her own learning and reading style, and it is only natural that one begins by writing in whatever way “feels right” to oneself. Reading is also generally a solitary experience, and the way we talk about the things we’ve read seldom gives much of a clue about the differences in how we experience it. “I loved the chase scene in Chapter 9!” may mean “I could visualize the horses galloping through the forest and the branches whipping past” or it may mean “I loved the way the words had the rhythm of hoofbeats and the sentences flowed into one another” or even “I could fell the wind in my hair and I was so into the ride that I kicked the footstool over when they jumped the river.”

If one doesn’t realize (or doesn’t believe) that other people don’t experience “reading a story” the same way one does oneself, one has no reason to suspect that some readers will trip over the clunky sentence fragments in that visually evocative section, or bog down and lose track of the story in a long flow of beautiful but slow-moving prose. I recall one writer friend who was mildly horrified to discover that there were readers who actually cared about “pretty sentences,” rather than about the mental images they produced, and another who was even more horrified to learn that not everyone stops to figure out exactly how to pronounce each and every alien name in an SF novel (because if you don’t know how to pronounce them, how can you tell what the rhythm of the sentence it’s in is supposed to be?)

I think that when any one person reads a story, they translate it from words-on-the-page into whatever their preferred mode of understanding is. In order to write a story, the process goes in reverse, translating the “mental pictures” or the “inner storyteller” into words-on-the-page. (This is one of the reasons why it’s never quite the story in your head.) If one wants to appeal to more than one type of reader, one’s translation into words-on-the-page has to end up with something that each type of reader will be able to “translate” from words-on-the-page into their particular most-valued way of experiencing the book.

Most of the writers I know do this kind of thing more or less by instinct. They lean towards “mental pictures” or “inner storytelling” or “reproducing the physical sensations,” but they’ve found ways of writing that also appeal to other sorts of readers. The writer who is all about mental movies learns to write sentences that are, if not rhythmic and flowing, at least not clunky. The writer who is all about poetic rhythm learns to include some visually evocative phrases. I’ve only known one or two writers who were so far into one mode or other that they had to consciously and deliberately work on acquiring the others in order to get any other styles into their work. Most of the rest of us pick up enough to get by without thinking about it.

“Getting by,” however, is not the ideal. I think an awful lot of writers could benefit from thinking about the reading/writing styles that don’t come naturally to them. Yes, it’s a lot of work to stop and think about the rhythm of the sentences, the word choices, and the flow of the syntax, when what really matters to you is the vivid mental images you’re trying to evoke. Yes, it’s hard to pull back and look at the “big picture” effect that all those lovely sentences add up to. Yes, it feels a bit strange to make yourself physically feel the tensions and the motion in the story. But even if one doesn’t make a regular habit of it, pausing every so often to think about the effects your words-on-the-page will have when they’re filtered through a different style of reading.

“There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition…

“But not much!”  – The Flying Karamozov Brothers

There are some basic things about writing that people who’ve done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one of them last week, when I was reading over a young writer’s manuscript and discovered a line of dialog that went something like this:

“Jack, why didn’t you tell Jane I would be here? It’s not fair. I knew that Jane would be here. ”

To be fair, it’s not really a particularly horrible line, and it’s also the sort of thing that shows up in my own manuscripts from time to time – but only ever in the zero-eth draft. Because there’s something about the repetition of “Jane … would be here” that just…bothers me. So if it were me writing it, then before anyone else got to see it, that line would get changed, along the lines of “Jack, why didn’t you tell Jane I was coming? It’s not fair. I knew that she would be here.”

Most would-be writers have at least some awareness that it’s a bad idea to repeat a word like “fewmets” or “rococo” too many times too close together (sometimes even twice is once too many) without a really good reason. Words that aren’t in common, daily use stick out a little, even when they’re just exactly the right thing to say, and repeating them makes them stand out even more. But it doesn’t always occur to people that the same effect can occur when two phrases are repeated, especially when they’re phrases we hear all the time, made up of ordinary, everyday words. And the closer the two identical phrases are to each other, the stronger the resonance they set up.

It’s easy to overlook such niceties during the white heat of getting a scene down on paper. It’s almost as easy to miss them during a review of the draft, especially if one hasn’t bothered to cultivate an ear for the look and sound of effective prose. It wasn’t until I settled in to write this post, though, that I realized that the real trouble with that original line isn’t so much the repetition, as it is that the repetition emphasizes the wrong thing.

Because repetition isn’t just a potential problem; it is also an extremely useful tool. The resonance between two or three identical or nearly-identical phrases or sentence structures can build emphasis and give more strength to the series:  “I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t sick. I was angry.”

In that dialog line above, the point is that the speaker is chewing out Jack for telling something to one friend and not the other. The phrase that repeats, though (“would be here”) is about the friends, not the telling. To get the emphasis back on Jack and what he said, I’d use: “Jack, why didn’t you tell Jane I would be here? You told me she was coming. It’s not fair.” Or maybe even “Jack, you jerk! You warn me that she’s coming, but you don’t warn her that I’ll be here? How fair is that?” The exact phrasing would depend on the voice of the speaker; either way, repeating the verb “tell” or “warn” points up Jack’s actions, where repeating “would be here” doesn’t.

On the other hand, if there were several people in the know, then the author might want to point up the fact that Jane has been left out by repeating: “You didn’t tell Jane I would be here? Everyone else knew I was coming – Greg knew; Sally knew; Jonathan knew; heck, even Geraldine knew! So why didn’t you say anything to Jane?”

Whether repetition is a problem or whether it’s a tool, the first step in correcting or using it effectively is noticing that it’s there. You can find analysis tools that will tell you how many times you’ve used each word in a manuscript, but when it’s a phrase or a sentence structure that’s repeated too often, the best help for it is to train your eye. Second-best is finding a helpful friend or colleague who will spot them for you.

Once you find a repeated word or phrase, the next step is to figure out whether it works or not, and if not, which occurrence stays and which one goes. A good friend of mine pointed out some time back that about 80-90% of the time, the one you want to keep is the second one, because the reason you repeated the word or phrase is that writing it the first time brought it to the top of your mind, so that the second use is the perfect spot for it. Note that this means the second time you wrote it, not the order the reader will read it…especially if you went back and added it in while revising a previous sentence or paragraph.

About half of the rest of the time, it’s like that sentence about Jane – you want a repetition in there somewhere, but just not the one you have. And the remainder of the time, it’s just fine the way it is. (Percentages vary by writer – some of us are more inclined to egregious and unnecessary redundancy than others.)

As I said, paragraphs are where this analogy switches from looking at building blocks to looking at what you are building out of the building blocks. Consequently, the main properties of paragraphs aren’t so much about the paragraphs as a unit; they’re more about the way all the earlier blocks and bits of blocks fit together to get a particular effect.

Paragraphs are groups of sentences. That’s the official definition I learned back in grade school – a paragraph consists of one or more sentences that deal with a single idea or topic. What I didn’t find out until much, much later is that paragraphs can also be looked at as a way of breaking down a larger idea – a story, a scene, an essay topic – into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. In other words, you can look at them as the largest unit of grammar/syntax, or as the smallest unit of story.

Either way you look at it, though, paragraphs are a collective, and so I call the first major property of paragraphs relationship. The sentences in a paragraph have to relate to each other in ways that aren’t pre-defined by parts of speech or the rules of grammar and syntax. Paragraphs also have to relate to each other in some way, or the story or essay devolves into incoherence.

The tricky thing about paragraphs is that they don’t have the same kind of structural, grammatical, or syntactical rules that you get with words, phrases, and sentences. This is especially true when it comes to fiction, and it means you don’t have anything to fall back on when you’re not sure which sentence should go where. It’s pretty clear if you’ve gotten the subject and the verb in the wrong spots in a sentence, but sometimes the only way to figure out the order of the sentences in a paragraph is to move them around six or eight times to see what works better (and imagine what a pain that was prior to word-processors!). Sometimes, I end up moving a sentence up or down a couple of paragraphs, because it relates better there than it does in the place where I originally thought it up.

The relationship between sentences within a paragraph is usually based on content – they’re all about the same thing. The relationship between paragraphs usually has to do with moving the story smoothly forward – the way the action or the conversation or the description flows from one paragraph-sized unit to the next. If the relationship isn’t clear and the topic of one paragraph doesn’t move smoothly into the topic of the next, you probably need a transition to link the two (or at least clarify the relationship between the respective paragraphs). Also, it’s worth mentioning that most paragraphs have to relate to both the previous paragraph and to the one that comes next (unless of course you’re at a scene or chapter break, and even then, you usually want some kind of transition).

The second major property of paragraphs is…I dunno, I’ve already used “significance,” so let’s call this one “importance.” Each paragraph is presumed to be about as important as every other paragraph in the story (if it isn’t, why is it there?), and each paragraph theoretically has just as many sentences as it needs in order to get its idea across. Since importance is a property of paragraphs, rather than sentences, it spreads out pretty evenly across all the sentences in the paragraph, whether it’s a two-sentence paragraph or a ten-sentence paragraph. The sentences in a two-sentence paragraph thus end up feeling more important or more urgent than the sentences in the eight-sentence paragraph.

A one-sentence paragraph seems more important still.

Especially if it’s short.

It grabs attention.

Hard.

At least, it does the first time you use the trick. After a while, though, the principles of contrast and variation come into play, and all those one-sentence, one-line, one-word attention-grabbers stop feeling important or urgent and start feeling gimmicky. “Fun with Dick and Jane” has almost nothing but one-line, one-sentence paragraphs, and I don’t think anyone sees it as a great model for grabbing and holding the reader’s attention.

The last thing I want to say about paragraphs is a reminder that they’re at the top end of the chain of building blocks that runs from words to phrases to sentences. Consequently, all of the properties of those smaller blocks add up and apply to paragraphs. Paragraphs, though, are the point where things start to shift. Properties like complexity and variation and importance and content become more and more important from here on up, while properties like sound and rhythm and length become less so. A one-word paragraph commands attention. A one-word scene…I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I’m quite sure I’ve never seen one, which tells you right there that even if it is possible, it’s not really very useful for most writers.

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.

Those two famous quotes have been flung at writers and would-be writers for the last century, often with a smug certainty that no one would ever dare to argue with with them. I mean, it’s Flaubert! It’s Twain! And they agree! It would be hard to find anything more literarily respectable.

Nevertheless, I spent years being just a little uneasy about the whole notion of the need to find the perfect word, every time. It sounded good, but I didn’t trust it. Then one day I ran across a quotation from Ursula le Guin: “Flaubert has been set up as such a universal model, and his le mot juste has been made into such a shibboleth, that it’s salutary to watch the poor man founder in a quicksand consisting entirely of mots juste.”

“So,” I thought to myself, “this perfect right word thing isn’t something that works for everyone.” I felt relieved, but I wasn’t entirely sure why until a few days later, when I was pouring over my current chapter-in-process, struggling mightily with a recalcitrant sentence. I finally put down something or other as a placeholder and went to bed, figuring that if I got a good night’s sleep, I’d have a better chance at finding the really right way to say what I wanted. Lo and behold, morning came, and I looked at the placeholder sentence, and could not for the life of me see why I’d been in such a lather the day before, because it was perfectly fine.

I thought about that for a while, and realized that this happens to me at least half to three-quarters of the time. What is worse, sometimes I’ll work for half an hour trying to bring up that mot juste  that I know is buried in my brain somewhere, and then a day or two later, it will suddenly come to me…and when I flip back triumphantly intending to replace the pallid, limp, totally wrong word I’d ended up using instead, I find to my horror that this word I’ve spent so much time and anxiety on is not the right word at all. Indeed, whatever I ended up using is much, much better, most of the time. That “mot juste” was only the perfect word in my imagination; if I’d been able to call it up instantly, I’d have seen that and gone on and not ended up wasting half an hour.

A novel is a lot of words, and most of them, quite frankly, aren’t anything special. You have to go a long way to make a big thing out of “the” or “and” or “is/was,” which are generally right at the top of everybody’s list of “most often used words.” Even if it’s true that you really can’t use anything else most of the time. Also, if you do get one word a little bit wrong in a 100,000 word novel (or in one of those 300,000 word monsters that are currently so popular), you’re talking 0.001%, and most people just aren’t going to notice (or if they do, they’ll figure it was a typo).

Right about then, I noticed that most of the people I knew who were pushing the whole mot juste thing were either poets themselves, or were people who gave poetry first place on their personal hierarchy of literary arts. And while there are very long poems, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule these days…and if you get one word a little bit wrong out of thirty or fifty or five hundred words, it sticks out a lot more than one or two or ten out of 100,000.

And then I found out that Virginia Wolf had some of the same reservations (or at least, I think that’s what she meant when she said “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”

After I read that, I felt a lot better about my doubts. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, like everything else in writing, the whole question of Finding The Right Word is a balancing act. Because sometimes there really is a right word; it just happens a whole lot less often than I think it does. More important, I find that if I try to completely ignore the whole question of finding the perfect right word, and just write whatever seems close, I end up getting sloppier and sloppier, until my “first draft” is well nigh unreadable and requires more work in revision than I’d have done if I’d just taken a few minutes to consider alternatives the first time through.

So these days, I try to limit the amount of time I spend hunting for the perfect word. I give myself less time to agonize about it before I put in the “placeholder” and move on. Oddly enough, I seem to have just about the same (small) number of later revisons as I did before I instituted this policy, which says to me that I’ve got the balance right…for now.

When I got my first word-processor, I was immensely pleased by the way it let me go back and tidy up at the last minute. The “search and replace” function was especially helpful for getting rid of words and phrases that I’d overused. The only catch was, I had to know which words I was overusing, in order to search for them.

Over the years, I’ve developed a search-and-destroy list of words and phrases that creep into my rough drafts no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Some are things I’ve noticed; some are things my first-readers have called to my attention enough times that I have to reluctantly admit that what I think of as a charming or evocative phrase has been overworked, to say the least. The list changes a little from book to book, and from viewpoint character to viewpoint character. Daystar had a terrible tendency to overuse “really” (and we won’t even talk about the semi-colons); Eff doesn’t have a problem with “really,” but I have to watch that she doesn’t overuse “a mite” and her sentences sometimes go on for whole paragraphs and need some breaking up.

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that “search and destroy” is really the wrong name for that list. The words and phrases on it aren’t things that always have to disappear; they’re things that need an extra look. About 80% of the time, I don’t need them, but the other 20% of the time, they’re exactly right.  For instance, the sentence “She seemed to be able to see a lot more from the high window” is a lot stronger and shorter as “She could see a lot more from the high window” (both “seemed to” and “be able to” are fairly high up on my search-and-destroy list; in combination they’re an instant kill).

On the other hand, the sentence “Even if he chose not to answer some questions, she would be able to tell a lot by which questions he refused.” is more ambiguous; here, the choice to change “she would be able to tell a lot” to “she could tell a lot” is as much a matter of voice as it is of over-use. I’d probably change it in most cases, but if I hadn’t used the phrase in a while (a couple of chapters, say) and my viewpoint character tended to be pedantic, I might very well leave it alone. And the sentence “He wondered if he would be able to swim all the way to the far side of the river” is almost certainly going to remain unchanged, because “he wondered if he could” probably isn’t going to imply enough self-doubt for what I want there.

The other thing I noticed is that “destroy” isn’t exactly accurate, either. At least half the time, I don’t just delete an overused word or phrase. Instead, I replace it with something else. “Would be able to see” often becomes “could see,” or even just “saw.” “Very red” sometimes becomes “crimson” or “scarlet,”  if the character’s voice allows it. Sometimes it doesn’t; one of my characters prefers similes such as “as red as my grandmother’s cranberry sauce” to terms like crimson or scarlet, so that’s what I change it to for her.

The point, as always, isn’t really to come up with a list of forbidden words (which won’t be the same for every writer anyway). The point is to make the writing more effective by looking at the standard words and phrases the writer comes up with by default, and then making a conscious decision whether to look for a clearer or more vivid or more succinct way to say the same thing.