Pet Peeves on Parade, part XXVIII and Structural Repetition, part V: wait — there’s a forest out there? How can I possibly be expected to see it through all of these trees?

The other day, an author who had established her literary credentials some decades ago — let’s call her Martha, because it’s nothing like her name — came over to my house for tea and a vigorous discussion of the ever-changing literary market. I love chatting with well-read, highly opinionated people on this particular subject, and Martha did not disappoint. She is, to put it mildly, no fan of what she calls “the recent vampire/werewolf/zombie craze,” nor does she entirely improve of this golden age of YA.

“I keep meeting wonderful writers,” she says, “who have just given up on writing for adults. Or about anyone with a pulse.”

I do, too, but actually, I find this view a trifle outdated: when I walk into, say, a Barnes & Noble today, what strikes me is not the size of the YA section (I think the expansion of this particular book category has yielded some great things) or how few novel protagonists boast pulses (for me, a little contact with the undead goes a long way), but what a high percentage of the books currently available for sale were written by those who no longer have pulses at all. I’m as fond of Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as the next person, but do they really need to take up half the summer reading table AND an entire shelf of the sale books? Might an enterprising publisher not shell out for some display space for a few more living authors?

And while we’re at it, is there a particular reason that so many bookstores stock only FRANKENSTEIN, but not any of Shelley’s other novels? Again, I’m as fond of, etc., etc., but the lady was prolific. For my money, VALPURGA, her fictional account of the Inquisition, dances circles around FRANKENSTEIN. But perhaps that’s merely another manifestation of my preference for living protagonists, rather than revivified ones.

As so often happens, I ended up defending publishing trends I do not necessarily applaud, simply because Martha seemed so very determined to ring the death knell for the industry — because, she said, “All publishers think about now is cash.”

That’s a very popular complaint amongst those who landed their agents back when it was considered a trifle gauche for writers to admit that they wanted to make a living at it. My kith and kin has been involved in producing books since the 1920s, and I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of a time when publishing was purely a charitable enterprise. It is true, however, that both agents and publishers routinely used to nurse promising authors through half a dozen books, despite anemic sales, in the hope that someday, he (and it was almost always he) would gain a larger audience. Now, if a new author’s book does not sell well, she (and it often is she these days) and her agent may well have trouble convincing even an editor absolutely besotted with her prose stylings to take a chance with her next.

Hey, the bookstore needs that shelf space for its fifth copy of FRANKENSTEIN.

To be fair, though, readers also have quite different expectations than they did when Shelley’s debut novel hit the shelves — or, for that matter, when Martha’s did. Pacing is considerably faster these days; the passive voice so popular prior to World War II is considered stylistically rather weak, and in deference to that type of browser who habitually grabs books off the shelves and reads page 1 before purchasing, action tends to appear much earlier in plots than in years past.

Yes, even in literary fiction — do some comparative reading. Martha didn’t want to believe it, either.

Because I am, as you may have noticed, a big fan of concrete examples, I reached over to my fiction bookshelves for an example of good, solid literary writing that might have trouble getting published, or even landing an agent, today. I didn’t have to run my fingertips past more than half a dozen spines before I found a great page 1: William Styron’s breakthrough 1951 novel, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS.

I would urge all of you to read this lyrical, moving book in its entirety (after you polish off VALPURGA, perhaps). For our purposes, though, I’m going to show you only what I read to Martha. Try to absorb it on two levels: for the quality of the writing, and as our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, might respond to it if it landed on her desk as a submission from an unknown writer today. To aid in that imaginative feat, I’ll even show it to you as she would see it.

“Wow, he was a wonderful writer,” Martha said. “Why did you stop there?”

“Because,” I said, bracing myself for the inevitable outcry of the literary-minded, “an agency screener wouldn’t have read any farther.”

Any guesses why? How about that paragraph-long, 118-word opening sentence? Or the two subordinate clauses beginning with which and the one with where? Or the piling-up of prepositions? Or the abrupt shift from the third person to the second on line 6?

None of this, of course, mars the inherent loveliness of the writing; hearing it read out loud, Martha was quite right to be impressed. As seen on the submission page, though, how likely to you think Millicent is to exclaim, as my guest did, “Wow, this is a wonderful writer,” rather than “Wow, that’s quite a run-on sentence?” And having emitted the second, how likely is she not to follow it with, “Next!”

Darned right, that would be a pity; this is a beautifully-written, incisive novel. But Millicent is in fact justified in believing that a browser picking up this page 1 is likely to set the book back on the shelf again halfway through that gargantuan opening sentence.

What would make her so sure of that? Because the difference between the literary market of 1951 and the literary market of 2011 lies not merely in how quickly professional readers make up their minds about submissions, but also in non-professional readers’ expectations for what constitutes good writing.

I know, I know. After I made that argument to Martha, she kept feeling my head to see if I had developed a fever.

Why might a browser not be able to see past the length of that opening sentence? Memory, partially: the browser’s high school English teacher would have marked her down for producing a run-on of this magnitude. Besides, subordinate clauses are simply not as highly regarded as they used to be. Back in the day, literature was rife with these; now, most Millicents are trained to consider them, well, a bit awkward. In fact, chances are very good that she was specifically trained to zero in on relative pronouns like which and subordinate conjunctions like where with the intent of ferreting out run-ons.

That, I suspect, is going to come as surprise to those of you who love 19th-century novels. We could quibble for hours about whether literary tastes have changed for better or worse. Since they have undoubtedly changed, though, it’s vital for aspiring writers who prefer more old-fashioned structures to realize that what was hailed by critics in 1951 might well give Millicent pause on page 1 today.

Or even give her an excuse to stop reading. But that does not necessarily mean that if the late lamented Mssr. Styron were trying to break into the literary fiction market today, I would advise him to lose all of the subordinate clauses.

Oh, I would certainly recommend some tinkering; that semicolon, for instance, could be replaced by a period at no great loss to the passage. Because the writing is so pretty here, however, I’m reluctant to impose the necessary cuts and changes on this passage, even for the purposes of an instructive example. As an editor, all I can justifiably do is point out the problems; it’s the writer’s job to rewrite.

That, too, often comes as a surprise to those harboring old-fashioned views of publishing. I meet aspiring writers all the time who greet any and all revision suggestions with an airy and dismissive, “Oh, I’m sure the acquiring editor/the agent of my dreams/some luckless proofreader will take care of that. All that matters at the submission stage is the quality of the writing.”

To a professional reader, sentence-level difficulties are not external to the writing; they’re integral parts of it. How a writer revises — or doesn’t — is as important to the ultimate quality of the book as the initial composition. Contrary to popular belief, though, there is no such thing as a single best way to revise a narrative, any more than there is a single best way to tell a story.

That being the case, how could an editor justifiably perform all necessary revisions to a manuscript? Or an agent, for that matter? And why wouldn’t a savvy writer prefer to make those changes herself, so she can control the voice?

Part of the charm of individual authorial voice is that it is, in fact, individual — but you’d never glean that from how writers (and writing teachers) tend to talk about revision. All too often, we speak amongst ourselves as though the revision process involved no more than either (a) identifying and removing all of the objectively-observable mistakes in a manuscript, or (b) changing our minds about some specific plot point or matter of characterization, then implementing it throughout the manuscript.

These are two perfectly reasonable self-editing goals, of course, but they are not the only conceivable ones. When dealing with what I call, with apologies to Madame Shelley, a Frankenstein manuscript — a text that, while perhaps prettily written, has not yet been revised to the level of professional polish — a conscientious self-editor might well perform a read-through for voice consistency, another for grammatical problems, a third for logic leaps, a fourth because the protagonist’s husband is no longer a plumber but the member of Congress representing Washington’s 7th District…

And so forth. Revision can come in many, many flavors, variable by specificity, level of focus, the type of feedback to which the writer is responding, and even the point in publication history at which the manuscript is being revised.

Does that all sound dandy in theory, but perplexing in practice? Don’t worry; I am queen of the concrete example, remember?

To help you gain a solid sense of how diverse different of levels of revision can be, I’m going to treat you to a page from one of my favorite fluffy novels of yore, Noël Coward’s POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE, a lighthearted romp set in a tropical British colony on the eve of a royal visit.

I chose this piece not merely because it retains a surprisingly high level of Frankenstein manuscript characteristics for a work by a well-established writer (possibly because it was Coward’s only published novel), or even because it deserves another generation of readers. (As it does; his comic timing is unparalleled.) I think it’s an interesting study in how literary conventions change: even at the time of its release in 1960, some critics considered it a bit outdated. Coward’s heyday had been several decades before, they argued, so the type of sex comedy that used to shock in the 1920s was a bit passé, and wasn’t it a bit late in the literary day to steer so firmly away from sociopolitical commentary?

Now, sociopolitical commentary has largely fallen out of style, at least in first novels, and sex, as Coward himself was fond of observing, seems to be here to stay. Here is a page from the end of the book, where our narrator, a harried British matron living on a South Sea island, finds herself entertaining Droopy, the husband of her best friend Bunny’s would-be mistress.

P&C sample

Amusing, certainly, but a bit Frankensteinish on the page is it not? At first glance, how would you suggest Noël revise it? Would your revision goals be different if this were page 5, rather than page 272?

Before you give your final answers, here’s that page again, after it has been subjected to just the kind of repetition-spotting mark-up I’ve been asking you to perform of late. (Sorry about the dark image; I honestly didn’t take the photograph in a particularly gloomy room. If you’re having trouble reading the specifics, try pressing command +.)

P&C edit 1

Replete with structural redundancy, is it not? By today’s book publication standards, as Millicent would no doubt be overjoyed to tell you, it would deserve instant rejection on that basis alone.

But would you agree? Or is the very repetition an inherent part of this comic voice?

Arguments could be made in both directions, you know. After all, this narrative voice is not all too far from the kind of writing we all see every day online, or even in the chattier varieties of journalism. We can all see why some writers would favor this kind of voice, right? Read out loud, this kind of first-person narration can sound very natural, akin to actual speech.

That’s not to say, though, that Millicent would not cringe at the very sight of it in a novel submission. And why? Feel free to chant it with me: the level of repetition that works in everyday speech is often hard to take on the printed page.

As you can see for yourself in the example above, I suspect. Now that you see all of those ands and other word repetition marked on the page, you must admit that they are mighty distracting to the eye. By repeating the same sentence structures over and over, our buddy Noël is practically begging Millicent to skip lines while skimming.

Nor is all of the redundancy here literal; there’s a certain amount of conceptual repetition as well. Take note of all of those visually-based verbs: not only do people look a great deal, but our heroine envisages AND tries to imagine how she might appear in his eyes.

And did you catch the over-use of subordinate clauses, all of those whiches in yellow? While a tolerant Millie might be inclined to glide past one every ten or fifteen pages, even a screener noted for her restraint would begin to get restless with a quarter as many as appear on that single page above.

That almost certainly would not have been a major objection raised by Millicent’s forebears in 1960, though, right? The literary gatekeepers would have concentrated on quite different parts of this page — the grammatically-necessary missing commas, for instance, and the back-to-back prepositions.

Longing to see how Millicent’s grandmother would have commented on this page? Well, you’re in luck; I just happen to have her feedback handy.

P&Eedit2

Let’s linger a moment in order to consider Grandma M’s primary quibbles. First, as she points out so politely in red at the top of the page, it takes at least two sentences to form a narrative paragraph. In dialogue, a single-line paragraph is acceptable, but in standard narrative prose, it is technically incorrect.

Was that gigantic clunk I just heard the sound of jaws belonging to anyone who has picked up a newspaper or magazine within the last decade hitting the floor?

In theory, Grandma M is quite right on this point — and more of her present-day descendants would side with her than you might suppose. Millie’s grandmother did not bring her up to regard setting grammar at naught lightly, after all. But does that necessarily mean it would be a good idea for you to sit down today and excise every single-sentence narrative paragraph in your manuscript?

Perhaps not: the convention of occasionally inserting a single-line paragraph for emphasis has become quite accepted in nonfiction. The practice has crept deeply enough into most stripes of genre fiction that it probably would not raise Millicent’s eyebrows much.

How can you tell if the convention is safe to use in your submission? As always, the best way of assessing the acceptability of a non-standard sentence structure in a particular book category is to become conversant with what’s been published in that category within the last few years. Not just what the leading lights of the field have been writing lately, mind you; what an established author can get away with doing to a sentence is not always acceptable in a submission by someone trying to break into the field.

Pay attention to what kinds of sentences first-time authors of your kind of book are writing these days, and you needn’t fear going too far afield. As a general rule of thumb, even first-time novelists can usually get the occasional use of the single-sentence paragraph device past Millicent — provided that the content of the sentence in question is sufficiently startling to justify standing alone. As in:

The sky was perfectly clear as I walked home from school that day, the kind of vivid blue first-graders choose from the crayon box as a background for a smiling yellow sun. The philosopher Hegel would have loved it: the external world mirroring the clean, happy order of my well-regulated mind.

That is, until I tripped over the werewolf lying prone across my doorstep.

Didn’t see that last bit coming, did you? The paragraph break emphasizes the jaggedness of the narrative leap — and, perhaps equally important from a submission perspective, renders the plot twist easier for a skimming eye to catch.

Grandma M would growl at this construction (“My, Granny, what big teeth you have!”), and rightly so. Why? Well, it violates the two-sentences-or-more rule, for starters. In the second place, this problem could have been avoided entirely by eschewing the RETURN key. In a slower world, one where readers lived sufficiently leisurely lives that they might be safely relied upon to glance at every sentence on a page, all of this information could have fit perfectly happily into a single paragraph. Like so:

The sky was perfectly clear as I walked home from school that day, the kind of vivid blue first-graders choose from the crayon box as a background for a smiling yellow sun. The philosopher Hegel would have loved it: the external world mirroring the clean, happy order of my well-regulated mind. That is, until I tripped over the werewolf lying prone across my doorstep.

I bring this up not only to appease Grandma M’s restless spirit, currently haunting an agency or publishing house somewhere in Manhattan, but so that those of you addicted to single-line paragraphs will know what to do with hanging sentences: tuck ‘em back into the paragraph from whence they came. Ruthlessly.

At least a few of them. Please?

Really, it’s in your submission’s best interest to use the single-line paragraph trick infrequently, reserving it for those times when it will have the most effect. That will at least give your narrative the advantage of novelty.

How so? Well, amongst aspiring writers who favor this structure, moderation is practically unheard-of. Many, if not most, novelists and memoirists who favor this device do not use the convention sparingly, nor do they reserve its use for divulging information that might legitimately come as a surprise to a reasonably intelligent reader.

As a result, Millie tends to tense up a bit at the very sight of a single-sentence paragraph — yes, even ones that are dramatically justifiable. Hard to blame her, really, considering how mundane some of the revelations she sees in submissions turn out to be. A fairly typical example:

The sky was perfectly clear as I walked home from school that day, the kind of vivid blue first-graders choose from the crayon box as a background for a smiling yellow sun. The philosopher Hegel would have loved it: the external world mirroring the clean, happy order of my well-regulated mind.

Beside the sidewalk, a daffodil bloomed.

Not exactly a stop-the-presses moment, is it?

Often, too, aspiring writers will use a single-line paragraph to highlight a punch line. This can work rather well, if it doesn’t occur very often in the text — any literary trick will lose its efficacy if it’s over-used — AND if the joke is genuinely funny. Much of the time in manuscripts, alas, it isn’t.

At least not hilarious enough to risk enraging Grandma M’s spirit by stopping the narrative short to highlight the quip. See for yourself:

The sky was perfectly clear as I walked home from school that day, the kind of vivid blue first-graders choose from the crayon box as a background for a smiling yellow sun. The philosopher Hegel would have loved it: the external world mirroring the clean, happy order of my well-regulated mind.

My Algebra II teacher would have fallen over dead with astonishment.

Gentle irony does not often a guffaw make, after all. And think about it: if the reader must be notified by a grammatically-questionable paragraph break that a particular line is meant to be funny, doesn’t that very choice indicate a certain authorial doubt that the reader will catch the joke? Or that it’s funny in the first place?

Grandma M’s other big objection to Noël’s page 272 — and this pet peeve, too, she is likely to have passed down the generations — would be to, you guessed it, the many, many run-on sentences. The run-ons here, however, are not the result of the driving rhythmic pattern or descriptive complexity that made ol’ William go overboard on his opening; clearly, Noël was just trying to sound chatty.

That should sound familiar by this point in the series, right? Like so many aspiring novelists, our Noël favors an anecdotal-style narrative voice, one that echoes the consecutiveness of everyday speech. That can work beautifully in dialogue, where part of the point is for the words captured within the quotation marks to sound like something an actual human being might really say, but in narration, this type of sentence structure gets old fast.

Why might that be, dear readers? Sing along with me now: structural repetition reads as redundant. Varying the narrative’s sentence structure will render it easier, not to mention more pleasant, to read.

Are some of you former jaw-droppers waving your arms frantically, trying to get my attention? “Okay, Anne,” these sore-jawed folk point out, “I get it: Millicents have disliked textual repetition for decades now. No need to exhume Grandma M’s grandmother to hammer home that point. But I’d had the distinct impression that Millie is a greater stickler for bigger-picture problems than her forebears. Don’t I have more important things to worry about than grammatical perfection when I’m getting ready to slide my manuscript under her nose?”

Well, grammatical perfection is always an asset in a manuscript, ex-jaw-droppers, so a completely clean manuscript is not at all an unreasonable goal for your pre-submission text scan. You are right, however, that present-day Millicents do tend to be weighing a great many more factors than their grandmothers did when deciding whether the manuscript in front of them has publication potential. But not all of those factors involve large-scale questions of marketability and audience-appropriateness; Millicent is also charged with going over the writing with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. Using, of course, today’s standards as a guide.

What kinds of manuscript problems might catch on her comb that Grandma M’s would have missed, you ask with fear and trembling? See for yourself — here’s Millie’s response on the page we’ve been examining:

P&E edit 3

I sincerely hope that your first thought upon seeing her much, much higher expectations was not to wish that you’d had the foresight to try to land an agent back in 1960, rather than now. (Although I would not blame you at all if you kicked yourself for not launching your work back in the 1980s, when the home computer was available but not yet ubiquitous, astronomically increasing the number of both queries and submissions Millicent would see in a given week.) True, the competition to land an agent is substantially fiercer now, but it’s also true that a much, much broader range of voices are getting published than in Grandma M’s time.

Back then, if you weren’t a straight, white man from a solid upper-middle class home, Granny expected you at least to have the courtesy to write like one. (Styron’s father worked in a shipyard, so he had to fudge it a little; so did his contemporary Gore Vidal, for other reasons.) If you did happen to be a SWMFaSUMCH, you were, of course, perfectly welcome to try to imagine what it was like not to be one, although on the whole, your work would probably be more happily received if you stuck to writing what you knew. And if there was a typo in your manuscript, well, next time, don’t have your wife type it for you.

You think I’m making that up, don’t you? That’s a quote, something an agent told a rather well-known writer of my acquaintance in the mid-1960s. The latter kept quiet about the fact that he was unmarried at the time and composed his books on a typewriter.

Let’s return from that rather interesting flashback, though, and concentrate upon the now. It’s not enough to recognize that literary standards — and thus professional expectations for self-editing — have changed radically over time. It’s not even sufficient to accept, although I hope it’s occurred to you, that what constituted good writing in your favorite book from 1937 — or 1951, or 1960 — might not be able to make it past Millicent today. If you’re going to use authors from the past as your role models — a practice both Grandma M and I would encourage — you owe it to your career as a writer also to familiarize yourself with the current writing in your book category.

Just for today, what I would like you to take away from these examples is that each of the editorial viewpoints would prompt quite different revisions — and in some instances, mutually contradictory ones. This is one reason the pros tend not to consider the revision process definitively ended until a book is published and sitting on a shelf: since reading can take place on many levels, so can revision.

Don’t believe me? Okay, clap on your reading glasses and peruse the three widely disparate results conscientious reviser Noël might have produced in response to each of the marked-up pages above. For the first, the one that merely noted the structural, word, and concept repetition, the changes might be as simple as this:

P&C basic edit

“Hey, Anne!” the sharper-eyed among you burble excitedly. “Despite the fact that Noël has added a couple of paragraph breaks, presumably to make it easier for the reader to differentiate between speech and thought, the text ends up being shorter. He snuck another line of text at the bottom of the page!”

Well-caught, eagle-eyed burblers. A thoughtfully-executed revision to minimize structural redundancy can often both clarify meaning and lop off extraneous text.

I hope you also noticed that while that very specifically-focused revision was quite helpful to the manuscript, it didn’t take care of some of the grammatical gaffes — or, indeed, most of the other problems that would have troubled Grandma M. Let’s take a peek at what our Noël might have done to page 272 after that august lady had applied her red pen to it. (Hint: you might want to take a magnifying glass to the punctuation.)

P&C revision 2

Quite different from the first revision, is it not? This time around, the punctuation’s impeccable, but the narration retains some of the redundancy that a modern-day Millicent might deplore.

Millie might also roll her eyes at her grandmother’s winking at instances of the passive voice and the retention of unnecessary tag lines. Indeed, for Noël to revise this page to her specifications, he’s going to have to invest quite a bit more time. Shall we see how he fared?

P&C final edit

Remember, not every close-up examination of a single tree will result in a pruning plan that will yield the same forest. A savvy self-editor will bear that in mind, rather than expecting that any single pass at revision, however sensible, will result in a manuscript that will please every reader.

By apprising yourself of the current norms in your chosen book category, you can maximize the probability that your self-editing eye will coincide with Millicent’s expectations. Keep up the good work!

Part XXVI of Pet Peeves on Parade, and part IV of Structural Repetition, and other excuses stockpile a whole lot of ands. Because you wouldn’t want to run out or anything.

Are your fingers stained with highlighter ink, campers? I hope they are: last time, I urged you to scan your submission pages — in particular, the first five, the opening chapter, or all of a contest entry — for over-use of the words and, but, and then; the average manuscript submission is positively peppered with ‘em. Since our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, sees these words so very often, I suggested that you print out these pages and highlight these words throughout, so that you might get a sense of just how often you tend to utilize them.

As I hope you have seen for yourselves, once you started marking, it was pretty darned astonishing just how often those conjunctions leapt off the page, wasn’t it? Or they would have, had you flung yourself into this nit-picky task wholeheartedly — as opposed to, say, devoting yourselves the activities of normal people.

The typical writerly reaction, though, is somewhere in between: glancing over those pages with an initially willing mind, but throwing up one’s hands in despair three buts in. “What was Anne thinking,” I sensed some of you muttering yesterday, “to advise such a time-consuming (and potentially ink-consuming) exercise? Doesn’t she realize that most of us have to fight in order to carve out time to write — and even if I happened to be one of the happy few who don’t, sunny days relatively rare in the Pacific Northwest?”

Well, in the first place, summer in Seattle is frequently beautiful; the popular belief that it rains here non-stop is a myth. In the second place, I do realize just how important your time is to you — which is precisely why I’m advising you to invest a little time now in exchange for not having scads of your time wasted later in the submission process.

Think of it this way: as those of you who have submitted to an agency or entered a contest lately are already well aware, preparing your pages and sending them off is quite time-consuming, and, if you’re like most aspiring writers, even more energy-consuming. We also all know, I hope, that the cleaner your manuscript — that’s industry-speak for pages free of basic spelling, grammar, formatting, and logic problems, in case anyone was wondering — the less likely it is to push Millicent’s rejection buttons. The same holds true for her pet peeves: the better revision job you do, the less likely your pages are to come winging back in your SASE, accompanied by a form-letter rejection. Or, as is increasingly common, for them not to come back at all.

Sense where I’m heading with this? Getting caught in a submission-rejection cycle generally ends up eating far, far more of a writer’s valuable time than an intensive revision aimed at weeding out rejection triggers would take.

Or, to put it more bluntly, aspiring writers who routinely send out first drafts, especially — sacre bleu! — ones that have neither been proofread or spell- and grammar-checked — because they are impatient to get their books published generally have a harder time landing an agent, winning a contest, and/or pleasing an editor than writers patient enough to polish their work prior to submitting it.

Given such a noble goal, concentrating upon something as basic as whether your narrative relies too heavily upon and, but, and then may not seem as if it would make a big difference, but actually, out of all the potential problems a self-editor might discover in a Frankenstein manuscript, overused conjunctions are some of the easiest to catch and fix. And the pay-off can be tremendous: quick-reading agency screeners, editorial assistants (who screen submissions for editors) and contest judges are routinely ordered to subtract points (Brownie in the case of the former two, literal in the case of the contest submission) for grammatical errors — and word repetition is always high on their penalty list.

As is that habitual roommate of conjunctions, the run-on sentence. Not sure what one looks like? Here’s a lulu, presented for your reading pleasure in its natural habitat, the manuscript page.

Laugh if you like, but would it astonish you to learn that this is shorter than some of the sentences my aged eyes have beheld in manuscripts and contest entries? I’ve seen sentences that have dragged on for more than a page; I once spotted one that expected the reader to follow its twists and turns for almost three.

Although I have apparently lived to tell about it, there can be no legitimate justification for dragging the reader through such an epic. The best possible outcome — which the author does not deserve — is that perhaps no one will notice that there was only a single period in those 21 lines of text, but that’s not what’s likely to happen at submission time. Since text like this simply shouts at Millicent, “Hey, this writer didn’t bother to reread this paragraph in hard copy after writing or revising it; clearly, these pages are not ready for professional perusal,” including such a lengthy run-on produces prose that is in effect self-rejecting.

I sense that those of you fond of the occasional multiply compound sentence longing to equivocate. “But Anne,” run-on huggers point out, “couldn’t embracing this sort of conversational-style sentence be a daring authorial choice? Could it not, in fact, be a characteristic of a distinctive voice?”

Well, it could, if it were handled skillfully — but in 99.99% of cases, extended run-ons are not interesting enough to be honored with the name of style. Run-on sentences, much like the repetition of a favorite word or phrase, virtually never strike Millicent as the result of well-thought-out and purposeful writerly strategy. Or, if a pro does think it is purposeful it’s poor strategy: “I know! I’ll bore my reader and annoy Millicent by making her read the sentence twice in order to understand it!”

Seem like a harsh assessment? It isn’t, particularly, if you consider that from an agent or editor’s perspective, it’s the writer’s job to write not only clearly, but beautifully, adhering to the basic rules of grammar. Expressing a sentiment well and without gaffes is, after all, the minimum requirement for professional writing, not an optional extra.

To Millicent, then, a run-on sentence tends to look like an instance of the writer’s just being in too much of a hurry to write well — and in practice, she’s frequently right about that. It’s not at all uncommon for an aspiring writer to whip out a scene or paragraph in a rush, fully intending to come back and flesh out those not-especially-stirring sentences when he has more time. Astonishingly often, though, that mythical day with 27 hours — 24 for normal life, plus an extra 3 for revision — never manages to roll around. The writer forgets all about those original noble intentions and moves on.

Multiply that by a few hundred times, and you’ll end up with the type of submission that makes Millicent shake her head over a good premise gone awry: a typo-filled, run-on laden series of scenes dimly indicating what an intriguing story this might be four or five drafts down the line. A half-century ago, an agent or editor might have taken on a project like this, seeing that with proper professional guidance, the writer might polish it up into something genuinely fine. Today, however, our Millie sees just too many technically perfect submissions to worry much about rejecting those that still need work.

You’d be surprised, I suspect, at just how clearly a page featuring a couple of run-ons telegraphs to the pros that this manuscript could use more revision. Run-ons are usually hodgepodges of several distinct sentences’ worth of material, rubber-cemented together with our old pals and, but, and then. Look how obvious it is that the writer was in a rush:

Eighteen thousand citizens rushed as one to the city’s walls and stared over the side, but they could not possibly have anticipated what they would find there and gasped accordingly, then began to shout.

Essentially, this is a summary, not a description. We can see where and how this hefty hunk of prose could be chopped up into interesting, specific detail-filled individual sentences, but for reasons best known to herself, the writer has elected not to do so.

Once a reader has developed the editorial eye to see what could have been, other types of compound sentence also seem ripe for closer scrutiny. Take, for instance, the 19th century prose practice of stringing clause after clause together with whiches and whos and wheres:

Petunia, who was desperate, ran along the docks where Ambrose had vanished. She turned right every time she came to a curve, which was easier than making a new decision each time, but which left her wondering after about fifteen minutes if the awnings she was passing were the same ones she had passed earlier.

Modern style cries out for fewer of those clunky asides. And don’t even get Millicent started on the species of run-on that’s simply the result of a writer’s apparently being unsure whether it’s okay to replace a period with a comma in order to speed up the reader’s sense of what’s going on.

Sebastian hesitated before marching through the doorway, the scent of gunpowder coming through it was so strong.

The answer, Millie would like me to tell you, is no: it’s never correct to slap two complete sentences together with a comma. That last example should have been cut in half with a period:

Sebastian hesitated before marching through the doorway. The scent of gunpowder coming through it was so strong.

Or a semicolon:

Sebastian hesitated before marching through the doorway; the scent of gunpowder coming through it was so strong.

Even with the punctuation corrected, these sentences still might raise Millicent’s ire. Any guesses why?

Give yourself a gold star with almond clusters if you instantly leapt to your feet, shouting, “So is comparative! It must take a modifier!” A so statement logically requires a that follow-up. Voilà:

Sebastian hesitated before marching through the doorway. The scent of gunpowder coming through it was so strong that it made him gag.

Why, yes, I did add some extra information to this sentence that might not have been part of the author’s original intention; editors are notorious for doing that, in the interests of rendering the prose clearer. I could also have revised these sentences without changing the meaning. What the author probably meant (“And should have taken the time to say,” sniffs Millie) was this:

The scent of gunpowder wafting through the doorway was so strong that Sebastian hesitated before marching through it.

This version also, I am glad to report, neatly side-steps the other professional readers’ pet peeve in the original, presenting cause and effect out of chronological order. Think about it: how likely is it that Sebastian would have hesitated before he smelled the gunpowder? Isn’t it far more plausible that he paused because it wafted toward him and he drew a conclusion from it about what probably lay beyond that doorway?

I hate to be the one to break the sad news, but the writer of the first version probably thought she had said precisely that. She was just in too much of a hurry to go back and make sure a reader would take that meaning from it.

Starting to get the hang of reading a run-on for clarity and grammar? Good. Now — and only now — are we ready to talk about style.

Let’s face it, none of these are particularly pretty sentences. The word choice is not especially interesting; they reveal little about the physical environment, Sebastian’s character, or even the danger into which he is almost certainly walking. As such, the phrasing takes a potentially suspenseful moment and squashes the reader’s sense of anticipation.

So I ask you: as a writer, how likely would you be to do any of those things on purpose, in the name of delightful literature or compelling storytelling?

Millicent doesn’t think it’s likely, either. No professional reader would mistake any of these examples for a daring stylistic experiment; they are not polished or interesting enough to prompt the reader to try to figure out if the writer had some clever reason for presenting these facts in this manner.

Nor — dare I say it? — are these sentences original enough to set off the High Literary Stylings siren in Millicent’s brainpan. That may well come as something of a surprise to creators of the variety of first-person narration whose primary stylistic recommendation is that it reads like everyday speech. The most popular means of pulling that off, as we have discussed earlier in the Pet Peeves on Parade series, is to replace grammatically-necessary periods with the ands, buts, and thens that grant a false consecutiveness to verbal storytelling.

My name is Louisa, and I am seven years old — and already, I see your eyes glazing over, dismissing anything I might have to say as the mere ramblings of a child. But I was there when the schoolhouse caught fire, there when the mayor decamped with the last dime of the town’s funds, there when the crocodiles began to squirm up from the riverbed to dine on the dear departed that no one was around anymore to bury. Then the vultures came, and still, I was there.

It’s not an uncompelling voice — although of the scores of professional readers’ pet peeves, few will cause the average Millicent to mutter, “Next!” faster than the grade-school storytelling expedient of having the narrator say right off the bat My name is X and I am # years old — but honestly, any originality the reader might spot in it comes from the details, not the echo of run-on filled normal speech. (“And even if it did,” Millicent adds, “this is a far cry from a seven-year-old’s voice.”)

Don’t believe me? Okay, here is the same passage, stripped of run-ons and reworked to minimize conjunctions.

My name is Louisa. I am seven years old. Already, I see your eyes glazing over, dismissing anything I might have to say as the mere ramblings of a child, but I was there when the schoolhouse caught fire. I was there when the mayor decamped with the last dime of the town’s funds. I was there when the crocodiles began to squirm up from the riverbed to dine on the dear departed that no one was around anymore to bury. When the vultures came, I was still there.

A forest of hands sprouted throughout the course of that last paragraph; I couldn’t be more delighted. “But Anne,” shout those of you who have been paying attention in recent weeks, “isn’t this opening a prime example of the oh-so-common invocatory rhythm achieved through word and phrase repetition that we have already identified as one of Millie’s pet peeves? I can’t believe that you edited the original without addressing that problem.”

Hey, it’s not the editor’s job to rewrite the author’s voice choices; all we do is flag what’s not working and suggest how to kick-start that story’s engine. It’s the writer’s job to decide how the words should appear on the page, right?

Admit it: you’re happy that’s the case. You wouldn’t really like somebody else to set your literary voice for you, would you?

So I leave to you the meaty creative challenge of making your prose sound like you at your best. For the moment, my goal is far less lofty: I want to help you be able to spot a run-on when you encounter it in the wild.

Here’s a good preliminary rule of thumb: if you can’t say any given sentence within a single breath, it might be a run-on. (Yet another great reason to read your manuscript OUT LOUD, IN HARD COPY, and IN THEIR ENTIRETY before you submit, eh?) Another classic tip-off: where run-ons gather, there will be ands aplenty also, typically.

So whip out your marked pages from last time, please, and let’s observe the reproduction habits of and. If you’re like most writers, your marking project probably revealed four major patterns of andusage:

(1) In lists.

Remember, not all lists take the form of Kamala had three novels, two memoirs, and a dictionary in her backpack. Keep an eye out for lists consisting of named emotions, which often appear in groups (Kamala felt angry, betrayed, and hurt), too-hurried accounts of activity (Kamala went to the store, searched fruitlessly for spumoni ice cream, ran down the block to her favorite trattoria, and begged them to sell her a couple of scoops on the sly.), as well as lists inadvertently formed by the use of and for emphasis (Kamala felt angry and betrayed and hurt and, consequently, ravenous for spumoni ice cream.).

Don’t think of all of those types of sentence as lists? Millicent does, believe me — and are lists really the most interesting way to present your protagonist’s activities? Ever?

(2) In the immensely popular X happened and (then) Y happened sentence structure.

We’re all familiar with this one, right? Edward ate his pizza and drank his Coke. The sky turned brown, and all of the birds stopped singing. I could go on like this all night, and if my guests were not flipping impatiently through magazines, I would.

There’s nothing wrong with this structure per se — but used too often, or too close together, all of those ands can start to feel quite repetitious quite fast. As can…

(3) In the almost-as-popular trilogy structure: Someone did X, Y, and Z. Alternatively, it may appear as Someone did X and Y, then Z.

Yes, either of these structures could be considered a list (as in, Christos cried, rolled over, and bawled some more.), but since most aspiring writers simply like the three-beat rhythm, I prefer to talk about it as a separate sentence type. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this structure if used sparingly, but all too often, the three-beat descriptive sentence becomes the default in the manuscript.

The resulting repetition can feel quite percussive to a reader, even if the actual sentence structure varies:

Christos felt betrayed, confused, and, oddly enough, desperate for some spumoni ice cream. Puzzled, he wandered into his kitchen, yanked open the freezer door, and pondered his ice cream supply. Wait — what had happened to his long-hoarded supply? Suddenly, it came to him: he’d heard Kamala rooting about in here in the wee hours, rattling bowls and clattering spoons. He felt angry and betrayed and hurt.

See how predictable those threesomes became, even in the space of one short paragraph? Imagine how Millicent feels when confronted with pages upon pages of them — which happens more than any of us would like to think.

(4) In complex descriptions.

Descriptions with multiple elements almost always contain at least one and, particularly if the sentence is passive: Germaine was tall and lanky. Again, this is technically a list (albeit a short one), but few writers would think of it as one.

Pay close attention to descriptive passages for another common and bugbear: sentences containing more than one of them. A multiple-and sentence is to most professional readers what a red flag is to a bull, and yet they are so easy to produce almost inadvertently if a writer is trying to cram too much description into a single sentence. As in:

Germaine was tall and lanky, with long, straight hair that came down to her lean and boyish hips. She liked to dress in black-and-white dresses, the kind that confused the eye if she walked past a strobe light, and skin-tight leather boots. She also favored tight jeans and tank tops, except of course for days she knew she would be running into Kamala and joining her on a spumoni ice cream run.

Quite a lot of ands, isn’t it? As strange as it may seem, most writers have an infinitely easier time spotting this kind of repetition in other people’s work; in their own, they tend to concentrate on the description, not the repetitive structure.

Complicating matters is the fact that often, two or more of these four types of and usage will appear within a single paragraph — or even a single sentence. Not sure what that might look like in practice? Okay, see if you can ferret out instances of all four kinds in this sterling piece of prose:

Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow, folded it twice, and stuffed it back into his coat. A motley assortment of trash caused his hand to recoil: cast-off candy bar wrappers, half-sucked lollipops hastily stuck back into their wrappers, waiting for later, and both red and black licorice whips. Sure, he was a sane and sober adult now. Outwardly composed, he twisted his face into a smile, swallowed a groan, and extended his hand to Emile.

How did you do? Admittedly, we’re looking for something a bit subtle here. Although the types of repetition used in this example may sound merely chatty when read out loud, they would come across as structurally redundant on the page. Even minor word repetition can set editorial teeth on edge, because editors — like other professional readers — are trained to zero in on redundancy.

To see how this orientation might affect how one reads, let’s look at this same paragraph with a screener’s heightened antennae:

Abe took a deep breath and ran his palms over his face. He yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the red and black tattoo over his left eyebrow, folded it twice, and stuffed it back into his coat. A motley assortment of trash caused his hand to recoil: cast-off candy bar wrappers, half-sucked lollipops hastily stuck back into their wrappers, waiting for later, and both red and black licorice whips. Sure, he was a sane and sober adult now. Outwardly composed, he twisted his face into a smile, swallowed a groan, and extended his hand to Emile.

See? The repetition of all those ands can be downright hypnotic — the percussive repetition lulls the reader, even if the action being described on either end of the and is very exciting indeed.

There’s a reason for that, you know, and if you’ve been paying attention throughout this series, it has probably already occurred to you. The swiftly-scanning eye’s automatic tendency is to jump between repeated words on a page, in very much the manner that a CLUE player might move his piece from the study to the kitchen via the secret passage about which everyone in the game is evidently quite well-informed. (Hey, it’s an editor’s job to demand precise word usage.)

The result: Miss Scarlet did it in the kitchen with the revolver.

Oops, wrong chain of events: the result relevant for our purposes is a submission page read far, far more quickly than the average submitter might wish. Not only by Millicent and her ilk, but by the average reader as well.

The best way to avoid triggering this skimming reaction is to vary your sentence structure. A great place to start: scanning your manuscript for any sentence in which the word and appears more than once. Take a gander:

Ezekiel put on his cocked hat, his coat of many colors, and his pink and black checked pantaloons. And he dusted himself out before heading toward the big top, clown shoes a-flopping.

Did your eye catch the subtle problem here? No? Let’s take a second look, this time as Millicent would see it:

Ezekiel put on his cocked hat, his coat of many colors, and his pink and black checked pantaloons. And he dusted himself out before heading toward the big top, clown shoes a-flopping.

All of the ands are serving slightly different functions here, two of which would be perfectly valid if they stood alone: the first is connecting the second and third items in a list; the second is connecting two characteristics in a shorter list. And the third — as in this sentence — is the kind of usage we discussed last time, where a conjunction gives a false sense of chatty consecutiveness between the first sentence and the second.

When I first began writing that last paragraph, I didn’t intend it to be an illustration of just how visually confusing word repetition may be on the page — but as I seemed to be succeeding brilliantly at doing just that, I figured I’d just run with it.

You’re welcome. Let’s highlight the repetition here, to determine precisely why a skimming reader might find it confusing:

All of the ands are serving slightly different functions here, two of which would be perfectly legitimate if they stood alone: the first is connecting the second and third items in a list; the second is connecting two characteristics in a shorter list. And the third — as in this sentence — is the kind of usage we discussed yesterday, where a conjunction gives a false sense of chatty consecutiveness between the first sentence and the second.

Is your brain in a twist after all of that percussive redundancy? Never fear — the twin revising morals are actually quite simple to remember:

(1) Every writer, no matter how experienced, will occasionally write a poorly-constructed sentence or paragraph, so there will never be a point where any of us can legitimately assume that our first drafts require no revision whatsoever, and

(2) Just because a given word may carry more than one meaning — or, as here, refer to distinct categories of things — that fact doesn’t nullify the effects of repetition upon the reader.

Because we writers tend to think of words according to their respective functions within any given sentence, rather than as images on a page, these kinds of repetition often flies under our self-editing radars. Unless one is looking for it specifically, it’s easy to, well, overlook. Thus my urging you to whip out the highlighting pens, in case you were wondering. I’m just trying to make repetition jump out at you as garishly as it does to those of us who read for a living.

Incidentally, words that sound alike but are spelled differently — there, they’re, and their, for instance — often strike readers as repetitious if they are used in too close proximity to one another. For example:

“They’re going to look for their zithers in there,” Thierry pointed out.

Why might this sentence give a reader pause? Because many pronounce words silently in their heads while they scan. Yet another great incentive to read your manuscript IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD, eh? It’s the best way to replicate the silent reader’s mental experience.

Next time, I shall delve into some other problems that commonly arise from an over-reliance upon ands. In the meantime, in between time, try to minimize word and sentence structure repetition, and keep up the good work!

Pet peeves on parade, part XXIII: the monster always returns…returns…returns…

I’m having a good day, campers: today, I got to delve back into an editing project I’d had to put aside for a while. It’s something that requires my full energy; digging one’s arms up to the elbow in a complex manuscript takes more out of a conscientious editor than writers tend to believe.

You’d be surprised at how deeply those of us who read for a living can bond with the manuscripts we handle. It’s not as though an editor (or an agent, or an agency screener) can plop himself down and read a book like any other reader; it’s our job to be alive to every detail. I like to think of myself as the book’s advocate, trying to figure out all of the little ways to make it as beautiful and marketable as humanly possible.

And no, in response to what a good third of you just thought very loudly, beautiful writing is not always marketable, any more than marketable writing is always beautiful. Ideally, a manuscript should be both. It should also, if I can possibly manage to nudge it in this direction, be written in a voice and vocabulary appropriately challenging for its target readership.

Bringing out any of these laudable traits is not only a matter of critiquing what could be improved; quite a lot of what I do involves helping the author see what is already good and could be made better. Part of being a thoughtful freelance editor — as opposed to a careful copyeditor, the nit-picky soul who concentrates on making sure that the manuscript is clear and the sentences grammatically correct, the minimum standard for professional writing — involves not only checking for possible red lights that might lead to rejection, but also figuring out what a manuscript’s strengths are, as well as why it will appeal to its target audience.

Again, those are not necessarily the same thing, right?

Most aspiring writers do need to be reminded, I’ve noticed, what is good about their work. Or even told what the selling points for their books are.

There’s a pretty good reason for this, actually. Throughout the writing process, it’s awfully easy to start to think of the effort you’ve put into a book as its most important characteristic. But realistically, publishing houses do not acquire books simply because someone went to the trouble to write them. Nor, contrary to popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, will readers — ones who do not already know the author personally, at any rate — pick up a book simply because somebody happened to write it.

Why does prompt publishers to acquire manuscripts and readers to buy books, you ask? Would I sound like a broken record if I suggested that both sell because of their strengths?

In fact, the length of time it took to write a book is precisely the wrong thing to mention in a query letter or pitch; it’s widely considered unprofessional. Millicent the agency screener is apt to regard queries that include statements like I have spent seven years writing NOVEL, GREAT AMERICAN as not only a waste of page space, but as a studied appeal for her sympathy.

“Why on earth would I care how long this manuscript took to write?” Millicent murmurs into her omnipresent latte. “And why would I be more favorably impressed by a seven-year effort than one that took only six? What matters is on the page, not what Herculean efforts it took to get there.”

Let me repeat that, as it’s awfully important: at the submission stage, manuscripts are evaluated based upon what actually appears on their pages, not the writer’s intentions, effort, or even what the book might look like after a conscientious editor’s had a few rounds with it. Many, many aspiring writers seem to have a hard time accepting this, judging by how often justifications and explanations seem to find their way into queries and pitches. From a professional point of view, this information just isn’t relevant.

But that’s not the only reason that including it could hurt you. Because it’s quite standard for both agents and editors to request revisions after taking on a book project — see my earlier observation about how involved professional readers can get with manuscripts they like — it’s prudent to assume that the pros in your future will expect you to be able to incorporate feedback in a timely and reasonable manner. So if the agent of your dreams’ reaction to a detailed account of the five years you invested in producing the manuscript is less likely to be, “Gee, this book must be worthwhile,” but “Heavens — if a single draft took five years, how long will any revisions I want take?” is it truly in your interests to mention it?

Save the probably quite interesting story of how you churned out that 400-page novel in the scant ten-minute increments you managed to snatch between your day job and your night job for future interviews. Trust me, your reading public will eat it up.

In your queries and pitches, stick to the information that Millicent actually needs in order to decide whether to request pages. As submitting writers are all too prone to forget, publishing is a business, not an art form — agents and editors acquire books they believe are marketable, not just ones they believe are well-written. And, as I believe I have mentioned several hundred times before, they do not — contrary to the hope of most submitting writers — read the entire submission before making up their minds on either point.

Anyone care to tell the class at what point in the average submission Millicent stops reading? Think on it, and I shall give you the answer at the end of this post.

Hint: it doesn’t necessarily correlate to the number of pages her agent boss asked you to send. Not at all.

How does this relate to the revision process, you ask? Well, swift judgments mean that if you have limited revision time at your disposal, it’s smart strategy to concentrate on the first 50 pages of your manuscript — the usual first request from an agent — or, in a pinch, the first 5. (If you are planning to head to a writers’ conference anytime soon, burnishing the first 5 until they shine is imperative: the first five pages of the manuscript are the standard writing sample, the most anyone is at all likely to ask to see within the context of a pitch meeting. But I digress.)

Do I sense an undercurrent of amusement out there? “Are you seriously taking the time to justify doing any revision at all, Anne?” those of you who have followed the Pet Peeves on Parade series closely ask, chuckling. “Isn’t it a bit late in the series for that? We all know what a stickler Millicent can — and indeed, should — be. Or are you once again leading us down the primrose path to some well-concealed eventual point?”

Well, the importance of revision bears repeating, chucklers, but you’re right: my little peroration was warming you up for a pet peeve that I suspect not all of you will agree is problematic on the page. Or so professional readers like yours truly surmise from how pervasive the problem I’m about to mention is in submissions — particularly in openings.

I’m speaking, of course, to invocatory rhythms that don’t quite work. And you thought this post wasn’t going to be a continuation of our discussion on voice!

Invocatory rhythms are one of the most popular tools aspiring writers use to beautify their narratives, a kind of sing-song rhythm that alerts the reader that Something Literary is Going on Here. One of the easiest ways to add this music to a text is through word and phrase repetition. Take a gander at a fairly representative sample:

Musette ran through the corridor, ran like the wind, ran as though lions were behind her and the open arms of a knight in shining armor in front. Didn’t she deserve her freedom, after all this time? Didn’t she deserve a life free of the incessant demands of boss, husband, co-worker, photocopy machine, cat? Didn’t she, in fact, deserve to breathe the fresh air of autonomy, unfettered by any limitations whatsoever?

See the problem? No? Okay, let’s take a peek at it through Millicent’s experience-sharpened peepers.

Musette ran through the corridor, ran like the wind, ran as though lions were behind her and the open arms of a knight in shining armor in front. Didn’t she deserve her freedom, after all this time? Didn’t she deserve a life free of the incessant demands of boss, husband, co-worker, photocopy machine, cat? Didn’t she, in fact, deserve to breathe the fresh air of autonomy, unfettered by any limitations whatsoever?

The problem is clearer now, right? Not only does this innocent-looking paragraph harbor a heck of a lot of word and phrase repetition — enough that our Millie may murmur under her breath, “Wow — doesn’t this writer know any other words?” — but that eye-confusing reiteration is encased in identical sentence structures. The result is a little something we professional readers like to call structural repetition: a percussive repetition of similarly-structured sentences (or sentence fragments) intended to make a rhythmic point.

Why bring this up as a voice and revision problem, in addition to a notorious Millicents’ pet peeve? Because part of the issue here is editorial: merely broadening the vocabulary, the usual fix for word repetition, would not solve this problem. Lookee:

Musette ran through the corridor, sped like the wind, fled as though lions were behind her and the open arms of a knight in shining armor in front. Didn’t she deserve her liberty, after all this time? Didn’t she merit a life free of the incessant demands of boss, husband, co-worker, photocopy machine, cat? Didn’t she, in fact, have an inherent right to breathe the fresh air of autonomy, unfettered by any limitations whatsoever?

Better already, is it not? To a professional reader, though, this passage would still read as structurally repetitious, despite the wording being more varied (and thus more interesting) this time around. And that reaction is apt to confuse self-editors, who would tend to see the nice, pulsing rhythm pushing the paragraph forward, rather than the probability that the too-similar sentence structures will cause the reader to zone out a bit as the paragraph goes on.

Not to mention the virtual certainty that Millicent will murmur, “There’s nothing inherently wrong with this narrative trick, but why must this writer foist it on us twice in a single paragraph?”

You’ve got an excellent point there, Millie. Like every other narrative device, structural repetition works best when it is used sparingly.

How sparingly, you ask with fear and trepidation? Two or three times, say, in the course of a manuscript, to draw the reader’s attention to particularly important passages. Even within the context of this short excerpt, see how much more effective the first use of structural repetition is if we remove the second.

Musette ran through the corridor, sped like the wind, fled as though lions were behind her and the open arms of a knight in shining armor in front. Didn’t she deserve her liberty, after all this time? She longed with the urgency of a sneeze for a life free of the incessant demands of boss, husband, co-worker, photocopy machine, cat. Clearly, she had an inherent right to breathe the fresh air of autonomy, unfettered by any limitations whatsoever.

Didn’t like it that way? Okay, let’s switch where the structural repetition falls — and while we’re at it, take out the cliché about the wind.

Musette sped through the corridor as though lions were behind her and the open arms of a knight in shining armor in front. Didn’t she deserve her liberty, after all this time? Didn’t she merit a life free of the incessant demands of boss, husband, co-worker, photocopy machine, cat? Didn’t she, in fact, have an inherent right to breathe the fresh air of autonomy, unfettered by any limitations whatsoever?

Was that a sudden gust of non-clichéd wind that just made my cat topple over, or did a significant minority of you just sigh gustily?
“I see that there are repeated words in the original version, Anne,” some of you point out, “but frankly, I liked it best. Surely the choice to incorporate structural repetition is a stylistic choice, rather than a matter best left up to an editor. Unless you have just inadvertently proven your point about not every reader’s liking every well-written narrative voice, and you are demonstrating yourself to be the kind of knuckle-dragging troglodyte who eschews the joys of literary fiction in favor of novels that — ugh — feature a plot?”

Actually, I’ve been known to read and enjoy both, oh ye quick to judge. What’s more, I’ve read plenty of literary fiction with strong plots and genre fiction that features beautiful language. So there.

But you are obliquely correct, oh sighers, that the original version above was more likely to have dropped from the fingertips of a writer with specifically literary aspirations than one who was aiming for a more mainstream readership. Since invocatory rhythms are quite common in poetry, this style turns up very frequently in novel and memoir submissions, particularly in those that are either literary fiction or are other types of manuscript written with a literary tone. It just sounds pretty, right?

“If the writing’s pretty on an individual sentence level,” sighers everywhere argue, “how could that be problematic in a submission?”

In several ways, actually. Rather than telling you why, let’s look at the single most famous example of invocatory prose in English literature, the opening to Charles Dickens’ A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Yes, I use this particular example fairly frequently, but humor me here: Dickens, bless his now-still heart, has provided us with a lulu of an example of why structural repetition is problematic in print.

Just for kicks, pretend that you have never seen it before, and try to read like an agency screener. To facilitate that laudable endeavor — and to give you the opportunity to judge for yourself whether all of this textual repetition provides a compelling entrée into the story that follows, here is not just the well-known opening, but the next page as well. As always, if you find you are having trouble making out the individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the images.

Now, this voice is certainly distinctive, isn’t it? Hard to conceive of a more memorable opening, rhythmically speaking. But it’s also true that if these were the first two pages of a submission, virtually any modern-day Millicent would have rejected it by line three. Any guesses why?

If your hand instantly shot into the air, alerting me to your trenchant observation that it was because the first paragraph is one interminable run-on sentence — 119 words, connected incorrectly by commas, rather than semicolons, sacre bleu! — give yourself a gold star for the day.

Ditto if you zeroed in upon the apparently random capitalization of nouns, the criminal punctuation choices, the ubiquitous logical contradictions (yes, I know it’s meant to be ironic; think like a screener here and look for reasons to shout, “Next!”), the second paragraph written entirely in the passive voice, and the fact that two paragraphs into the piece, the reader still has absolutely no idea who the protagonist is or what’s going on.

And can’t you just picture an editor furiously scribbling in the margins: “Which was it — the best of times or the worst of times? It could hardly have been both. Commit to one or the other!”

Although any one of those perfectly valid objections might have prompted that cry of “Next!”, the structural repetition is what most pros would have noticed first. To see why, you stand up right now and take two steps backward from your computer monitor.

Notice the visual pattern? Millicent would have spotted it as soon as she pulled the first page of ol’ Charles’ manuscript out of the envelope.

Actually, if you’ve been revising for a while, you might have caught that the structural repetition problem without backing off. A solid tip-off: the verb to be appears 14 times within the first sentence.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Yes, this is a level of verb variation that would make Millicent long for the comparatively challenging vocabulary choices of See Dick run, Jane. Run, Jane, run. Remember, though, it’s not just the repeated words and phrases that would raise professional readers’ weary eyebrows here: it’s the phenomenon of consecutive sentences being set up in the same way. No matter how great your high school English teacher told you this particular opening was, it’s dull for the reader to read the same It was X, it was Y sentence structure over and over again.

Or, indeed, any given sentence structure, if it is repeated often enough within too few lines of text.

Unfortunately, a lot of writers just adore structural repetition: it reads a bit like a prayer. It can provide a driving, almost galloping rhythm to a page. Many aspiring writers see that rhythm in the work of authors they admire and say, “By gum, I’m going to make my paragraphs read like that!”

And they do. Sometimes, they make their paragraphs read like that several times per page.

Don’t mind that loud rapping. It’s merely Millicent pounding her head against a wall, moaning, “Make it stop! Make it stop!”

That’s what happens when perfectly legitimate voice choices run amok. Like any magic trick,, repetitive structure loses its ability to charm when the reader sees it too often. After a surprisingly short while, it can start to come across less as an interesting stylistic choice than as a sort of narrative tic.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let me ask you: how many iterations of It was… did Dickens put you through before you first thought Oh, come on, Chuck; get on with it?

“But Anne,” lovers of percussive repetition beg piteously, “I just love my structurally repetitious opening page/paragraph/chapter. If I’m careful not to use this trick again anywhere in the manuscript, I can keep it, can’t I?”

I have a news flash from Millicentville: she sees a LOT of structurally repetitious openings; as with anything else she sees a dozen times a week, it’s probably going to be more difficult to impress her by this method. She’s also not particularly likely to believe that an opening redolent with repetition is a one-time narrative choice.

More often than not, when a manuscript opens with repetitive structure, it will continue with repetitive structure. That, alas, renders structural repetition dangerous to use in the first pages of a submission. Or book proposal. Agents and editors are just so used to this tendency that they’re all too likely — fairly or not — to conclude that to read on would be to be treated to the same type of sentence over and over, ad infinitum.

And that, my friends, is not invocatory; it’s soporific. Next time, I shall talk about ways to tell which is which in your writing, to figure out when invocatory rhythms will help your work.

Remember, Millicent seldom makes it all the way to the bottom of page one. That’s not a whole lot of lines in which to establish the originality and power of your voice.

Too bad our pal Chuckles blew his chance by repeating himself so much, eh? Keep up the good work!

Pet peeves on parade, part XXII: a stay of execution for some of those oft-doomed darlings, or, how can I tell which of this array of beauties to keep?

Because we have been concentrating quite heavily on craft issues of late — and very satisfying it has been, too — I had planned to devote Memorial Day weekend entirely to book promotion skills: author interviews, book trailers, guest blogs, and similar increasingly essential but seldom discussed wrenches for the first-time author’s toolkit. I do plan on getting to that material tomorrow. I realized this morning, however, that due to a heavily-booked last couple of days, I had left those of you in the throes of revision without a meaty homework assignment for the long weekend.

That will never do, will it? You might have to resort to sending out a few more queries, writing fresh pages, spending time with your kith and/or kin, or some other non-revision-related activity.

Practice is essential for building up the revision portion of that toolkit — and not just experience correcting one’s own manuscript on a sentence level. Being able to produce and polish a lovely sentence is, after all, the best-known part of an author’s job description. It often comes as a surprise to first-time novelists and memoirists, though, that most of the feedback agents, contest judges, and yes, even many editors give is not line-specific, but general requests to change precisely the type of patterns we’ve been discussing throughout this series: ramping up the showing, rather than the telling; tinkering with the pacing to keep the reader turning pages; revealing more character complexity in the dialogue, and so forth.

You didn’t think I’d been going on and on about these matters just to get your work past Millicent the agency screener, did you? Once you’ve landed the agent of your dreams, you will need to be able to translate sometimes rather vague revision requests (which can run the full gamut from cut out all of the semicolons to more should happen in the first 50 pages to does your protagonist’s brother absolutely have to be gay?) into concrete changes on the manuscript page. Sometimes very quickly.

How quickly, you ask with fear and trembling? Well, let me put it this way: my agent once called me on Thanksgiving to ask if I could rewrite the last third of a novel to an editor’s specifications before Christmas. I had it on her desk in three weeks.

Well may you react with horror — but if you’re not afraid of having your hair turn white on the spot, think about how much more difficult that would have been to pull off if I hadn’t already amassed a pretty hefty array of tools already honed in my writer’s toolkit.

That hellscape you just envisioned is a fairly standard experience for first-time novelists and memoirists, by the way. See why I am constantly badgering you to improve your revision skills, even if you happen to have a brilliant manuscript already in hand? You never know when you’re going to need ‘em.

Want to know what the most challenging part of revising on a deadline? Maintaining consistency of voice. It’s terribly easy to become so fixated on details — or on a certain part of the text — that one ends up with the requested changes, true, but also with a Frankenstein manuscript.

For those of you new to Author! Author!, a Frankenstein manuscript meanders in voice, tone, perspective, structure, and/or style; like the body parts of Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, the text may create the illusion of a whole entity, but it lacks the spark, the true-to-life continuity of a story told from beginning to end by a consistent authorial voice. Often, FM tendencies are the result of multiple or partial revision; even more often, they spring from a writer’s learning the tricks of the trade while writing a book.

How do I know? You’d be surprised how frequently the voice is quite different at the end of the manuscript than at the beginning. Or polished in parts, but rough in others.

Part of the point of this series has been to help you identify these FM tendencies in your own work. To that end, we’ve been talking a great deal about what to take out of a manuscript. Today, I would like to discuss what to leave in, or even what you might want to add.

And the masses rejoice! “Oh, that’s such a relief, Anne,” burnt-out revisers shout from every corner of the globe. “I’ve been working my fingers to the elbow, excising redundant text, spicing up my dialogue, and, of course, getting rid of all of those ands, all the while steeling myself for the inevitable moment when you would talk me into axing my favorite sentences and phrases. Because, after all, we’ve all been told time and time again to kill your darlings. But may I, kind lady, dare hope that you’re going to tell me to keep a couple of my favorites?”

Oh, you poor dears — no wonder you’ve been quivering in your boots. How could you not be, when writing teachers all over North America have been shouting at their students to axe their favorite bits of prose since practically the moment the classic piece of advice fell out of Dorothy Parker’s well-rouged lips sometime during Prohibition?

Well, I’m not going to do it. While a willingness to consider cutting even one’s pet bits is indeed useful, in my experience, most talented writers — published and as-yet-to-be-published alike — actually have a pretty good sense of the little things that shine in their manuscripts. They may not be right that all of the pretty bits are indispensable to the story they are telling, but they usually know which sentences sing and which merely croak.

Especially if the writer in question has been honing her craft, her pet parts of the text are likely to be telling little details, original, fresh, surprising specifics that bring joy to the eyes of agents, editors, and contest judges when they appear nestled in a manuscript — particularly on the first page of the text, where they act like miniature neon signs reading, “Hello? This one can WRITE!” causing Millicent to sit up straight for perhaps the first time that screening day and cry, “By gum, maybe I should not toss this one into the rejection pile.”

As lovely as eliciting this reaction is, there is more to catching a professional reader’s attention than a charming and detailed first page, I’m afraid. Of course, it’s a necessary first step to that reader’s moving on eagerly to the second, and the third, and so forth. Yet an initial good impression is not enough, however much writing teachers emphasize the importance of including an opening hook: as I believe I may have mentioned before in this series, in order to wow an agent into asking to see the entire manuscript, or into reading the entirety of the one you’ve already sent, the impressive writing needs to continue consistently throughout.

Ah, some of you formerly joyous revisers have wilted a bit, haven’t you, under the realization that keeping your favorite writing may require more work than cutting it wholesale? “But Anne,” you whimper, “how can a revising writer tell if the proportion of telling little details falls off throughout a manuscript enough to harm the narrative? More importantly for submission purposes, what density of telling details is enough to continue pleasing a professional reader’s eye?”

Excellent questions both, revisers: we’re all aware that the answer to the first is not necessarily the answer to the second, right? The first is largely a matter of personal style, after all, as well as the narrative expectations of a particular book category. Some writers wrangle generalizations better than others, after all. Generally speaking, though, the higher the proportion of exquisite detail to generalization, the more literary the writing; the more summary statements predominate, the lower the expected reading level of the audience.

And if the three repetitions of general in those last two paragraphs drove you crazy, I’m proud of you. You’ve been doing your editing homework.

In answer to the indignant collective gasp I hear echoing about the cosmos, literary is not simply a synonym for high-quality when we’re talking about writing. Let’s face it, there is plenty of good fiction writing that isn’t literary fiction — and plenty of excellent writing that isn’t literary. Just as the various striations of YA presume specific reading levels, literary fiction assumes a college-educated audience, or at any rate readers with a college-level vocabulary.

Thus, literary fiction is a book category, not a value judgment. It is quite possible, however, to bring a literary voice to other book categories — one sees literary-voiced memoir (like, for instance, Barbara Robinette Moss’ extraordinary CHANGE ME INTO ZEUS’ DAUGHTER from time to time, and many breakout novels are literary-voiced genre works.

That doesn’t mean, however, that a highly literary voice would be appropriate to every book category — or indeed, to every story. Only you, as author, can decide the best voice for your story, but in order to figure out the detail/generalization level appropriate to your book category, you can pick up some external clues.

How? By keeping up with the market in your chosen field, of course. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: unless you are willing to read recent releases in your chosen book category — as opposed to what was coming out 5, 10, or 50 years ago — you’re going to have a much harder time querying, submitting, and yes, revising your own work.

Why? Because you won’t know what the current expectations and conventions are. Case in point: detail vs. summary statements.

Think about it: could you really get away with a summary sentence like, “She had legs that stretched all the way from here to Kalamazoo,” in a genre other than hardboiled mystery, bless its abstraction-loving fan base? (All right, I’ll admit it: one of the all-time best compliments I have ever received came from a writer of hardboiled; he commented on a dress I was wearing by telling me, “You look like trouble in a B movie.” I shall continue to cherish that to my grave.)

That’s one of the many, many reasons agents and editors tend to expect aspiring and published writers alike to read a whole lot of recently-published books within the category they write, in case any of you conference-goers out there had been wondering: to gain a working sense of the abstract/concrete statement ratio habitual readers of that type of book will expect to see. Some other reasons for keeping up with the latest releases: learning what that particular readership likes, figuring out what is and isn’t appropriate vocabulary for that specific readership, gaining currency with what’s being published right now, rather than in, say, 1858, and other practical benefits.

Some of you are sniffing disdainfully, aren’t you? “But Anne, none of this can possibly apply to me or my manuscript. My book is ART, you see: it is totally original. It cannot be forced into an artificial category.”

I can understand why you might feel that way, oh sniffers, but I have a news flash for you: there’s no such thing as a published book that doesn’t fall into a particular book category, no matter how genre-busting it may be. It’s simply how agents, publishers, and booksellers think of books. (If that is indeed news to you, and for some tips on figuring out which conceptual container might best house your manuscript for marketing purposes, please see the HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR BOOK’S CATEGORY posts on the archive list at right.)

Because that’s the case, the pros’ eyes tend to glaze over whenever an aspiring writer refuses — or even hesitates — to say to which category his manuscript belongs. To them, that just sounds like, you guessed it, a lack of familiarity with the current book market.

It’s not enough, though, to have a general (there’s that word again!) sense of what kind of writing is currently highly regarded in your chosen category. You also need to get a feel for your own personal style. Before you can decide where you want to pitch your manuscript on the detail scale, you need to figure out where the telling details already tend congregate in your work — and where they do not, so you may work toward overall voice consistency.

Which brings us right back to close textual analysis, doesn’t it? Funny how that worked out. Whip out your trusty marking pens, campers, and try this experiment:

1. Print out three chapters of your manuscript: the first, one from the middle, and one toward the end of the book.

Don’t use the final chapter; most writers polish that one automatically, doubtless the effect of our high school English teachers making us read the final pages of THE GREAT GATSBY so often. Second or third from the end will give you a better idea of your voice when you’re trying to wind things up.

Do print out Chapter 1, though, because if Millicent reads any of them at all, she will start there.

2. Make yourself comfy someplace where you will not be disturbed for a few hours, and start reading.

Easier said than done, of course, especially for those of you with young children gladdening your daily lives, but this isn’t relaxation: this is work. So don’t you dare feel guilty about taking the time to pore over your prose.

Yes, I know: your three-year-old will not be all that impressed that I said so. But you owe it to your writing to get to know your own voice.

3. While you are reading, highlight in nice, bright yellow every time the narrative gives information about a character in summary form.

Yes, this will be a phenomenal amount of work, but trust me: it will be worth it. Mark everything from Angelique felt envious to Maxine was a shop welder of immense proportions to Zeb was a compassionate soul, drawn to injured children, limping dogs, and soup kitchens.

4. Now use a different color of pen — red is nice — to underline any character-revealing information that the narrative conveys indirectly, through specific detail or speeches that demonstrate a characteristic or an environment that is reflective of a character’s internal mood.

Remember, you are not judging the quality of the sentences here — you are looking for passages that encourage the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about what the character is like, rather than simply stating it as a fact. To revisit the trio from above, red-marked sentences might include:

Unable to contain herself, Angelique surreptitiously poked her rival with a pin, or

Maxine’s broad shoulders barely fit through the doors to her metal shop, or even

Zeb was late for work again, having been sidetracked by a child’s scraped knee, a search for the same little girl’s lost cocker spaniel, and the absolute necessity to track down and fund the homeless person he had been forced to overlook yesterday because he’d already given away the last dollar in his pocket.

Beginning to spot some patterns? Good. Now that your manuscript is color-coded to tell you at a glance what your summary statement/telling detail ratio is, how consistent is your narrative being about preserving those proportions?

That’s a big concept to get your mind around, I know. While you’re pondering, let’s get back to that colorful text.

5. Now that you’ve identified these different species of sentences, double-check immediately before and after the indirect indicators in red for summary statements telling the reader precisely how these dandy little details should be interpreted. Circle bottom-lining conclusion statements in a third color — let’s say green, and complete the Rastafarian triumvirate.

Such summaries tend to lurk in the environs of telling details — usually unnecessarily, as vivid details by definition speak for themselves. You may find them elsewhere, naturally, but these will be the easiest to spot.

6. For each green-marked sentence, ask yourself, “Self, is this summary absolutely necessary here, or does the indirect statement cover what I wanted to say? Could it in fact be cut, and would the manuscript be both shorter and better for it?”

Applied consistently, this question can strip a lot of unnecessary verbiage from a manuscript relatively painlessly. It’s a good strategy to know, because it’s often difficult for a writer to notice redundancy on a page he has written himself — from a writerly perspective, saying something in two different ways often just looks like creative emphasis.

Or — and this is more common — the writer may not trust the reader to draw the correct conclusion from the more delicate indirect clues, and so rush to provide the logical extrapolation. But readers are pretty smart, especially those lovers of good writing (in every sense) who dote on marvelously revealing details.

Again, that’s not to say that specifics should trump generalities every time. Abstract statements that bottom-line a character’s ever-changing array of feelings, thoughts, and actions (Eileen was morose, Teddy was sexy, Elvira was a tall, cool hunk of woman, etc.) can save a lot of time in a narrative, quickly providing the reader a sense of what’s going on and who is doing it.

Sometimes, that can come in very handy. In a scene where the action is pretty mundane, a swift summary statement like Bernadette spent the next fifteen hours yawning her way through book shelving can act like a fast-forward button for the narration.

The effect can be even greater when there is a lot going on. When an action scene suddenly requires fifteen thugs to jump Our Hero, describing each one individually and in a nuanced manner would slow the scene down to a crawl — which, inevitably, would convey the impression that O.H. is being beaten up in slow motion.

Fast-paced action deserves fast-paced narration, short, tense sentences that get the blood pumping. Short, to-the-point summary statements like Edmund ducked sideways. The anvil thudded into the wall behind him. may well serve the scene better than long, lyrical, detail-rich ones that go on for line after line.

Oh, you wanted a second example? Okay: As Edmund veered sideways, the rush of air by his ear, percussive and harsh, reminded him of that long-ago summer of fireflies and BB guns, unwashed berry juice climbing up to his elbows after braving the bees for an afternoon’s blackberrying. Funny, how something as dangerous as an anvil flung at his head could awaken such long-dormant memories.

Yes, the second set was prettier — but which would work best for this SPECIFIC action scene in this SPECIFIC story, told in this SPECIFIC voice?

By contrast, concrete characterization statements depict what a character is saying, doing, feeling, and so forth in a particular moment. In a story told primarily through concrete statements — and again, writing with a high concrete/abstract ratio is considered more stylistically sophisticated — the narrative expects the reader to draw conclusions about what characters are like based upon an array of specific actions, feelings, words, and so forth, rather than simply providing a summary statement.

Does that distinction sound at all familiar? It should: this is yet another manifestation of everyone’s favorite writing bugbear, the difference between showing and telling.

Yet constructing an effective narrative is not as simple as eschewing the latter and embracing the former. Obviously, every manuscript ever produced needs both abstract and concrete statements. Because, let’s face it, there’s no such thing as a chapter, paragraph, or even sentence that’s appropriate for every book in which the creative mind might choose to have it appear.

Context matters — and so does book category.

Avoiding summary statements wherever possible may serve a high-end women’s fiction writer very well, for example, but actually harm certain types of genre novel. The rash of semicolons that might make an academic book look learned is unlikely to fly in a Western — but you’d be surprised how much more acceptable it would be in a science fiction novel. And while those of us devoted to literary fiction do occasionally marvel at a story intended exclusively for a college-educated readership written in very simple language, the vocabulary range of most literary fiction is quite different from that of well-written YA.

But you knew that already, right?

And don’t even get me started on how much more acceptable rampant summary statements are in most types of nonfiction than in fiction. Memoirs in particular tend to rely upon them pretty heavily.

Why? Well, as a reader, how eager are you to hear every detail of what happened to even a very interesting real-life narrator over a two-year period? If a memoirist steers too clear of abstract statements like Auntie Mame’s famous My puberty was bleak, she’s going to end up expending quite a bit of precious page space on illustrating just how bleak it was, right?

So much for my carefully non-judgmental speech on the subject of abstract vs. concrete statements. It is worth noting, though, that on any given day of manuscript-screening, your garden-variety Millicent sees a whole lot more summary sentences than concrete ones.

Which, obviously, can render a genuinely original detail quite a refreshment for weary professional eyes. So, generally speaking (ooh, there’s that pesky word again), if you can increase the frequency with which such concrete details appear, you’ll be better off.

Ready to take gander at the ratio in the manuscript you’ve been submitting — or are planning to submit to professional scrutiny anytime soon? Fantastic. Let’s revisit those yellow, red, and green pages from above. But this time, grab a fourth color of pen –- how would you feel about embracing something in the purple family?

7. Mark all the sentences where your protagonist (or any other character whose thoughts are audible to the reader) thinks a response to something that has just happened, instead of saying it aloud or the narrative’s demonstrating the reaction indirectly.

Remember, you’re not judging the quality of writing by determining what to highlight, or sentencing any given observation to the chopping block by marking it. You are simply making patterns in the text more visible.

These kinds of sentences are hard to show out of context, so let me mark up a bit of text for you. The sentences destined for purple overcoats are in caps:

I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE SAID THAT, ZACHARY THOUGHT.

WHY WASN’T HE ANSWERING? “What’s wrong?” Nanette asked, rubbing her tennis-sore ankles. “Are you feeling sick to your stomach again?”

OH, WOULD ONLY THAT HIS ONGOING DISSATISFACTION WITH THEIR MARRIAGE STEMMED FROM A SOURCE AS SIMPLE AS NAUSEA. WAS HIS WIFE HONESTLY SO SOULLESS THAT SHE COULDN’T FEEL THEIR WELL-MANICURED LAWN CREEPING UP THE DOORSTEP TO SMOTHER THEM IN SEDUCTIVE NORMALCY? “No, I just had a long day at work.”

Everyone clear on the distinction I’m making here? Excellent. Now humor me a little and dig up a fifth color of pen — blue, anyone?

8. Mark any sentence where your protagonist’s reactions are conveyed through bodily sensation of some sort. Or depicted by the world surrounding him, or through some other concrete detail.

You’re probably going to find yourself re-marking some of the red sentences from #4, but plow ahead nevertheless, please. Starting to notice some narrative patterns? Expressing character reaction via physicality or projection is a great way to raise the telling little detail quota in your manuscripts.

Does this advice seem familiar? It should, for those of you who regularly attend writing workshops or have worked with an editor. It is generally expressed by the terse marginal admonition, “Get out of your character’s head!”

I wish feedback-givers would explain this advice more often; too many writers read it as an order to prevent their characters from thinking at all, ever. But that’s not what get out of your character’s head! means, at least not most of the time. Generally (ooh!), it’s an editor’s way of TELLING the writer to stop telling the reader about the character’s emotional responses through dialogue-like thought. Instead, (these feedback-givers suggest) SHOW the emotion through details like bodily sensation, noticing a significant detail in the environment that highlights the mood, or…

Well, you get the picture. It’s yet another way that editors bark at writers, “Hey, you — show, don’t tell!”

What will happen to your manuscript if you take this advice to heart? Well, among other things, it will probably be more appealing to Millicent — because, believe me, protagonists who think rather than feel the vast majority of the time disproportionately people the novels submitted to agencies and publishing houses.

And when I say vast majority of the time, I mean in practically every submission they receive. To put it bluntly, a novel or memoir that conveys protagonist response in ways other than thought a significant proportion of the time will at very least enjoy the advantage of surprise.

Why are characters who think their responses — essentially summarizing what they might have said or done in response instead of saying or doing it — so very common, especially in memoir? One theory is that we writers are so often rather quiet people, more given to thinking great comebacks than saying them out loud.

A girl’s best friend is her murmur, as Dorothy Parker used to say.

Or maybe we just think our protagonists will be more likable if they think nasty things about their fellow characters, rather than saying them out loud. That, or there are a whole lot of writers out there whose English teachers made them read HAMLET one too many times, causing them to contract Chronic Soliloquization Disorder.

Whichever it is, Millicent would be happier about most submissions in practically every book category if they exhibited this type of writing less. Done with care, avoiding long swathes of thought need not stifle creative expression.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s revisit our little scene of domestic tranquility from above, this time grounding the characters’ reactions in the flesh and the room:

By the time Nanette was midway through her enthusiastic account of the office party, Zachary’s stomach had tied itself into the Gordian knot. The collected swords of every samurai in the history of Japan would have been helpless against it.

“Zach!” Nanette’s back snapped into even greater perpendicularity to her hard chair. “You’re not listening. Upset tummy again?”

He could barely hear her over the ringing of his ears. He could swear he heard their well-manicured lawn creeping up the doorstep to smother them in seductive normalcy. The very wallpaper seemed to be gasping in horror at the prospect of having to live here a second longer. “I just had a long day at work.”

See the difference? The essentials are still here, just expressed in a less obviously thought-based manner. The narrative’s gotten out of the characters’ heads — and stepped right into their bodies.

Go back and take another look at your marked-up manuscript. How blue is it? How heavily purple is that prose? (Sorry; I couldn’t resist setting you up for that one.)

No, but seriously, it’s a good question: all of the types of sentence you just identified are in fact necessary to a successful narrative, so ideally, you have ended up with a very colorful sheaf of paper. Using too many of one type or another, believe it or not, can be boring for the reader, just as using the same sentence structure over and over lulls the eye into skimming.

If you doubt this, try reading a government report sometime. One declarative sentence after another can be stultifying for the reader.

The telling details of your manuscript will be nestled in those red- and blue-marked sentences, Note how frequently they appear in your chapters. If you find more than half a page of yellow and/or purple between patches of darker colors, you might want to go back and mix up your abstract/concrete ratio more.

If you find any pages that are entirely yellow and/or purple, I would suggest running, not walking, to the nearest used bookstore, buying three or four battered paperback editions of books that sell well in your chosen genre, and carting them home to perform the five-marker experiment on them. Could you revise your manuscript so that the color ratio in it replicates that in those books?

Yes, this is a time-consuming exercise, now that you mention it. A test like this is rather nerve-wracking to apply to your own work, but it’s a great way to start getting in the habit of being able to see your pages as someone who does not know you might. (If you want to get a REALLY clear sense of it, trade chapters with a writer you trust, and apply the same experiment.)

At the end of it all, however, you will have a much, much clearer idea of what your narrative voice sounds like — not only at its best and worst, but when it is just trying to do its job. You’ll gain a sense of what it sounds like when you’re tired or excited, trying desperately to get a thought down before it vanishes or having the time to allow your words to revel in their own beauty.

Once you gain that working sense of your own voice, editing your own work will become easier, I promise. You’ll be able to spot the telltale signs that the narrative has slipped away from it; you may even come to feel the drift before the words hit the page.

It sounds like magic, but it isn’t: it’s narrative consistency.

What does all of this have to do with saving your darlings? Plenty. How wonderful would it be if your best writing did not jump out at the reader because the entire manuscript was that good?

A lovely thought, isn’t it? Your darlings will be comfortably housed in a strong, sure narrative; they may — and this happens more than one might think — be your pets because they are already written in your personal narrative voice.

But you won’t know that for sure until you know your voice inside out, will you? Keep up the good work!