Order of a Sentence – with Maralys Wills

sentence

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

If a story moves forward one step at a time, each of those steps is the sentence. It’s the basic unit we read in, covering one small handful of points, and urging us on to read the next one. To explain that last part–about the sentence’s last part, and the sense of urgency it should give–I’ve asked multitalented author Maralys Wills to comment:

 

After years of teaching and doing line-by-line editing on some 50,000 manuscript pages, I’ve discovered one of the most effective, and yes, simplest, ways of improving your writing.  Always save the strongest word for the END OF THE SENTENCE.   For instance, if you have the sentence, “Death is the one thing I’ve always feared,”  you’d re-write it to say, “The one thing I’ve always feared is death.”  To the extent that you do this on all your sentences, you’ll find your work has a new feeling of energy, of power. You’ll discover that your words ring in the reader’s ears. As you write, you’re always building to strength.  Good writers do this instinctively.  But it’s something that even a beginner can learn.

I’d have to agree, a sentence lives and dies by its momentum. Except, maximizing that last word may not be as simple as it sounds, especially in fiction.

Consider the basic sentence shape,

subject verb object

such as:

John chased the outlaw.

The challenge is that fiction mainly needs the picture to evolve, one step at a time out of what it had been before. Nonfiction can casually drop a comparison of something to “a sheriff chasing down some desperado” into a paragraph to jazz up its point with its flashiest word as its object, right at the sentence finale. But in fiction the outlaw’s probably already on the scene, and we’re more interested in the shifting relationship between him and the other pieces there — not how many other names he can be called by, but who “chases” or “yells” or “shoots” at who. Or better yet, if that chase also lets John on his horse “thunder” after the outlaw.

That is, there’s more room for variety in the sentence’s verb, not its object… even though most natural-sounding sentences put their verb in the middle, not the end. Trouble.

One answer is not to ask the object to compete with the verb.<!> Moment-to-moment fiction just gives verbs too much advantage, and often it’s better to only look for an object that’s a worthy wrapup for the verb’s power.

(And, the main choices are just the verb in the middle and the object at the end. Plenty of sentences use or even end with other parts of speech, but those pieces are trimmings compared to the Big Three; trying to power-finish with “John chased the outlaw desperately” is more likely to crush the adverb under the sentence’s weight than it is to empower either.)

Still, there are a few options to get the most power out of objects:

  • pick specific urgent parts of a thing that will grab attention, like our outlaw raising “his gun.”
    • or, picking out an attached part just to paint a wider picture of that object, before swinging back to the central thing again, such as John noticing the outlaw’s gun hand’s “tremble” rather than always the man himself.
    • mixing in other subjects and their chance to pick a new object that , such as townspeople sweating in the temperature’s “inferno.”
      • or of course, when the plot swings around to new and important things that first appear as an object, like the outlaw grabbing “a hostage.”

(And of course, these can mix up the subject too.)

Maralys Wills has her website at http://maralys.com/

For my own larger collection of thoughts on sentences and wording, take a look at The Toolbox — what goes Around the words.

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