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  AS GOOD AS IT CAN BE …

  Some Basics of Structure and Style

  In the previous chapter we considered what might need correcting in your story and the way you tell it. Once you’ve dealt with that, it is finally time to polish your structure and presentation. Here are a few basics that you should keep in mind.

  Chapter Breakdown

  A novel doesn’t have the same structural rules as, say, a sonnet or a haiku, but there is a more-or-less accepted framework. The most macro element of this framework is generally the chapter.

  A chapter may be as long or as short as necessary. Some writers prefer to keep all their chapters about the same length, say 5,000 words, which would mean an average-length book had 15–20 chapters. Other writers vary chapter size: one may be 1,200 words (only about three or four printed pages) while another is 6,000. This may be dictated by the pace of the book or the way the plot develops: you don’t want to break off in the middle of the most exciting part to say ‘Chapter 10’ just because you have reached the required number of words in Chapter 9. Most publishers don’t mind about chapter length, as long as the book has the right number of words in total.

  How much happens in a chapter is up to you, too. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. The hero may meet the heroine, fall in love, have a misunderstanding and break up, all in the space of a chapter. At other times a whole chapter may be consumed by the hero driving from his office to the nursing home where his elderly mother lives, worrying about what sort of mood she will be in today.

  How to Begin and How to End

  How many times have you been reading in bed, or over a cup of coffee during a break in your working day and said to yourself, ‘I’ll just get to the end of this chapter’? And then found yourself three pages into the next chapter without realizing it? That’s because the writer has been clever with chapter endings.

  Except for the end of the book, when you have to tie up all the loose ends, never end a chapter by solving anything. If your hero is having a problem catching up with the bad guy, don’t let him catch him on the last page of a chapter, unless the bad guy has a gun in his hand. Chapter endings should be dynamic and energetic, taking the reader’s breath away and forcing her to continue reading.

  The first sentence in every chapter should draw the reader into the story, just as the first sentence in the book did. Starting with dialogue or a strong piece of action may persuade the reader not to go to sleep just yet.

  Paragraphs

  Each chapter is further broken down into paragraphs. Paragraphs are versatile and flexible; they may be a page long or just a few sentences. But unless you are writing dialogue, they should be more than one sentence. As a rule, a single sentence cannot stand as a separate paragraph of narrative text.

  If you haven’t done it automatically as you wrote your first draft, breaking your manuscript into paragraphs should be done with an eye for both sense and readability. Huge blocks of text can be off-putting. Many readers will give up – or at least skip a few lines – rather than wade through that much information. You may be reluctant to break a single thread of thought that runs through a page-long paragraph. Henry James famously wrote in very long paragraphs, but even with a great stylist such as him, many people find him difficult to read for this very reason. It’s for the good of your story that you offer it to your readers in a way that they can take it in.

  This doesn’t mean that you should never use a long paragraph. Paragraphs don’t all have to be the same length. Long paragraphs can be right for creating mood, but shorter paragraphs convey more movement. Excitement and agitation can be expressed with short, choppy paragraphs.

  Use paragraph breaks every time you change the mood or place. Give your reader plenty of room to absorb all your words.

  Dialogue Format

  Each line of dialogue constitutes its own paragraph. For instance:

  She walked into the house and closed the door.

  Her mother looked up. ‘Back already?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing to eat. I wasn’t expecting you.’

  This is where you break the rule about single-sentence paragraphs. The convention is that each new speaker has a new paragraph. That’s because it is so easy for a reader to get lost when more than one character is speaking. Always keep in mind that you want to make it as easy for the reader as possible. She may be reading in a room full of crying toddlers, or on a crowded bus on the way to work. A fascinating story will go a long way towards keeping her attention. But a well-ordered page helps too.

  Don’t worry that there is too much of what publishers call ‘white space’ on a page of dialogue. Readers can cope with that. They may even welcome it after an extended piece of ‘moody’ narrative where you indulged in a few longer paragraphs. It would be far worse to have the dialogue jumbled together without paragraphing. A dialogue paragraph means the reader instantly recognizes when a different character is speaking, even without dialogue tags.

  Sentence Structure

  Each paragraph is made up of sentences. There are plenty of books about grammar and sentence structure: what concerns us here is how you use sentences to the best advantage. Sentences can be long or short, but each one should make sense and get to the point.

  So how do you write good sentences? Use strong verbs and interesting nouns. Be sure that you have something to say. Do what feels natural. Watch out for awkward ways of saying something and strive to make them clearer and easier to understand. Compare these two paragraphs:

  He’d always been afraid of lifts. As a child, he avoided them. Later, they became a necessary evil. Now he faced the ultimate challenge. His new job required him to get into a lift that went up ninety-nine floors.

  He gulped as he faced his new enemy. A lift that went up ninety-nine floors. Yes, he was afraid of lifts. He had always managed to avoid them as a child. But now he had no choice. He had to get into that lift or not go to work.

  There is nothing grammatically wrong with the first version. It conveys the same information as the second. But the second is more active and punchy Don’t be afraid of using sentence fragments such as ‘A lift that went up ninety-nine floors’ if it enhances your text.

  As for sentence length, look at these two examples:

  When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

  Dolly stole a glance down the staircase. There were soldiers milling around below, dozens of them, wearing the colours of the palace guard. One of them spotted her and began to shout – the Queen? Is the Queen up there?

  Dolly stepped quickly back, out of his line of sight. Who were these soldiers? What did they want? She could hear their feet on the stairs now. Somewhere close by, the Princess began to cry, in short, breathless gasps. Augusta thrust the baby into her arms – here, Dolly, here, take her, she won’t stop. The baby was screaming, flailing her fists. Dolly had to turn her face away to keep from being struck.

  The first of these, from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, has 110 words and three sentences. The second, from Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, has 112 words and 12 sentences. The first is lyrical, evocative, haunting. You read the long sentences slowly and ponder what great sorrow they foreshadow. The second is action-packed and anxious. You read them quickly, you want to get on with the story: where is the Queen? Is she all right? Will Dolly and the baby escape?

  Try these effects with your own work. Choose your sentence length to suit your
story. Vary it to change pace and mood.

  Making Every Word Count

  Deciding what to put in and what to leave out is tough. Deciding what to leave in and what to take out when you are editing is even tougher. Writers tend to fall in love with their words and ideas. That is one reason why it helps to put your work aside for a while before coming back to revise it: you need to distance yourself from it just a little, so that you can judge it more dispassionately.

  As a writer, you should be prepared to sacrifice anything in the name of clarity. If the reader has no idea what you are talking about, then the greatest story ever told has no meaning. Telling a tale clearly and brilliantly should be the goal of every writer.

  With this in mind, stay away from fancy words that the average person doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know. Don’t say ‘masticate’ when all you mean is ‘chew’ or ‘peruse’ when you mean ‘read’. Your reader wants to read your story: she isn’t interested in the breadth of your vocabulary. Also, in addition to being irritating, the more you use big words, the more likely you are to use them incorrectly. Never, ever use a word unless you are absolutely certain of its meaning. Don’t say disinterested when you mean uninterested, or fortuitous when you mean fortunate. Say what you mean, mean what you say is one of your most important mantras.

  Brevity: the Writer’s Virtue

  Being succinct is an art. Even in a book of 100,000 words, it is important to keep the story fresh and vital. Say what needs to be said in each scene or piece of dialogue, then move on. Don’t belabour the point. If you feel the story or a scene is being dragged out for too long, the chances are that the reader will think so too.

  Some writers feel it’s their responsibility to educate their readers, whether it is about spirituality, world events or whatever. They feel the need to drive their point home over and over again in a way that would make a children’s book on good manners look interesting. Being preachy when you write will alienate more people than it attracts. If you are able to get some small point that you believe in across, then good for you. But be entertaining first. Let readers pick up on your moral if they like, without having it hammered down their throats.

  Overwriting Descriptions

  Overlaying your work with too many metaphors and lavish descriptions will make it feel like a Victorian drawing room. Think of all those lace doilies over velvet cushions. Rugs on top of carpets, bric-a-brac on every surface, pictures all over the walls. The Victorians didn’t know the expression ‘less is more’. The result was nice and comfy most of the time, but sometimes it became stifling.

  Watch out for flowery phrases describing simple things and for page-long descriptions of the room in which the heroine finds herself. Description is fine in small doses. But if your long sentences of description are turning into long pages, cut it back. Find ways of injecting some of it into conversation. Remember that you have a whole book to fill. You can add little details all the way through it. Unless it is crucial to your plot development, there’s no need tell us on page 2 that the flowers in your alien world smell like chocolate. They’ll be just as sweet if you mention them on page 139.

  Overstating Your Point

  As I said a moment ago, it is OK for your book to have a message as long as it doesn’t become an obsession. Readers don’t care about your obsessions unless you are Captain Ahab chasing a great white whale. You can make them feel guilty about eating meat or voting Conservative if it is something to do with the story – but not otherwise.

  The same applies to something as simple as how sexy and beautiful your heroine is. Readers can only stand to be given information like that so many times. After a while, instead of empathizing with her, they begin to want her to fall over a cliff. This is not the reaction you want.

  Over-Explaining the Story

  Mystery novels aren’t the only places where you can explain too much. Even if yours isn’t the sort of book where over-explaining ‘gives the game away,’ any novel that tells too much about the plot, the characters or the setting is flawed. You’re trying to give your readers a feel for the place, the time or the people. You don’t need to spend 25 pages telling them everything you know about it – and they certainly don’t want to know. Caro Fraser puts it this way:

  One of the dangers of working largely from research is that you can get carried away by your own discoveries. There is a temptation, when researching some incidental aspect of a novel, to use a wealth of interesting information and fact in the novel itself. Most of it isn’t needed. It may have helped you to write with confidence, but the reader can usually do without it. More than a few writers fall into the trap of imagining that their sudden, profound depth of knowledge about

  some esoteric subject will be just as fascinating to the reader as it is to them. In one of my novels I had to create a character who develops dementia, and I spent a lot of time researching dementia and its effects on the individual. At the end of the day, however, I took what I had learned and used my imagination to create what I hoped was a believable characterization. The research stayed in my notes.

  How do you know if you’ve explained too much? Look for repetition: that’s the hallmark. But also ask yourself if a particular fact or description is in there for a reason. If you find that you have detailed the kind of thread that was used in a Roman toga without advancing the plot or developing a character, you’ve overdone it – take it out.

  Show, Don’t Tell

  This is a mantra of creative-writing classes that you have probably heard many times. Only occasionally will the reader accept text that simply tells what has occurred without describing it. In your rough draft, there are probably passages where you simply said what happened or what the characters did or how they felt without really involving the reader. Now is the time to go back and rewrite.

  For example, you might have said that the heroine was worried about climbing the mountain because of the risk of an avalanche. That doesn’t engage your reader: it’s too passive. Try livening it up with a bit of dialogue:

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe to climb today?’ She looked up at the mountain that seemed to touch the sky. ‘Those snow packs look pretty heavy. It wouldn’t take much to bring them down.’

  Both ways accomplish the same thing: the reader knows that the mountain is high and covered with snow. But the second way doesn’t read like a travelogue. It draws the reader in, helping her to see through your character’s eyes.

  Of course there are times when you simply have to ‘tell’. One of these is during tense or fast-moving scenes:

  They struggled for the gun. Max kicked it across the room. But Sam shoved him against the door and pulled out a knife.

  Scenes like this don’t have time to be pleasant or descriptive. In fact it’s important that they aren’t. Your concern here is not to break the tension or mood with unnecessary description. In this case, terse, staccato words and sentences work best. Stick to the bare minimum and tell your readers what’s happening. Think of it as a live commentary on a football game: you’re excited, possibly scared; so are your characters and with any luck your readers will be too.

  The Cutting-Room Floor

  In real life there is a surfeit of words. People don’t consider that what they’re saying might be repetitive or unimportant, as you realize every time you eavesdrop on someone else’s mobile-phone conversation on the bus. They don’t have to think about how everything they say and do fits together to make a coherent whole.

  Writing isn’t like that. Writers observe real life in order to learn more about people and situations. They mimic real life. But even a 100,000-word novel is too small to encompass everything that happens in a single day in the real world. Nor would you want to encompass it – as we said in the chapter about dialogue, too much of what happens to most of us on a daily basis is too mundane, and frankly too boring, to be included in a novel.

  That’s why writers have to choose their words carefully. They have a limited amount of space in which
to tell their story. Think of it as being on a budget, only instead of money it is words that are restricted. You need to consider how much narrative you are going to spend on any given scene. That doesn’t necessarily mean allocating a fixed number of words (though if you are the type who has already chosen to write a detailed outline, you may find this works for you). What most writers do is write the scene, then go back and tighten it. Cut anything that is rambling, or that comes under the headings of overwriting, over-explaining or overstating your point. Don’t use six words where one will do. Not every scene needs to have action or tension that propels it forwards, but every scene needs to know why it’s in the book and what its function is for the storyline.

  Shortening Dialogue

  This goes back to the two hard-and-fast rules mentioned earlier:

  Read it out loud and see if it sounds natural.

  Don’t have your characters tell each other something that they both already know. They wouldn’t do that in real life.