Paksworld

When writing fast,  I often write “what happened” and not “where/when/how/why”–without much context.  Sometimes whole important conversations, because I’m “hearing” the people talking to one another, without any guide to who said what.

This requires backfilling.    Scenes must have context (physical, emotional, whatever else is needed) and transitions from previous scenes.  Conversations that run on for a couple of pages with no “he said/she said” or “[name] said/ [othername] said”  lead to reader confusion…and lack the cues to reaction to the previous speaker’s words.

So last night I found a chapter that began with a confrontational conversation–and no context (I did at least say who was part of the conversation, but no more than that.)   I remembered that one and had gone looking for it.   Now it has location, weather (significant),  emotional context, political context,  and the really confrontational bit is a couple of manuscript pages in, which makes more sense.

In the subsequent passages,  I found many things to tinker with, most of it shortening overlong sentences (I think in long sentences.  It comes from my admiration for Ruskin, probably.  He wrote marvelous, half-page-long, intricate sentences which–if you read them aloud–are like watching a water lily unfold.  Perfectly logical, inevitable,  packed with meaning.)    For the long sentences to function in fiction, though, they cannot be the dominant length.  It occurred to me last night, in a conversation with a writer-friend who called (so of course we started discussing the craft) that a good chunk of prose is fractal, in that its “coastline”  (in terms of sentence length) is jaggedy, and yet the same basic structure informs both the short and the long jags.

At any rate, effective prose should seem to flow along…but within that flow are all the variables: long words, short words,  long phrases, short phrases, etc, etc, up to and including paragraphs.   Readers need variation.    It feels natural to have it; it’s more comfortable to read.    Most writers (and speakers) have a natural “length tendency” to write or speak in short, medium, or long bursts, with much the same construction.  My writer friend told me about  a manuscript she’d critiqued in which the writer had ended every sentence with a gerund or gerund phrase…and when told that this was monotonous, had simply started putting some of the gerunds at the beginning.  We all have quirks of expression–not exactly mistakes, but not effective in long works (such as books.)

So there I was plowing through the chapters, with the editor-brain muttering to the writer-brain “Boy, you sure took your time getting to the meat of that one.   And look here, ANOTHER inverted word order sentence.  And you don’t even speak German.   Wow…could you have made this more confusing?”

Today–more of the same this morning so far and until noon, when I quit to get ready for the evening’s church services.    (Pick up M- from his apartment and head for the early evening service at St. Matthew’s, where R-  sings, grab a bite of their between-services choir food, then drive across the city to St. David’s, where I sing, for the late service, and then drive the 50 miles home.  R- needs to be at St. Matt’s by 5 pm and it’s a solid 20 minutes from M-‘s apartment to St. Matt’s, so (backing up and allowing for traffic and the possible thunderstorms and hail) we should probably leave here about 3 pm.)