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16 3
164 HoNING YouR CRAFT
like writing about the explosion of Mount St. Helens or the World Trade
Organization riocs in Seattle, I have them pull out a piece of their own prose
and count the number of words in each sentence for three paragraphs. I also
have them jot down commems on the kinds of sentences they use: simple
declarative (basic subject-verb), complex, fragmented, and so forth. They do
the assignment, because it would be even more boring to sit and do nothing,
I suppose. Suddenly a little exclamation breaks out from a corner of the
room. "Ohmigod!" says one young woman. "All of my sentences are eleven
words long!" This young woman has been concerned about what feels to her like a
flatness or lifelessness to her prose. Here, in one rather mechanical but not
painful she's put her finger on the reason, or one of the reasons. On
further analysis she discovers that she has a penchant for writing one simple
declarative sentence after another: "I drive to the forest in April. My car is
almost for a new dutch. The forests are quiet at that time of year." The
metronomic beat of same sentence structure, same sentence length, has
robbed her otherwise sparkling essays of their life.
For the sake of comparison, listen to the difference created in those three
sample sentences by a little more rhetorical invemiveness: "In April, a quiet
time of year, I drive to the forest. My car almost ready for a new clutch." -SuZANNE
Scene Versus Exposition
Generally speaking, scene is the building block of creative nonfiction. There
are exceptions to this statement-more academic or technically oriented writ
ing, the essay of ideas perhaps-but overall, the widespread notion that non
fiction is the writer's thoughts presented in an expository or summarizing way
has done little but produce quantities of unreadable nonfiction. Scene is based
on action unreeling before us, as it would in a film, and it will draw on
same techniques as fiction-dialogue, description, point of view, specificity,
concrete detail. Scene also encompasses the lyricism and imagery of great
poetry. We have, as the Dillard quote at the head of this chapter indicates,
access to the full orchestra. We need to learn to play every instrument with
brio.
The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 165
Let's begin by defining our terms. Expository writing, as the term implies,
exposes the author's thoughts or experiences for the reader; it summarizes,
generally with little or no sensory detaiL Expository writing compresses time:
For jive years I lived in Alaska. It presents a compact summation of an experi
ence with no effort to re-create the experience for the person reading.
On the other hand, scene, as in fiction, uses detail and sensory information
to re-create experience, generally with location, action, a sense of movement
through time, and possible dialogue. is cinematic. Here is a possible
reworking of the above sentence, using scene: For the jive years I lived in Alaska I awoke each morning to the freezing seat of the outhouse, the sting of hot strong coffie drunk without precious sugar or milk, the ringing ccG' day!" of my Australian neighbor.
The version of this sentence dearly presents the reader with a more
experiential version of that time in Alaska, with details that provide a snap
shot of the place: the slowness of time passing is stressed by the harsh routine
of the coffee and outhouse; we get a sense of scarcity of supply; the neighbor
even has a bit of swift characterization. Of course, for an essay in which Alaska
is totally unimportant the expository summation might be the better move.
But if you find yourself writing nonfiction with very little scene, you are likely
to produce flat writing readers have to struggle to enter.
Remember "The Knife," by author/surgeon Richard Selzer? This essay
moves fluidly between scene and exposition; Selzer forces us to live the awe
some power and responsibility of the surgeon before allowing himself the
lmury of meditating about it.
There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. The hands of the others, assis
tants and nurses, are still. Only the voice of the patient's respiration remains.
It is the rhythm of a quiet sea, the sound of waiting. Then you speak, slowly,
the terse entries of a Himalayan climber reporting back. "The stomach is
okay. Greater curvature dean. No sign of ulcer. Pylorus, duodenum fine.
Now comes the gall-bladder. No stones. Right kidney, left, all right. Liver
. , . uh-oh."
Selzer goes on to tell us he finds three large tumors in the liver. "Three big
hard ones in the left lobe, one on the right. Metastatic deposits. Bad, bad."
Like fine fiction, this passage contains a clear hospital room,
166 HoNING YouR CRAFT
characterized appropriately enough by sound rather than appearance: the silence oflife and death. There is action mimicking real time, containing the element of surprise. We learn along with the surgeon about the patient's metastasized cancer. There's dialogue, as the surgeon narrates to himself, to
his surgical assistants, seemingly to the fates, his discovery of the patient's
mortality. And, like fine poetry, this piece of writing also organizes itself through imagery: the "quiet sea" of the passive patient's breathing versus the labored voice-like a "Himalayan climber's"-of the surgeon emphasizes the former's loss of control.
Selzer's passage would be easy to change to an expository sentence: Often
in surgery l found unexpected cancer. But the author's final purpose-an extended meditation on the relationship of human and tool, soul and body
would fall flat. The reader, lacking any feel for the grandeur and potential tragedy of exploring the body, would dismiss expository statements such as,
"The surgeon struggles not to feel. It is suffocating to press the feeling out," as merely odd or grandiose.
There are several other moves worth noting in this passage. One is that, like
the sample Alaska sentence given above, Selzer's surgical description is repre
sentative scene. In other words, he doesn't pretend this operation occurs at one specific time and place, but it represents a typical surgical procedure, one
among many. Another technique to note is his use of the second person for a speaker that is presumably himsel£ Second person-the you rather than the l-is a point-of-view choice, discussed in more detail further on in this chapter.
In contrast, here's an example of a specific, not representative, scene, from
JoAnn Beard's essay "The Fourth State of Matter." The scenes comprising the essay all occur at very specific moments in time. Here is Beard at work, with
her physicist colleagues having a professional discussion around the chalkboard:
"If it's plasma, make it in red," I suggest helpfully. We're all smoking ille gally, in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We're having a plasma party.
"We aren't discussing plasma," Bob says condescendingly. He's smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like
I'm breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don't get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could
The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 167
be fired, which drove me to tell him he was already fired, and both of us
stomped into our offices and slammed our doors. "I had to fire Bob," I tell Chris later. "I heard," he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend.
This is a very pinpointed event, not representative but presumably unlike
any other moment in Beard's life. Notice how much suggestive detail Beard packs into a short space. TI1ese characters break rules, argue, and exist in complex relationship to one another. Her relationship with Bob is established
in this scene--a relationship that seems suffused with a genuine but relatively harmless tension, given their ability to issue dire threats to each other without
consequence. The dialogue sounds real and secures the characters, capturing the nuanced pretense of Bob's stressing the "plas" part of the "plasma." Chris,
the man in the middle, seems to have heard all this bickering before.
We all tend to use too little scene in creative nonfiction. We especially forget the possibilities of representative scene. Even when we're reporting a typical rather than a specific event, use of scenic elements, as in Selzer's sur
gery, conveys a sense of character and situation far more effectively than does summary.
Specificity and Detail
Scene forces us to use specificity and detail, elements that get lost in the quick wash of exposition. Even in discussing the largest ideas, our brains engage
with the small workings of the senses first. And the specificity of a piece of nonfiction is generally where the sensory details lie: the aroma of honeysuckle, the weak film of moonlight. While it is possible to go overboard with detail,
generally in drafting it's best to keep going back and sharpening as much as possible. You leaned not just against a tree but against a weeping silver birch; the voice at the other end of the phone sounded like the Tin Man's in The
"Wizard of Oz. Your readers or writing group can tell you when you've gone too far. When you write scene, your job is to mimic the event, create an expe riential representation of it for the reader.
Look at the examples given before, and think about how much the details
add to those scenes: the hushed silence of the hospital room and three hard tumors on the left lobe of the liver in Selzer's essay. In Beard's, we see the
168 HoNING YouR CRAFT
bickering but ultimate acceptance of this dose group of coworkers. We sense the author's ambivalent position in the group-shut out of their "talking physics," as she tells us earlier-but also her authority within the group. We
sense, in the hyperbolic description ofBob's pipe smoke ("like daggers"), a bit of foreshadowing of a coming tragic event.
In The Elements ofStyle, William Strunk, Jr., explains that the one point of accord among good writers is the need for detail that is "specific, definite, and concrete." (We also address this point in Chapter 1.) Concrete detail appeals to the senses; other writers call such details "proofs." If Selzer told us readers
that sometimes in surgery he found cancer, we might abstractly believe him, but it's hard to associate that fact with real life and death. In this passage, we're convinced by the specifics: three hard tumors on the liver, the surgeon's voice mumbling, "Bad, bad."
Abstract language-the opposite of relying on concrete detail-refers to the larger concepts we use that exist on a purely mental level, with no appeal to the senses: liberty, justice, contentment, and so on. These terms may contain the implication of sensory detail (you may flash on "warmth'' when you hear "contentment," but that's a personal reaction that wouldn't make sense to, say,
a penguin), but they are in themselves broad categories only. Of course, within the details you use emerges a wealth of abstract information. Beard could have summarized her relationships with her coworkers; Selzer could have presented a few expository sentences about soul and body, surgeon as God. We want experiences, not lectures; we want to enter into events and uncover their meanings for ourselves.
Paying attention to concrete detail and the input of our own senses also helps save us from the literary pitfall of cliche, an expression or concept that's
been overused. Frequently, cliches are dead metaphors, so overused we don't pay attention anymore to the comparisons they contain. (Do you actually think of a yellow metal when you hear "good as gold"? Do you even realize this phrase comes from a time when the gold our country held validated our money?) If Beard had described Bob's pipe tobacco as smelling like "dirty socks," or "killing" her nose, she would have been indulging in cliche. Instead, she used the information of her senses to create a fresh image.
Chances are, you know more than you need to know to write effective scene, bur your natural expressiveness has been stifled, often by misguided advice from academic writing classes. Next time you work on a piece of ere-
The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 169
ative nonfiction, hear yourself talking through the story to friends in a crowded coffee shop or club. There's plenty to divert their attention: music, people watching, smoke, and noise. Which details do you use to hold their attention? Do you imitate the look of someone's face, the sound of a voice? Do you
screech to demonstrate the sound of car tires on asphalt? Your reading audi ence will be equally distractible. Think about how to render these attention grabbing devices in your prose. You may want to consult Chapter 1, "The Body of Memory," to remind yourself how to use sensory detail.
Developing Character
Character development, like learning to write effective dialogue, is part of
writing scene. It's another particularly easy-to-miss demand of good creative nonfiction. Afrer all, we know what our patents, children, or lovers look like. Unconsciously, we tend to assume that everyone else does as welL
Suzanne has, by marriage, a very funny grandmother. She wasn't intention ally funny, but nonetheless the mere mention of her name tends to bring down the room when the family's together. The family bears in mind, as courteous
people, that we need to break through our uncontrollable giggling and due other listeners in to the source of our amusement: "Well, she carne from a tiny
town in south Georgia and talked about nothing all day long but her ar-ther itis and her gallbladder that was leakin' plus she lied compulsively and pursed her mouth in this funny way when she did .... " Mter a few minutes of this our
auditors understand why we find her so endlessly amusing. This kind of filling in, also natural in conversation, is the essence of character development.
Nothing demonstrates the power of fine characterization like studying writers who, in a few strokes, can help us apprehend someone sensually (through sight, sound, or feel) as well as give us a sense of their essence. The following are examples of quick, effective character development from essays we love:
• Albert Goldbarth in ''After Yitzl": "My best friend there shoed horses. He had ribs like barrel staves, his sweat was miniature glass pears."
• Lawrence Sutin in "Man and Boy": "In the case of my father and myself, I had the fullness of his face and his desire to write, which had
170 HoNING YouR CRAFT
been abandoned when he came to America with a family to raise ....
He was a middle-aged man who was sobbing and sweaty and his body
was heavy and so soft I imagined his ribs giving way like a snowman's
on the first warm winter day."
• Judith Kitchen in "Things of This Life": "Mayme would step onto the
platform wearing a dark purple coat, her black braids wound tightly
around her head. Her skin was too soft and wrinkly. When you kissed
her cheek, it wobbled, and you wished you didn't have to do that."
Details that give a sense of the essence of an individual-in all his or her
typicality (commonness with their type; grandmothers typically have soft and
wrinkly skin) and individual, specific glory (sweat like miniature pears)-are
hard to define, but blazingly effective when you come upon them. Think,
when you write about someone close to you, how you would characterize that person in a stroke or two for someone else.
Dialogue
It can be difficult to allow ourselves to use direct dialogue in creative nonfic
tion. After all, memory's faulty; we can't recall conversations word for word,
so why try? The answer is that we need to try, because insofar as nonfiction
attempts to be an honest record of the observant mind, dialogue matters. We
recall voices, not summaries; we observe scenes in our head, not expository
paragraphs.
Dialogue generally moves action forward. Selzer quotes himself finding the
metastasized cancer, and Beard gives a sense of the dynamics of her office.
Dialogue must characterize and capture the voice of the speaker, however, not
simply give information. The latter is called in fiction writing "information
dumping," and it occurs when you have people say things like, "Well, Carmen,
I remember you told me you were taking the cross-town bus that day only
because your white 1999 Volvo had developed a gasket problem." Information
dumping is less of a problem in nonfiction because this genre is reality based
(and people really do not talk that way). But, if you cue your readers that you
are re-creating a conversation, it may be tempting to lard the dialogue with
information you can't figure out how to get in any other way. Don't do it.
7he Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 1 71
Everyone has a natural cadence and a dialect to his or her speech. We
nearly always speak in simple sentences, not complex-compound ones. We
might say, "When the rain comes, the grass grows," which has one short
dependent clause beginning with the word when; we aren't likely to say,
"Whenever it happens the rain comes, provided the proper fertilizer's been
applied, the grass grows, unless it's been masticated by cows grazing thereon''
a simple sentence or main clause ("the grass grows") festooned with wordy
subordinate clauses. We frequently speak in sentence fragments or ungram
matical snippets-e.g., the how-are-you question "Getting along?" instead of
the grammatically correct ''Are you getting along?" One exception to these
rules of natural speech might be a person who is pompous and wordy. Perhaps
you're writing dialogue to capture the voice of a stuffy English professor you
know. In that case, go to town. Just bear in mind that what bores you will
bore others fairly quickly. In the case of people who are boorish, dull, or oth
erwise hard to listen to, give readers a sample of the voice and they will fill in
the rest. A little goes a long way.
One final caveat: beware of elaborate taglines, which identifY the speaker,
such as "he said," "she argued," and so forth. In dialogue between two people
taglines are often dispensable after the first two. Even when you must use
them, stick as much as possible to "said" and "asked," two fairly invisible
words in the context of dialogue. It's an easy mistake to make-and a difficult
one to overlook as a reader-to have all of your characters "retort," "storm,"
or "muse." And make sure the words themselves contain tone as much as pos
sible. (Tone can also be conveyed in a character's gesture, as in Beard's col
leagues casually breaking the rules by smoking in their office.) Don't follow
each speech tag with an adverb such as "angrily," "sadly," and so on. If you feel
the need to use those words, ask yourself why the dialogue itself doesn't seem
to contain those feelings.
Point of View
Every story is told by a storyteller (even in a piece with multiple speakers, one
speaker dominates at a time), and every storyteller must be situated somehow
within the frame of the work. This situating is called point of view (POV), and
we express it through choice of pronouns. To put it simply, the tale can be
ld b "I" (fi POV) " " ( d ) "h " " h " to y an rst-person , a you secon person , or a e or s e
(third person). Though it may seem at first blush as though all nonfiction
must be told in first person, skillful writers do use the techniques of second
and third-person POV to wonderful effect in nonfiction. And the more the
genre stretches its limbs, takes risks, and remakes its rules, the more such
untraditional devices appear, and the more aware we become as writers of what they can do.
Of the three point-of-view choices, second person is the rarest, in nonfic
tion as well as in fiction and poetry. It's not hard to figure out why: second
person POV calls attention to itself and tends to invite reader resistance.
Imagine recasting "For five years I lived in Alaska" as "For five years you lived
in Alaska." That's exactly what a POV shift to second person would do; it
places the reader directly in the shoes of the author, without narrative media
tion. Clumsily used, second person screams out for the reader to say, "No, I
didn't" with an inner shrug of indignation and stop reading. Skillfully used,
however, that blurring ofline between reader and author can be very powerful.
Here's a sentence from "The Fourth State of Matter" again, a classic first
person approach: "It's November 1, 1991, the last day of the first parr of my
life." Compare that with a short passage from Richard Selzer, who uses second
person liberally throughout his essay. Watch the careful way he slips from
first- to second-person POV, as if inviting the reader to experience the fearful ness of a surgeon's power:
I must confess that the priestliness of my profession has ever been impressed
on me. In the beginning there are vows .... And if the surgeon is like a poet,
then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.
In contrast, Judith Kitchen's essay "Things of This Life" uses third person
throughout the piece to create a sense of freshness and excitement in a child hood memoir:
Consider the child idly browsing in the curio shop. She's been on vacation
in the Adirondacks, and her family has (over the past week) canoed the
width of the lake and up a small, meandering river .... So why, as she sifts
through boxes of fake arrowheads made into key chains, passes down the
long rows of rubber tomahawks, dyed rabbits' feet, salt shakers with the
words "Indian Lake" painted in gold, beaded moccasins made of what could
only in the imagination be called leather, is she happier than any time dur
ing the past week?
Kitchen, further along in the essay, tells us, "Now consider the woman who
was that child." It seems at first an odd choice, to v.rrite about the self as if it
were someone completely apart, a stranger. But as Kitchen unfolds her sense
of her life as "alien," a space she's inhabiting that raises questions she still can't
answer ("How can she go on, wanting like this, for the rest of her life?"), the
strategy becomes a coherent part of the architecture of the essay.
Imagine the paragraphs it would take to explain such an alienation from
the self-a sense of distance from one's own desires-and the relative power
lessness such an explanation would have. Annie Dillard writes in our intro
ductory quote that she "delighted" to learn that nonfiction, like poetry, can
carry meaning in its structures. Kirchen here has wisely chosen a structure to
convey her feeling-a feeling open only to the clumsiest articulation.
Image and Metaphor
Janet Burroway, in her text Writing ~Fiction, describes metaphor as the founda
tion stone "from which literature derives." Image-any literary element that
creates a sense impression in the mind-and metaphor-the use of compari
son-form the heart of any literary work. Notice how, trying to impress this
importance upon you, we strain to make strong metaphor: metaphors are the
foundation stones of a building; they're the pumping hearts of literary writ
ing. The ability to make metaphor is the most basic constituent of human
thought and language. Yet, too often we leave direct consideration of these
devices to the poets.
While essays can be organized many ways-through topic, chronology, or
passage of time---organization through image and metaphor has become
much more common. Clustering thoughts through images and loose associa tions (and metaphors are, at the most basic level, associations) seems funda
mental to the way the human mind works. You may mentally jump from a
look at a leaky faucet to a memory of watching the 1970s TV show "Charlie's
Angels" because of the name of the actress Farrah Fawcett. You may then glide effortlessly from that thought to a sense memory of the powdered hot choco late with marshmallows your mother made for you on weeknights while you
watched television. As we grow more aware of and sophisticated about the way human consciousness operates, it makes sense that our literature will come closer to these basic thought rhythms. In the Beard excerpt we used earlier in this chapter, within a few sentences we see images of daggers and
hissing and the use of the word fire. 'The imagery in this essay tells its own story-of a deadly event about to overtake the lives of these people.
You can often find clues to your own imagistic or metaphoric organizations when you recall the sensory association a thought or experience calls to mind. If the summer your best friend was killed in a diving accident always comes back
to you with a whiff of honeysuckle, stay with that image and explore it: in writ ing for a while. Does it lead to concepts of sweetness, youth, temptation, the quick blooming? If you let yourself write about the image alone for a while not rushing to get to the subject your mind may insist is "the real story'' -a
more complex, more true, series of themes in your story will probably emerge.
The Rhythm of Your Sentences
It's a well-known fact that sentences must contain some variation. You must
have become acquainted with this fact already. It's clear if you read a certain kind of prose. A work must use different kinds of sentence structures. Differ-. ent kinds of sentence structures help alleviate that numbing feeling. It's a feeling you don't want your readers to have.
The previous paragraph contains six sentences, each composed of about ten words, and each is a simple sentence, beginning with a subject and its verb. Unlike this sentence you're currently reading, none begins with a clause. None is short. None, unlike the twenty-five-word sentence introducing this second paragraph, engages us for very long. Read both of these paragraphs together. Do you sense a difference? Do you, as we do, begin to go blank by the middle of the first paragraph, and finally feel some relief at the second one?
Notice that the second paragraph in this section of the book, while clarifY ing many of the ideas that the first paragraph contains, varies sentence struc-
ture and length. It also varies voice. One sentence uses the vocative or command
voice ("Read both paragraphs together"), two are cast in the interrogative
voice-they ask questions. Clauses like "Unlike this sentence" and "as we do"
appear at the beginnings, middles, and ends of sentences to break up that
repetitive simple structure.
The Poetry of Prose
Virginia Woolf, who many writers would list as "favorite poet," began work not with an idea but with a "rhythm," writing to a friend, "Style is a very
simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you have that, you can't use the wrong words." Though it's become popular, and helpful at times, to divide up non fiction into lyric essays and non-lyric essays, doing so can obscure the fact that all language is controlled by rhythm-especially a highly stressed, Ger manic language like our own. If you learn to see how language operates
through rhythm and sound, or prosody, within prose, as well as how sentence structure affects meaning, you will be delighted at the new power of your
prose. Let's examine a paragraph ofWoolf's prose, one that appears at the start of
her novel Mrs. Dalloway:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with
a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open
the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh,
how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like
the flap a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the
open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the
flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising,
falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the
vegetables?"-was that it?-"I prefer men to cauliflowers"-was that it?
Woolf begins with two short, emphatic sentences that illustrate the joy ous, "plunging" movements of her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, going out on a trip to purchase flowers. She follows that with two long sentences, the first
176 HoNING YouR CRAFT
ending with the prepositional phrase "into the open air," the sentence struc
ture itself mirroring-and stressing-the protagonist's entry into the larger
world beyond her doors. The second of the long sentences contains a par
enthetical phrase (Clarissa thinks of her age in the memory as a par en theti
cal afterthought, a reflection of how we recall just how young we were at
some of life's key moments!). Those emphatic semicolons that first set off
the arrival of waves in her mind cue us that the "kiss of a wave" may not be
an entirely pleasant thing, and prepare us for the "foreboding" feeling Cla
rissa remembers. So does the strong stress-the many accented syllables
contained in the first part of this sentence. The final use of dashes to set off
the question "was that it?" enables that phrase to "float" syntactically, not
clearly connected to anything else in the sentence-is she wondering what
Peter Walsh said, what she was thinking then, or something else? The dashes
perfectly capture the artless wandering of her mind at this moment. While
many writers understand Virginia Woolf as an originator of the "stream
of consciousness" narrative style, few examine how she achieves the effect stylistically.
Author Virginia Tufte uses the term syntactic symbolism to describe syntax
that creates emotional effects. Here is an excerpt from writer Dorothy Parker, a description of a breakup:
But I knew. I knew. I knew because he had been far away from me long
before he went. He's gone away and he won't come back. He's gone away
and he won't come back, he's gone away and he'll never come back.
Here the repetition of "knew" captures the author's sense that she cannot
drive this devastating knowledge out of her mind. Even the tense shifting
past "knew" to present "He's gone"-reflects her inability to cease feeling the painful emotion.
Sentence length and structure, pattern of stressed syllables, and placement
of dependent clauses and phrases all deeply influence meaning. In her book
Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard writes about a tragic plane crash that disfigures
a child. Dillard begins with a sentence with a clause placed in an unexpected
order. "Into this world falls a plane," she writes, rather than ''A plane falls into
this world," choosing to place the clause ("into this world") at the introduction
The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form 177
to the sentence rather than after the subject it describes, the plane. The last
position in a sentence always gets the most attention, so her sentence structure
puts our attention squarely on the plane, with the swoop of the opening clause
beginning with "into" causing the plane to "fall" into our reading ear.
Prose, not just poetry, avails itself of rhyme too-its beauty and, at times,
its feelings of comfort and closure. In the novel jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
describes her heroine waking up as the closeted madwoman in the house
rampages through the rooms on her floor: "I sat up in bed by way of arousing
this said brain; it was a chilly night; I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and
then I proceeded to think again with all my might." Notice the rhyme between
"brain" and "again" and "night" and "might." Bronte has written a couplet in
prose! Somehow, reading this beautifully rhyming sentence lets us know Jane
will think her way out of this danger.
TRY IT
1. Go through a piece of your writing and find a passage of summary that could
or maybe even should be in scene. Don't fret right now about whether scene is
absolutely necessary here: the point is to develop the skill of automatically ask
ing yourself whether that option will help you.
Sometimes we stymie ourselves by imagining we must remember everything
or we can't describe anything. So work with what you do remember. You may
forget the look of a room but remember the sound or smell of it (think of Seiz
er's defining silence in that hospital room). Or create a bridge, such as writing a
few sentences about how this is what a dialogue sounds like in your memory as
you try to re-create it, giving yourself permission to fill in what you don't remem
ber word for word. Remember that almost any device for reconstruction is fine,
as long as you let readers in on what you're doing.
2. To get a feel for writing scene, re-create an event that took place in the last
week---one with characters you can delineate and dialogue you can remember.
It doesn't have to be important-it probably will help if it isn't. The point is
simply to write two to three pages in which a location is established through
description, people are characterized and talk, and something happens.