Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 72

The Value of Perversity

Theresa Nielsen Hayden, one of my many editor friends, once claimed that writers are like otters. Apparently, if you are trying to train animals, the normal method is to provide praise and rewards when they do something you would like them to do; the theory is that the animal thinks "He liked that! Cool! I'll do it again." If, however, the animal is an otter, what it thinks is "She liked that! Wow! Next time, I'll do something even cooler!"

Almost all the authors I've ever known have a certain perversity of thought, especially once they've gotten over all the how-do-I-do-this-is-it-right jitters that so many have at the beginning of their careers.  Established writers are downright contrary; give 'em a set of guidelines (let alone rules), and they'll happily set about straining them to the absolute breaking point, if they don't shatter them into a million pieces just to prove they can.

I've written stuff purely because somebody said I couldn't or shouldn't. The most memorable was me saying I couldn't and shouldn't - I'd gotten an invitation to a themed short story anthology, for which I had no suitable story in the file cabinet, no time to write a new one, no ideas for one anyway, and besides, it was far too short a deadline…so I checked off the "No, I cannot contribute to your anthology" box on the enclosed postcard and threw it in my "outgoing mail" pile. I then sat down to work on the then-current WIP. Four hours later, I got up, fished the postcard out of the pile, and tore it up, because I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft of a short story I knew I'd finish in the morning that would be perfect for the anthology.

(And it was, and they bought it. The story was "The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn," if you were wondering, and the anthology was Bruce Coville's The Unicorn Treasury.)

Writerly perversity applies to just about any aspect of writing you can think of, from things like the style and content of a story to structure to decisions about where to submit a piece. And, of course, to the whole writing process itself.

Which is why I occasionally get accused of giving contradictory advice.

"But you said writers are supposed to do X!" someone complains.

"No," I reply, "I said that that particular writer would be best advised to try X. You aren't that particular writer. In fact, you are nothing like that writer, not at all, so why on earth are you trying to work the way he/she does?"

The normal response is either grumpy silence or a long argument over the nonexistence of writing rules and regulations in general. But really, it all boils down to this:

Writers do not like repeating the same trick over and over. They get bored easily, on the one hand, and on the other, they want to show off whatever shiny new trick has caught their attention. They are really, really insistant on doing something even cooler (though admittedly, it is not always evident to their faithful readers why this shiny new trick is cooler than the last one, but that's because tastes vary).

Writers are very, very stubborn about all of this. And that is a good thing, because it's how we get so many lovely new stories to read.

Good enough

On Monday I was commiserating with a businessman friend about the miserable state of the economy, the dismal job market, the Packers winning the Superbowl (because he cares, not because I do), and various other usual topics, when he mentioned in passing that he couldn't find the right person to fill a particular job opening. I expressed surprise; given the vast numbers of people who are currently looking, it seemed to me like a buyer's market. We talked a bit more, and finally the lightbulb came on.

"Oh," I said, "you want somebody who is really anal-retentive for that position, right?"

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. "Not quite. I need somebody who is anal-retentive about the right things. Somebody who can tell when 'just good enough' is good enough, and when it's time to get picky about even the tiniest flakes of dust."

At which point, it occurred to me that part of the problem with writing is just exactly that: knowing when to be picky about the right things. It doesn't do a bit of good to polish a paragraph until every word in it shines if there's a serious problem with the scene or the chapter.

The trouble is, it's a lot easier for most writers to sort out microwriting problems than it is to find and fix problems at the macro level. To some extent, this is because the only way you can fix a writing problem is on the micro level. The events of the first six chapters may be happening in the wrong order, but a big part of making the fix is changing words and phrases: "February" to "August," "stamping snow from their boots" to "scraping mud off their shoes" and so on.

This makes it very easy to lose focus - to get so caught up in changing the winter day to a summer one that one forgets why one was changing it. The point isn't to stuff in as many references to weather and the time of year as possible; the point is to give the events of the particular scene a new context. It's not about simply changing the venue from February to August; it's about the way the action flows from one scene to the next, and the way information gets fed to the readers and to the characters.

Some writers do this by alternating rapidly between a close-up focus  ("what words do I need in this sentence?") and a big picture focus ("how is moving this scene going to change the overall pace and flow of the story? Is changing this sentence going to help or hurt?"). Some writers lay out the big picture very carefully before they start revising, then dive into the microwriting, secure in the knowledge that They Have A Plan. And some writers appear to be multitasking geniuses who can hold both things in their heads at once.

However you do it, the important thing is to make sure that whatever changes you make work on both the microwriting level and the macrowriting level.

It always happens to me

As regular readers of this blog may remember, a couple of months back I realized I'd gotten partway into the third of the Frontier Magic books and realized that I'd gotten the events in the wrong order.

Not "wrong" in the sense that I'd gotten cause and effect reversed (you know, the sort of thing where someone's suffering from a gunshot wound before the gun has actually been fired, or deducing information from a clue they haven't found yet). Wrong in the sense that one subplot had taken over, resulting in a whole lot of too-similar scenes in a row. Also wrong in the sense that the order of the scenes, if closely examined, didn't build up the way it needed too.

I ended up scraping the entire ms. back to paragraph 2 and starting over. I have now, finally, come nearly back to the end of the material I'd supposedly already covered, so I thought I'd update you on the situation.

The ms. is twice as long as it was in its original form, because there are scenes from several more subplots interspersed with the original scenes. The first-round material is now in a much more sensible order, has more logical reason behind it, and isn't so repetetive. The characters are, as usual, filling up far more time than I expected with clearing up important loose ends - they were supposed to have been on the road long before this, but what can you do? Scenes that happened in midwinter now happen in midsummer, which meant keeping a careful eye on the descriptive bits and stage business so that I didn't end up with people shaking snow off their coats in August.

I don't call this kind of thing "revising," though there's really no reason not to except personal preference. I call it "rewriting" or "redrafting." It's a way of fooling my backbrain into considering the story from a completely new angle. I'm not just patching up gaping holes in the roof; I'm building a whole new roof, though I do get to reuse some of the old material, if it's in good enough shape. It's a matter of attitude.

The other thing about this kind of do-over is that this time, I didn't end up wasting months agonizing about whether I really had to do it and looking for ways to salvage the work I'd done without going back to zero and rewriting the whole plot. I've done this twice before, and each time, it took me nearly a year to suck it up and ditch the chapters that had to be ditched. That's a year of wasted time, because I wasn't actually making forward progress on anything, just waffling and complaining and agonizing about how I wasn't getting anywhere. Third time's the charm, I guess.

I'm going through all this partly because I promised I'd keep people updated, but also because…well, because it's one of the hard parts about being a writer. (Which is why it took nine to fourteen months to psych up to do it the first two times I did it.) I am hopeful that the fact that it only took me a week to recognize and admit the fundamental problem this time means that next time (and I'm sure that there will be a next time, though I hope it's a few more books down the road) I will notice sooner and be able to fix it faster. Because the earlier you spot this kind of thing, the less you have to rewrite and the easier the whole process is.

Now all I have to do is finish the darned thing.

The Lego Theory Part the Last

This is the last of this series of posts. Really. I mean it.

Part of why it's the last is that I'm up to scenes, and I'm not really sure I can take this analogy this far, let alone any farther. Paragraphs were OK, because they're the linking point between the basic blocks of language - words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs - and the things you can do by putting those blocks together in different ways - scenes, chapters, novels, etc.

That means that from paragraphs on up, the writer needs to look at what she wants to build and make decisions based on the overall goal, then work backward to find the words and phrases and sentences with the properties she needs to get to that goal. You can't build a big red dinosaur if all you have are green and blue blocks. The way you fit the blocks together will be different if you want the dinosaur to be a raptor or a Tyrannosaurus rex, or if you want it to be standing upright vs. crouched.

In other words, you have to have some idea what you want to say, and/or what you are trying to do.

This is why so much how-to-write advice starts from various theories of what a scene needs and how to get to it: critical elements, goals, disasters, conflict, tension, drama, theme, etc. They're all trying to slap some structure or organization on the enormous number of possible things that writers can say and do in a scene. Everybody seems to take a different approach, which is fine, because with anything as complicated as a scene, there are probably as many different approaches as there are writers.

All that complexity means that I can't really sum up scenes in terms of a couple of properties, because there are too many different things - important different things - you can do with scenes. The best rule-of-thumb for scenes I know is the one I talked about in the Big Three: that a scene that doesn't do one of three things (advance the plot, deepen the characterization, reveal background/backstory) doesn't belong in the story; that a scene that does only one or two of the three can usually be improved by adding the missing thing, and that a scene that does all three things is a keeper.

But it is equally useful to look at scenes through the lens of the old journalism concept of five w's and an h: who, what, when, where, why, and how. In fiction, some of those things are often not stated explicitly - the readers are often left to judge for themselves why the characters have behaved as they do, for instance, and the "how" is frequently left for the climax of the overall story.

Nevertheless, a scene involves characters (who), something happening (what and how), at a particular time (when) and place (where), for some reason (why). The fact that these things aren't laid out in so many words makes it even more important for the writer to know they are in there somewhere, or at least, that the reader has enough information to figure them out.

That's about all I can think of to say about scenes that really applies to the category "scenes." Everything else I can think of has to do with specific subcategories: dialog scenes, action scenes, contemplative scenes, reaction scenes, emotional scenes, etc. which gets back to complexity and what you want to say and how the scene fits into the story as a whole. And since saying what you want to say is the goal of this whole series of posts, I think that's a reasonable place to stop.

The Lego Theory, Part 7

OK, you twisted my arm. But I'm stopping at scenes. Really.

As I said, paragraphs are where this analogy switches from looking at building blocks to looking at what you are building out of the building blocks. Consequently, the main properties of paragraphs aren't so much about the paragraphs as a unit; they're more about the way all the earlier blocks and bits of blocks fit together to get a particular effect.

Paragraphs are groups of sentences. That's the official definition I learned back in grade school - a paragraph consists of one or more sentences that deal with a single idea or topic. What I didn't find out until much, much later is that paragraphs can also be looked at as a way of breaking down a larger idea - a story, a scene, an essay topic - into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. In other words, you can look at them as the largest unit of grammar/syntax, or as the smallest unit of story.

Either way you look at it, though, paragraphs are a collective, and so I call the first major property of paragraphs relationship. The sentences in a paragraph have to relate to each other in ways that aren't pre-defined by parts of speech or the rules of grammar and syntax. Paragraphs also have to relate to each other in some way, or the story or essay devolves into incoherence.

The tricky thing about paragraphs is that they don't have the same kind of structural, grammatical, or syntactical rules that you get with words, phrases, and sentences. This is especially true when it comes to fiction, and it means you don't have anything to fall back on when you're not sure which sentence should go where. It's pretty clear if you've gotten the subject and the verb in the wrong spots in a sentence, but sometimes the only way to figure out the order of the sentences in a paragraph is to move them around six or eight times to see what works better (and imagine what a pain that was prior to word-processors!). Sometimes, I end up moving a sentence up or down a couple of paragraphs, because it relates better there than it does in the place where I originally thought it up.

The relationship between sentences within a paragraph is usually based on content - they're all about the same thing. The relationship between paragraphs usually has to do with moving the story smoothly forward - the way the action or the conversation or the description flows from one paragraph-sized unit to the next. If the relationship isn't clear and the topic of one paragraph doesn't move smoothly into the topic of the next, you probably need a transition to link the two (or at least clarify the relationship between the respective paragraphs). Also, it's worth mentioning that most paragraphs have to relate to both the previous paragraph and to the one that comes next (unless of course you're at a scene or chapter break, and even then, you usually want some kind of transition).

The second major property of paragraphs is…I dunno, I've already used "significance," so let's call this one "importance." Each paragraph is presumed to be about as important as every other paragraph in the story (if it isn't, why is it there?), and each paragraph theoretically has just as many sentences as it needs in order to get its idea across. Since importance is a property of paragraphs, rather than sentences, it spreads out pretty evenly across all the sentences in the paragraph, whether it's a two-sentence paragraph or a ten-sentence paragraph. The sentences in a two-sentence paragraph thus end up feeling more important or more urgent than the sentences in the eight-sentence paragraph.

A one-sentence paragraph seems more important still.

Especially if it's short.

It grabs attention.

Hard.

At least, it does the first time you use the trick. After a while, though, the principles of contrast and variation come into play, and all those one-sentence, one-line, one-word attention-grabbers stop feeling important or urgent and start feeling gimmicky. "Fun with Dick and Jane" has almost nothing but one-line, one-sentence paragraphs, and I don't think anyone sees it as a great model for grabbing and holding the reader's attention.

The last thing I want to say about paragraphs is a reminder that they're at the top end of the chain of building blocks that runs from words to phrases to sentences. Consequently, all of the properties of those smaller blocks add up and apply to paragraphs. Paragraphs, though, are the point where things start to shift. Properties like complexity and variation and importance and content become more and more important from here on up, while properties like sound and rhythm and length become less so. A one-word paragraph commands attention. A one-word scene…I'm not sure that's even possible, and I'm quite sure I've never seen one, which tells you right there that even if it is possible, it's not really very useful for most writers.

The Lego Theory, Part 6

A quick recap, for those who are getting a little lost:

Fiction (and the English language generally) is built up by combining smaller units into larger and larger ones according to various rules and principles, the same way you build large, intricate Lego models by putting a few relatively simple blocks together into more and more varied shapes.

Moving from smallest to largest, the basic building blocks of fiction are: words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, books, multi-book story arcs.

Each building block has properties that writers can use to make their prose more effective. So far, I've talked about specificity, sound, and strength/significance; position/order, rhythm, length, and contrast; variation, and complexity.

And I'm only up to sentences, and I'm not done with them yet.

There are two more properties of sentences that I still want to mention, and the first of them is pattern. It's a little more complicated than some of the other properties, because you can create a pattern out of any of the properties I've talked about so far, and not just one at a time, either. Even in a short, simple sentence like "he hunted," you have the alliterative pattern of the opening h's. More commonly, you see patterns of repetition made by using the same words or structure in the phrases and clauses that get put together to make a complex sentence:  "He hunted them with sharpened forks, with crumbling sealing-wax, with enameled thimbles, and with opaque glassware." "I told you in French; I told you in German; I told you in Japanese and Arabic and Thai."

Patterns, especially simple, repetitive patterns, give more emphasis and strength to whatever is included in the pattern. Setting up a pattern and then breaking it, partially breaking it, or extending it, can make a sentence work even better, especially if there's a subtle pattern underlying an obvious one. In "I told you…," I was deliberately setting up a repetitive structural pattern: "I told you X, I told you Y" - and then extending it with "I told you A and B and C." What I didn't realize until I got to this paragraph and looked back at it was that I also had a pattern of syllables going, from one-syllable "French," to two in "German" to three with "Japanese" and "Arabic."

And as soon as I realized that, I tried changing the last one to "Mandarin," to carry the syllable pattern one step further, but I didn't like it. I tried a couple of other languages…and then I realized that the problem was that following the pattern of syllables had set up a rhythm, and that the reason I wasn't happy was that all of my three-syllable language choices meant that I was ending the sentence on a weak beat. Going back to a one-syllable language brought the whole pattern back around to the beginning while also providing a more emphatic closure by ending on a strong beat.

In a story, which word I'd pick would depend on what came next. If it was "…And you didn't listen, not once!", I'd go with "Thai," because the stronger ending shuts off the list of languages in preparation for moving on to the next part of the complaint. If what came next was "I sent you notes, I sent you letters, I sent you articles and novellas and haiku," then I'd probably go with "Mandarin" at the end of the first sentence, because I wouldn't want to shut off the pattern just yet."

Which brings me to the last property of sentences that I want to talk about: content. It's last because it's the thing most people think about first when it comes to writing sentences. After all, the whole point of a sentence is to get an idea or image across to the reader.

What people sometimes forget is that you can look at content in much the same way as any other property of a sentence: as a way of adjusting how much impact you want a sentence (or paragraph or scene or whatever from there on up) to have on the reader. People tend to react more strongly to sentences about exploding volcanoes than they do to sentences about doing the dishes. Yes, you can use other properties and word choices to make the exploding volcano feel less important and the dishes feel more important, but you have to work at it.

As you move further up the levels, into paragraphs and scenes, content (like variation and complexity and contrast) becomes more and more important because there are so many more ways to use it over a wider and wider range. The context - the wider content of the paragraph and the scene and the overall story - has a lot to do with whether the volcanic explosion is a sudden, high-impact shock, or whether it comes as almost a relief after a long, slow build-up of expectations, or whether it's just one more disaster in a string of disasters that's gone on so long it's become the norm.

I can stop here, or I can do one or two more posts. Really, from sentences on up, it's more about what kinds of things you want to build with your Legos than it is about the individual blocks and groups of blocks.

The Lego Theory Part 5

Clauses are the next step up from phrases, and they are intimately connected with sentences. They come in two varieties, independent and dependent, and the first sort is a sentence, or could be if you punctuated it differently. "He ran, but she escaped." is a single sentence built out of two independent clauses with a comma-and-conjunction in the middle; "He ran. She escaped." is two sentences. Independent clauses are stronger than dependent clauses because they're whole.

The difference between a dependent clause and a sentence is that a dependent clause can't stand alone. Putting a period at the end of a dependent clause doesn't make it a sentence, because it isn't finished. It needs an independent clause to prop it up and finish it off, the same way a string of adjectives needs a noun at the end in order to be more than a random collection of words. "The giant red cold blinking artificial" is just a collection of adjectives until you add "goldfish" to the end, whereupon it becomes a phrase. "When the volcano exploded" and "because he knew" are both dependent clauses; sticking them together doesn't make a sentence until you add an independent clause like "George ran" or "she would escape."

If you leave a dependent clause or a phrase lying around all by itself, like "if Helen had set off the bomb" or "to swallow unwary travelers," you have a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments aren't really a separate level; they're broken-off bits of other building blocks. Like half a Lego, fragments can still be useful to achieve certain effects, but you have to be careful where and how you use them, because a broken-off bit of a block isn't as strong as a whole one and doesn't look as nice. If I ever get to paragraphs and scenes, maybe I'll talk some more about fragments then.

Like a tower of Legos, sentences are built up from smaller pieces and units - words, phrases, and clauses - and as with Legos, the properties of those units stack. Sentences, like words, can be specific and concrete, or they can be fuzzy and abstract. The position of words and phrases within a sentence affects their strength, impact, and effectiveness. The length of the sentence as a whole affects the kind of effect you can get with it, as does the overall rhythm of the sentence and the way all the words and phrases fit together. Just as with phrases, the first and last elements of a sentence tend to be more memorable and/or have more impact than the elements in the middle; establishing a rhythm and then changing it calls attention to the part of the sentence where the rhythm change happens; and short sentences tend to have more impact than long ones (unless you use too many of them in a row and wear the reader out). Within a given sentence, shorter elements tend to be more memorable than longer ones.

With the sentence level come some more key properties of prose, two of which are variation and complexity. Sentences can be simple and straightforward, or run on for a page of complicated interlocking clauses. Starting from a single, short, simple independent clause like "George ran," you can pile on phrases and descriptors: up the hill, away from the airport, after the bomber, into the glowing forest, next to the fairy hill. You can add a few dependent clauses, or link your first independent clause to a second one to make a compound sentence. Or you can do all of those things at once: "When the volcano exploded, George ran quickly up the hill and away from the airport, because he knew that if Helen had set off the bomb, she would escape into the glowing forest next to the fairy hill, where the giant red blinking artificial goldfish waited to swallow unwary travelers."

And you can vary all of the elements you use within a given sentence (that is, if it has multiple elements; it's kind of hard to get much internal variation out of a short, simple sentence like "George ran."). In the above example, there are short clauses ("because he knew") and longer ones ("George ran up the hill and away from the airport"), different types of phrases and clauses, and every part of speech from noun to conjunction (except for interjections). The rhythm changes, but not too often (and the pauses indicted by commas fall in places where there's a missing beat, for the most part).

Variation is immensely important for fiction, because fiction is entertainment, and no matter what kind of entertainment you are looking at, if it gets boring, it has failed. If your writing is all the same at any level - if all the phrases are the same length, or all the sentences have the same rhythm or complexity, or all the words are one-syllable, the reader starts to get used to it. If this goes on too long, the readers can get bored or irritated, which is why you want to vary different elements from time to time. On the other hand, too much variation has the same effect as trying to work in too much contrast - you get a hard-to-read confetti effect if you try too hard.

As you can see, the further up the levels you go, from words to phrases to clauses and sentences, the more options and properties one has to juggle, and the more complex things can get. This continues up through paragraphs and scenes and chapters and so on, which is one reason why juggling all this stuff to get to a more effective outcome gets harder and harder. You can micro-manage every word and phrase and sentence in a poem (you pretty much have to micro-manage everything in a haiku), but if you try to juggle all this stuff consciously at all possible levels of language in a 100,000 word novel, you will go crazy.

The Lego Theory, Part 4

Before I go on, I would like to remind everybody once again that the vast majority of authors do not consciously and deliberately micro-manage their writing to wring every last bit of strength out of every word's position, rhythm, etc. Most of the time, we work by feel - this way feels better/stronger than that way. I personally find that it helps to know why things work, especially when one is struggling with those one or two places in a piece that just don't seem to be working, but I rarely do this kind of conscious analysis on my own stuff, and when I do, it's pretty much always in a revisions pass.

Back to phrases.

I've already talked about position and rhythm. The third key property of phrases is length. Theoretically, you can string together as many nouns or verbs, or stuff in as many adverbs and adjectives, as you want in a phrase, but it doesn't take long to overload something this short. If you have to wade through six or seven adjectives/adverbs to get to the noun, you can lose track. On the other hand, you can manipulate how much impact a phrase has by making it longer (less) or shorter (more).

Length gets more important the further up the chain of units you go, in part because the amount of flexibility you have increases. A phrase can only get to five or six words before it starts to collapse under its own weight and becomes useless; two words is as short as you can get (I think; I'm not sure a single word counts as a "phrase," no matter how much information and context is packed into it). But sentences can be as short as one word or go on for hundreds of words, and so can paragraphs, allowing the writer a lot more room to create different effects by changing the length of a sentence or paragraph (of which more when we get there).

Next on the "properties" list comes contrast. At the phrase level, most of the contrast comes from word choices - putting a long word next to a short one, or a color adjective next to one for smell; changing the rhythm in a longer phrase; and so on. But once again, the further up the levels you get, the more possibilities for contrast you have - not just word choice within phrases, but the contrast between two phrases, between phrases and sentences, between different kinds of sentences, and so on.

Many writers think of contrast (if they think of it at all) as a matter of content- the difference between action scenes and emotional ones, for instance. That's certainly one aspect of contrast, but it only becomes important when you get way up in the middle levels and start talking about types of scenes. Contrast can be really useful at much lower levels of structure. Think of that big red Lego dinosaur. Now picture it with just two of the red Legos replaced by pale pink ones. You can get this same effect in prose by suddenly changing one or more of the properties (rhythm, length, etc.) through a change in word choice.

Contrast loses most of its impact if there is too much of it, too often. Two pale pink Legos on a giant red dinosaur would stand out because of the contrast. If, however, the dinosaur is built of Legos that change color every two or three blocks, none of the colors would stand out much and instead you'd get a confetti effect. I'm not sure what you'd call this in prose, but it certainly happens now and again, and if for some reason the writer is actively trying to make contrast less important in a piece, using a confetti effect is at least as useful as trying to avoid any contrast at all (and possibly much easier to do).

Phrases and their properties are important because they are a big part of what creates complexity in clauses and sentences, and all of their properties - position/order, rhythm, length, and contrast - apply to every unit of English from phrases on up. In other words, just as the first word in a phrase is a little stronger because of its position, so is the first sentence in a paragraph, the first paragraph in a chapter or scene, the first chapter of a book (hence the whole concept of the "hook"), etc. There's a rhythm within phrases, within sentences, within paragraphs. Shorter sentences and paragraphs have more impact than longer ones (if they aren't used so much that there's no contrast, see confetti effect, above). I'll talk about this more when I finally get to some of the things you can do with all this stuff, which will probably be after the next post, if people are still with me.

On to clauses and sentences. I warned you this was going to be long.

The Lego Theory, Part 3

Every set of Legos has the basic square and rectangular blocks that you build most of your castles and dinosaurs and pirates with, and then a bunch of oddly shaped pieces that you use to make the fancy bits. Last post, I compared the basic Legos to the first four basic parts of speech - nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

With both Legos and words, you can get along reasonably well with just the basic parts, but as soon as you want to make something complicated, you really want those pieces that are triangular or round or trapezoidal or long and skinny, to link things together or put the pointy tops on the towers or teeth or party hats. That's what the rest of the parts of speech do - the pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. None of them are particularly strong on their own, but they are invaluable once you start putting words together into phrases.

Phrases are the next level of English, up from "words," and this is the point where things begin to get interesting. Because as soon as you put two or more words together to make a phrase, they not only interact with each other, but they suddenly develop a couple of new properties that affect the impact they make.

The first of these is position or order. At the phrase level, the order that the words go in doesn't have a lot of flexibility in English. You can say "the red flower," but not "red the flower" or "flower the red." If you move a preposition to a different position, you often change the meaning of the phrase; "of the African jungle" is not the same as "jungle of the African" or "African of the jungle."

Nevertheless, position in phrases is where the writer starts being able to control what is going on in his/her prose. Words are what they are; unless the writer goes to the same extreme as J.R.R. Tolkein and invents whole new languages, the only control the writer has is over which words he/she chooses to use. The order the words go in is something the writer does have control of, at least to an extent, and that control grows with every level from phrases on up. You may not be able to move prepositions or conjunctions around without changing the meaning, but you can choose between "bedknobs and broomsticks" and "broomsticks and bedknobs" or between "on his champagne-polished black boots" and "on his black, champagne-polished boots."

The reason you want to control position or word order is that, as a general rule, the first element in a phrase or clause or sentence has the most impact and is the most memorable; the last element has second-most; and the ones in the middle have the least. "Bedknobs" has slightly more weight or strength than "broomsticks" in the phrase "bedknobs and broomsticks," for instance.

Position stacks on top of whatever strength the word has on its own. "Bedknobs" and "broomsticks" are both nouns, so they start off more-or-less equal in strength; it's only the relative position in the phrase that makes one a little stronger than the other. But the first word in "to boldly go" is a preposition, which is a relatively weak linking word; the fact that it comes first doesn't add much strength because it doesn't have much of a base to add onto. "Go," on the other hand, is a verb, the strongest part of speech, and it comes in the second strongest position, at the end of the phrase. Putting "go" in the middle (so as not to split the infinitive) weakens it significantly.

The second key property of phrases (as compared to words) is rhythm. Multi-syllable words can have rhythm because of the differing emphasis on the syllables; this is what makes some words fun to say (like "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"), but it's built-in and the writer can't do anything about it. As soon as there are multiple words, as in a phrase, the writer can control the rhythm by choosing words carefully and positioning them properly. By doing so, the writer can increase or decrease the natural strength and impact of any shorter unit that is part of a longer one (that is, you can use rhythm to put greater or lesser emphasis on a particular word in a phrase, or a particular phrase in a sentence, sentence in a paragraph, etc.).

Rhythm stacks with position and the other things that give a word strength. For example, with "bedknobs and broomsticks," the rhythm (DUH-da-da-DUH-da) is the same, whichever noun you put first. But "to boldly go" has a nice, regular rhythm - da-DUH-da-DUH - and ends on a strong beat. So the phrase has a verb, at the end, on a strong beat - three strengths all stacked together. "To go boldly," on the other hand, puts two strong beats together in the middle ("GO BOLDly"), interrupting the rhythm, and ends on a weak beat as well as with a weaker part of speech (the adverb). This is why "to boldly go" has so much more of a ring to it than "to go boldly" (for everyone except really strict grammarians, anyway). Poets do this kind of thing all the time, but it's useful in prose, too.

More on phrases coming up. I did mention that this was going to be long, yes?

The Lego Theory, Part II

Words, being the smallest and most basic building blocks of fiction, have lots of useful and important properties. I've already talked about specificity and sound; the next really key thing a writer needs to know about words is that they have different…strength or significance.

I define strong words as "the ones people pay more attention to." They have more weight in the reader's mind, and therefore make more of an impact. Since fiction is usually about making an impact on the reader, strength is probably the most important property and word, phrase, sentence, etc. can have.

What makes strength really useful, though, is that it isn't an absolute property - it's affected by a whole lot of other things that come along as words get strung together in different ways to make larger and larger units. This means that a writer can adjust the impact that a word or phrase or sentence has, by adjusting some of its other properties.

A word's basic strength begins with the first four basic parts of speech that we all learned (one hopes) in school:  noun, verb, adjective, adverb. Think of them as different sizes and shapes and colors of Legos. Put the right ones together in the right order, and you get a cool dinosaur; opt for ones that are the wrong size or shape, and you end up with an awkward unidentifiable lump.

So, parts of speech. The strongest one - the largest Lego - is the verb. Verbs are where the action is in any given sentence. Even so-called "passive verbs" indicate that something exists or is ongoing. A verb on its own can be an entire sentence, and a command, at that. You can tell a story with verbs alone: Look! Scream! Flee! Hide. Peek. Shoot. Duck. Explode. Cheer! 

This is the reason so much writing advice puts so much emphasis on using dramatic, active verbs. Verbs are the strongest type of word, by nature, and using a vivid, specific, concrete one can double up that strength. By the same token, if the writer wants a word to have less impact (perhaps so that an upcoming plot twist will not be obvious, or because the writer wants more focus on some other part of a phrase or sentence, or just to give the reader a rest for a moment), choosing a verb that is abstract or general may be the way to go.

Next in terms of strength come nouns. Nouns and verbs are the basic bricks that everything else gets built with. Nouns aren't as strong as verbs because until they have a verb to go with them, they just sit there. On the other hand, the more precise, clear, and specific you can make your nouns, the stronger they become. A red flower by any other name could be a carnation or a rose or a trumpet flower, but a rose is a rose is a rose.

Adjectives and adverbs are the weakest of the four basic building blocks, because they can't stand on their own. "Small cold blue" doesn't tell you anything until it has a noun like "elephant" or "shotgun" attached to it. In addition, some of time the right noun or verb can eliminate the need for one or more adjectives/adverbs; if so, you're generally better off using that noun or verb because they're stronger to begin with.

Another difficulty with adjectives and adverbs is that the more of them one uses, the weaker they become. This applies whether one is overloading just one noun or verb with four or five descriptors, or whether one has a modest one descriptor for each and every noun or verb on a page.

Because of all this, and because too many writers overuse them, adjectives and adverbs get a bad rap in a lot of writing advice. In its most exaggerated form, this becomes the "never use adverbs/adjectives" rule. But even if you are trying to pack your prose with as many dramatic, high-impact words as possible, ignoring adverbs and adjectives is not automatically your best choice. Yes, they are weaker than nouns or verbs, but the concrete/precision property still applies: the more precise and specific the adjective, the stronger it tends to be.

And if you have an adjective or adverb that makes its noun more concrete and precise in a way that can't be done with just a concrete noun, you have a winner. "Holy book" is a generic noun plus an adjective; "Bible" "Koran" or even "prayerbook" would be stronger in most cases. But "scarf" is a generic noun; "silk scarf" is more specific, and there isn't a noun that would do the job. Likewise, adjectives and adverbs that are unexpected are usually Good Things: "Wonderful," he said glumly.

So the best advice is, as always, not to just delete all the adverbs and adjectives indiscriminately, but to think about the desired effect and whether the adverb/adjective is really necessary. "'I hate you,' she said angrily." doesn't really need the adverb because the angry tone is consistent with the dialog; "she snarled" would be better, and it would be fine with just "she said." But "'I hate you,' she said cheerfully" isn't a sentence that can drop the adverb and still mean the same thing. Neither is "The band played badly."

Notice that a lot of what I'm talking about here is the way that words relate to each other. Because face it, the important thing about Legos is not the shape of each piece; it's how they fit together and what you can make with them. That really begins with the next level up from words: phrases. Which is what comes next.