Make Your Prose “Pacey”: How to Engage with Expectation, Silence, and Surprise

“The prose needs better pacing, better rhythm” How do you begin to solve that kind of intangible issue? If chunks of your prose feel dull or plodding, consider Ze Frank’s words about the “rhythmic trinity.” Ze Frank is not a writer, but he is an endlessly creative maker and humorist. His groundbreaking 2006 vlog “The Show” profoundly influenced current mega-hit vloggers like John and Hank Green. In Ze’s 3:23 video about “the rhythmic trinity of expectation, silence, and surprise,” he talks about how that trinity helped his music–and how it applies to humor in the classic joke’s setup, pause, and punchline:

“Watching younger comics, you can learn a lot by seeing what’s broken. They might be good at building expectation and delivering surprise, but they haven’t figured out silence yet, and they blast through their lines so fast you don’t have room to laugh. Or they’re all surprise and pauses without building any patterns for the audience to relax into. When it’s all surprise, it stops being a surprise. The craft of it is in the matter of all three: expectation, silence, surprise.” 

Writers use expectation, silence, and surprise to create rhythm on both the micro, sentence-to-sentence level and the macro, story level. I’ll save story for a later blog. Right now, I’ll talk about how the rhythmic trinity works on the ground, in your actual prose.

Expectation: Ze says that creating expectation means building patterns for the audience to relax into. So that might mean

• A stretch of quick-paced dialogue popping along
• A series of sentences of similar length, which can create a nice train-wheel rhythm
• A series of short action paragraphs
• A series of brief descriptive passages that take us (for example) from the exterior of the house to the interior
• Any of these creates a certain expectation, one you can then have fun disrupting.

Silence:

• Slow down prose with a lingering descriptive passage,
• Give any moment more air and breath by using a longer sentence, especially one that follows a series of short, brisk sentences of roughly the same length.
• Insert a sudden break into the dialogue, in which one person literally falls silent

Surprise: 

• Sometimes breaking a short sentence out in its own own paragraph makes it more arresting
• Zoom in on a tiny physical detail—or zoom out suddenly to a bird’s eye view of your scene
• Insert a bit of new information that turns the scene on its head 

How It Might Work (A Brief, Highly Simplified, and Pedestrian Example)

He said, “I tried.”

I said, “Not hard enough.”

He said, “But I can’t try harder.”

I said, “Well, you you have to.”

He said, “You’re asking too much.”

I said, “I’m asking for what you promised.”

[So now we’ve set up the expectations.]

And then, without warning, as if something had just occurred to him, or as if he’d had a sudden and interesting idea, he frowned and glanced up at the ceiling.  for a moment, his eyes rolled up even higher, till I could see their whites. [that string of clauses functioned as a kind of silence or hesitation] 

Then he fell face down on the table, quite dead.

[there’s the surprise element, made more surprising by the new paragraph]

More on using the rhythmic trinity on big story issues in my next blog. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear more ways you play with rhythm and pacing in your sentences.

Banish Stick-Figure Writing: How Concrete Sensory Details Make All the Difference in Fiction

Thin, generic description is the literary equivalent of drawing with stick figures. That’s a problem—because your reader’s imagination will only engage if it’s convinced what’s happening is real. And if their imagination won’t engage, their emotions won’t engage, and they’ll puts the book down and find something fun to do.

So how do you flesh your stick figures out?

In 1979, a revolutionary book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain pinpointed why so many adults and older children can’t draw. It’s because they aren’t drawing what they see—they’re drawing what they know.

In other words, they’re drawing a category, rather than the thing itself.

I “know” a face is oval and has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, so that’s what I draw. Then I’m surprised that it looks like a stick figure, not a human face. In reality, depending on the way a face is angled and the way the light falls across it, a real face may not be oval, may not have two (visible) eyes, may have only part of a nose, etc.

I “know” a tree has a thick trunk and at the top some branches and leaves—so I draw a stick-figure tree instead of the wild living thing flinging out arms and fingers in front of me.

The same thing can happen in writing. “A dog stood under a tree. A girl ran past.”  But “dog,” “tree,” and “girl” aren’t descriptions; they’re labels for abstract concepts. Was it a tiny mutt or a graceful Great Dane? An aspen or a cottonwood? A 6-year-old Latina or a willowy white teenager?

A few fleshier alternatives:

• A twenty-foot cottonwood, heart-shaped leaves turning lazily in the breeze
• A mutt with a smashed-in boxer’s face and lolling tongue
• A small girl with tangled dark hair, wiping her nose on a dirty coat sleeve as she runs past.

Now a little of this kind of description goes a long way. Be judicious: you don’t want to force-feed your reader a whole box of chocolates. If I were editing myself here, I’d decide which was the most important element for the reader to focus on. Let’s say it was the dog:

“The mutt stood under a tall cottonwood. He turned his smashed-in boxer’s face, tongue lolling, to watch a small, dark-haired girl run past. He did not give chase.”

We’re humans, we live in bodies. That means our minds won’t believe, our imaginations won’t be convinced, without plenty of concrete sensory details. Banish the stick figure. Make your writing juicy with life, and allow the reader to fall in love with your book.

A Turkey Day Miracle!

I just wanted to share a little Turkey Day miracle I experienced this year.

I recently took on a ghost writing project. Obviously, I’m not free to go into any detail about it, but I was basically hired to help on a manuscript that had stalled out during revisions.

The author and I had been batting big ideas back and forth for several weeks with the goal of generating an outline. It was slow going and frustrating for both of us as we brought our very different perspectives to the project. But the slog finally paid off. Only — as is often the case with revisions and miracles — this pay-off ended up looking nothing like I expected.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I finally emailed an outline to the author. But that wasn’t the miracle. No. The miracle occurred on the other end of the exchange. It seems the author had, totally unbeknownst to me, been busy rewriting his entire manuscript while we were discussing and (as far as I could tell) butting heads over some pretty major elements of his story. Soon after I was hired, I had suggested an idea for a substantial change I felt would solidify the hero’s character arc and give the reader a better empathetic focal point. We had agreed to implement this change, but we couldn’t seem to come together on how. And, with the holiday season fast approaching, I was running out of time. In addition to all the normal Yule-time crap, I still work backstage on Ballet Austin’s Nutcracker. So I tend to get very busy with non-writer things in December.

But, like I said, the author I’m working for had been furiously revising in response to our discussions. And he had taken his story in a whole new direction that simplified and clarified and generally turned the whole thing around. I found the fruits of his labors waiting in my inbox on the morning after Thanksgiving.

Nitpicking can be a good thing

Here’s where we get into the miracle. Which is, simply put, that this writer had not only fixed a lot of the problems with his story, he also reminded me why I love to edit. And, more importantly, he showed me the incredible power an editor has. Even if an editor doesn’t “get you,” even if an editor seems to do nothing but nitpick and ask annoying questions, he or she can still help because all those questions and comments will force you to look at your work in a new way. And those questions and comments – no matter how far off base they may feel – should force you to think about why you’ve made those choices. Even better, your editor’s nagging will make you figure out ways to fight for what you decide is important. And they’ll make you clarify the $64,000 question of why you wrote the thing in the first place.

Which is exactly what happened during my Turkey Day Miracle. The moral? It’s simple: take the time and effort (and risk) to find qualified people to react to your work while you’re working on it. And listen to them, especially when you don’t agree with what they’re saying. You’ll almost always be glad you did.

Revising May Not Be As Much Fun…

I’ve started a closed Facebook group for a couple dozen folks. They have agreed to beta read the first half of my WIP, The Search for Stagehand Jesus. Here’s thelink. Some folks have started posting their feedback already, but most seem to be reading the whole chunk first. Or they’re like everyone else in the world and crazy-busy with their own lives. Otherwise I can’t understand why they haven’t dropped everything they care about to read part of my book. But seriously, I’m grateful for their support and optimistic about what could happen. Since I figure I can’t thank them enough, I’m doing it one more time here.

Also, anyone reading this post who’s curious about the group should feel free to observe from the outside. You can see the activity without joining. Or, if you’re interested in a more active role, ask me for an invite. I’ve got folks from all of my different worlds mixing together in there. If they really engage, it could be fun.

And knowing people want to read what I’m revising is a heck of a motivator. Unfortunately, it’s also a pretty effective paralyzer. Since I created the group, it feels like I stagger between these two states most of the time. But I’m making progress on my revisions. Slowly. As usual, I blame things like my having to write this blog when I don’t work on The Search for Stagehand Jesus, but I know better. It really just boils down to priorities.

When I prioritize my WIP, it gets my attention and effort. When I don’t, it doesn’t. It’s that simple (and frustrating, since this realization leaves only myself to blame when I let the work go undone).

My most recent distraction has been NaNoWriMo. I know lots of people who signed up to write the first draft of a novel this month, and I’m following their progress through Facebook posts. (When exactly did Zuckerberg take over the world?)

I was sorely tempted to sign up myself.

Because first drafts are such fun! Generative writing is magical: that feeling when the fingers fly over the keyboard (or the cramped hand scratches it out across an empty page) is what got me into writing as a kid. There are no mistakes or bad choices in first drafts: all the new ideas are exciting and the characters get to do what they want.

But I didn’t sign up for NaNoWriMo because I’m revising. I’m not generating a new story. And starting a new project would mean deprioritizing my current one. You know, like I always do. No. This time I’m pushing past the second draft and into the realm (hopefully) of a polished and marketable manuscript. I’m done adding to that file drawer of abandoned first drafts. My goal is to finish this round of revisions by the end of the year. That way I can be ready to feed it to my beta reader friends on Facebook. And maybe even start pitching it at the next Austin SCBWI Conference.

Happy Holidays indeed.

No Idea What to Write? Get Over It

It’s not new, but an idea repeatedly struck me at the recent Texas Book Festival while I manned the Yellow Bird booth with poet, novelist, and fellow avian editor, E. Kristin Anderson. This was my first time being the face of Yellow Bird to a general audience (i.e. not a bunch of writers at a conference). I talked to a lot of people who aren’t actually writers, at least not yet. Some had had some good experiences in a few creative writing classes somewhere along the way. Some had always kept journals that no one’s allowed to read. I easily recognized them from my own not too distant past when I, too, thought writing was all about having a good idea.

Well, I’m here to say you don’t need an idea to start writing. Take this post as an example. This morning I stood and stared at the coffee dripping into the pot, thinking about the book festival, and wondering if I could mine my experience for a blog post. I had nothing. It did eventually occurr to me I needed to clean my coffee pot in a pretty bad way. The coffee dripped until I took a cup. I went in and sat down in front of the screen repeating my mantra in my head:

You don’t need an idea to write. You don’t need an idea to write.

So I typed that. Over and over. It’s a technique I picked up from one of the impromptu writing exercises Kathi Appelt was generous enough to lead at the Writing Barn’s Full Novel Revision Week back in August. It’s based on the theory that your brain hates wasting time and energy and that it will come up with something for you to write about simply to stop you from typing all that nonsense.

Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me halfway down the page that I could write about not needing a good idea to get started writing and how that ties in with the people I talked to last weekend, not to mention some of the themes I’ve already been exploring in this blog, and my recent experience at the Writing Barn. Forgive the massive sentence, but I needed to convey the enormity of the connections my brain made in that flash.

All because I didn’t wait for some inspiration to descend from on high. I forced it.

Again, I know this isn’t a new idea. I certainly don’t mean to claim any ownership of it by writing about it here. I just hope maybe a couple of those people I spoke to at the book festival might read this. And maybe one of them will set their alarm a little early tomorrow, and get up and stare at the coffee pot until they can take a cup. Then they’ll go in and type nonsense until they start to write again.