JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #87
March 3, 2022
I was advising someone recently about writing and revising and brought up the idea of "flow." There may be other aesthetic considerations for fictive prose, but I think there’s a strong case to be made that prose should move smoothly from sentence to sentence, that those sentences should convey an unbreaking train of thought in order to capture the reader and never let go. If we manage to accomplish this, the writing should provide no excuse for the reader to stop reading.
What this means in practice is that we pay very close attention to the organization of every clause, every sentence and paragraph, the introduction and development of every idea, be it scenic element, characterization, dialogue, action beat, or any other fictive element. We should anticipate a reader’s questions and answer them before they arise. If a detail or information is required to fully grasp some depiction of action, that detail should have been provided at the appropriate time prior to its ultimate usefulness so that the fictive depiction slots together seamlessly.
Achieving this aesthetic, if we are not savants, requires an exacting and careful diligence. We have to examine every word, try each one out in various syntactic positions, working out which would be best for purposes of the current sentence and how that sentence fits in with those that come before and those that follow. It’s not enough to know the rules of grammar for this kind of writing--we must understand the possibilities provided by grammar: how a sentence can be restructured to put a character or idea in the subject position, object position, as the indirect target of some other action; how the semantic roles of agent and patient can be expressed in various grammatical constructions; the way tense and aspect and verbal mode inflect the conceptual and semantic understanding.
Think about how many ways there are in English to talk about an event that will happen in the future: 1 - I’ll be there on Tuesday. 2 - I’m going to be there on Tuesday. 3 - I shall be there on Tuesday. 4 - I’m there on Tuesday. 5 - I’m always there on Tuesdays. 6 - I wouldn’t miss being there on Tuesday. Etc. There’s nothing to tell us which of these is "right."
I used to tell my students that you should only revise something if you’re fixing something specific (I know I’ve written this in previous Ruminations): out of the millions of possible ways to change a sentence, you only have reason to select another one if you’re trying to address a particular problem. In a similar way, an overarching aesthetic, like the idea of "flow" outlined above, can help guide our decisions in the crafting of prose.