I was all set this week to get away from the negative critiques of fundamental errors I keep finding. I wanted to discuss the prose of Steven Erikson, because Gardens of the Moon is one of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read.
But each week, it seems I find a new candidate for the worst way to start a novel. So here goes. This is so bad that it almost crosses over into brilliant comedy.
“Careful, please,” I said to the worker who was ineptly handling a crate full of dishes as I walked back into the house I was preparing to leave. “I think we’re just about done,” I called into the living room.
Active Voice
As usual with this series, I’ll point out a few things unrelated to the lesson first.
There’s too much passive voice. I’ve become much more lax about this type of thing in my own writing because it sounds wrong to change every single “was” to a more active verb.
But in the opening paragraphs, I really want to draw the reader in.
Here it’s quite easy.
“Careful, please,” I said. The worker fumbled a crate full of dishes, and I cringed, waiting for the inevitable crash.
Notice how the awkwardness of phrases like “was ineptly handling” can be replaced by a more suitable active verb: fumbled.
Already, this simple change corrects the fundamental lesson I want to get to:
Don’t do too much in a single sentence!
Sentence Length
As with every rule, there are amazing exceptions. Some of the best sentences I’ve read break this rule. But one must be able to follow and understand the rule before it can be broken, or you’ll end up with the tragedy that is the opening sentence to this novel.
Here’s a list of what the author tries to fit into the first sentence. There’s a mover who isn’t doing a good job. He has a box of dishes. The main character walks into his house. He’s preparing to leave the house.
That is far too much.
First off, in an attempt to get so much across, the reader will barely comprehend any of it. The sentence seems to be grammatically correct, but it feels like a run-on sentence with how wordy it is. He has to resort to awkward phrases to avoid a run-on. And most important of all, the information is told instead of shown.
What’s so disheartening is how close this author came to getting it right. He sets up a scene perfectly suited to showing all this information without telling the reader anything.
Unnecessary Clauses
Let’s finish up correcting the paragraph since we’re so close.
“…I was preparing to leave.” This is completely unnecessary. The main character is moving out in the scene. There is absolutely no reason to then tell the reader something that has already been shown.
Whenever you write the word “as,” a red flag should go off that you’re cramming too much into a single sentence. It is sometimes correct, but you must always ask yourself: are the two clauses actually happening at the same time?
In the example above, the word “as” introduces ambiguity.
Where is the worker? I imagined him loading a truck outside, and then the main character walks into the house and speaks to someone else.
But “as” implies he calls into the house since otherwise, he’d be speaking to someone behind him. Wait. If the person is in the house, how does the main character know he’s “ineptly handling?”
Cramming Too Much Into a Sentence
Pretty much all interpretations of the scene don’t make sense. I’ll return to the lesson. This only happened because the author tried to cram it all into one sentence.
If everything were described across multiple sentences, a more precise and logical picture would appear in the reader’s mind. So for the correction, I’ll place the people in their locations.
“Careful, please,” I said. The mover fumbled a crate of dishes, and I cringed, waiting for the inevitable crash. The box somehow made it onto the truck safely, so I walked back into the house. A lump formed in my throat, and I found a man wrapping tape around the last box in an empty living room.
Half to myself, I said, “I think we’re just about done.”
This is what I do when I go from the first draft to the second draft. There would still be a lot of tinkering to get it just how I want it.
But notice how all the same information comes across much better in this version. The reader has a chance to digest and visualize it all now. Putting too much in a sentence is a recipe for ambiguity and telling.
It’s also far harder for the reader to process.
Exceptions
And that brings us to my favorite exception to the rule. Sometimes you want to intentionally confuse the reader to imitate the experience of a character. The easiest way to do this is to cram too much into a sentence.
I hopped on the carnival ride. As it sped up, an awful feeling developed in the pit of my stomach. We spun and flung and bits of cotton candy whizzed by as my side pressed into the metal edge, pain and nausea filling my body, laughter and noise and that horrible smell of burnt burgers offending my nostrils.
Or whatever. You get the point.
Fight scenes are a common place this will happen, too. There are times when breaking the rule makes sense, but I consider this rule to be pretty solid. It’s going to be very rare and obvious when breaking it is a good thing.
