13 Ways of Looking at the Novel: Part Ten

10.  As a bunch of paragraphs, sentences, and words.

This is my favorite part of the process.  Style.  One could natter on endlessly about style, but I have a few short tips.

Words—try not to accidentally repeat words in proximity.  Especially verbs.  Avoid the pronoun and its constrains.  Read poetry. 

Sentences—“The syntactic means are relatively simple and few, but the stylistic effects are countless.” —Virginia Tufte from her wonderful book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.  If you want to be a writer, get this book.  Tufte looks at over a thousand different sentences as examples of how to write particular kinds of sentences.  If you know how to diagram sentences, you will be doubly blessed.  But get this book and keep it by your bedstand so that you have something useful to read in those five minutes between care and slumberland.

Just to steal a few examples:

From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise:

“The silence of the theater behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of the rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices.  The matinee was over.”  That last sentence, in its brevity, brings the preceding action to a full close.

Or from her section on Left-Branching Sentences: In many successful left-branching sentences, there is a temporal or logical development of the expressed idea that invites the delayed disclosure of the left-branching arrangement. The material that concludes the sentence makes an almost inevitable point:

“The afternoon after the night at the tavern, while O’s were being taken out of books and out of signs, so that the cw jumped over the mn, and the dish ran away with the spn, and the clockshop became a clckshp, the toymaker a tymaker, Black issued new searching orders.”  James Thurber, The Wonderful O

Paragraphs—much more than collections of words or strings of sentences, paragraphs serve many purposes in unifying single ideas and becoming the building blocks of scenes.  Someone should write a book called Beautiful Paragraphs.