JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #42
March 4, 2021
Sometimes when we compose our prose, we put down the images or ideas as they come to us rather than crafting and restructuring sentences as we go. For example, we might begin with a tonal image that suggests the feeling we’re looking for: "The feeling of warm water running over his toes" and, stuck with this phrase, we try to make it into a sentence about a character, adding, "made him remember what it was like to wade in the river as a boy," but now we have to make sure the character is doing something in the scene, so let’s go with, "as he lifted his eyes and faced the old man," oops, gotta describe the old man, "with white hair and craggy features" what is the old man doing? "watching him" where are they? "from the far side of the stream in the Vietnamese countryside." Feels like that’s the end, right? It’s not in the passive voice, so everything is fine.
The problem of course is that the sentence is the result of a random assortment of ideas, not a crafted journey through a set of impressions. At some point in the composition of our prose we have to consider the order in which we present a scene to the reader. What is the most salient part of the scene? What would the point of view character or narrator notice first? What do we want to be most vivid for the reader? What is merely connective or sets up other images? How can we end the sentence in order to lead into the salient subject of the next sentence? What ideas or images are we putting into the power positions of our sentences?
Common advice for beginning writers is to just get it down on the page, and these kinds of considerations can be made in the revision process. Eventually, however, we need to internalize these considerations so that they become unconscious guides to our drafting process. We should begin to "see" a scene in connected and organized prose. I find myself at times coming to a screeching halt when I write something like "He climbed to the top with the ladder," noticing immediately that "with the ladder" is syntactically ambiguous, trying as it does to attach to "the top," and I need, before I can go on, to clarify what I’m describing by instead writing, "He climbed the ladder to the top" or "Using the ladder, he climbed to the top" or "He climbed to the top," depending on what’s necessary and what shape nearby sentences might have. Sometimes I don’t even get the first version out of my head and onto the page before I’ve revised it.
These considerations are the root of clear, flowing prose. The flow should be laminar, not turbulent, for ease of reading so that they help construct the fictional dream rather than jab at sense impressions like a prosaic Whac-A-Mole. Even the most recondite considerations can be made more clear by the careful attention to the order of things.