Chapter 50: Size Does Matter

Last week, I mentioned a discrepancy in how a novel writer and a film writer pen their masterpieces.  This week, I'd like to discuss something they can both agree on.

For the most part, you should constantly change the texture of your prose.

Not drastically, mind you.  The general style should stay the same throughout a book, unless you're doing something incredibly clever with the point-of-view.  What I mean is, make sure every single sentence doesn't feel the same.  Example:

He woke up with a start.  His stomach was empty, his bladder full.  He stood from the bed.  He moved gently down the hall.  He lifted the toilet seat.  His stomach grumbled and he watched a yellow stream spit into the bowl.  He winced as the flushing sound filled the room.  He returned to his bed and went back to sleep.

You want to make sure there's a poetic non-pattern to your writing.  Change it up a bit.  Keep the reader guessing, not just about the plot, but about the structure of the sentences.  Example:

His eyes snapped open suddenly.  Lying on his back, he stared up, seeing nothing, seeing just blackness be on, where a ceiling should be.  What had woken him?  A sound?  An unwanted presence?  The realization hit him a moment later: he needed to pee.  Standing quietly, he pushed his feet into soft slippers and shuffled half-asleep down the hall, brushing his hand against the wall.  When he finally came to the doorway, he stepped in, flicking the switch and wincing at the shriek of light.  He shuffled toward the bowl and filled it with a yellow liquid.  Then he flushed, reabsorbed the room in solid black, and returned to his bed, where he fell happily on to the sheets and closed his eyes, replacing one darkness with another, feeling his conscious slowly drift away.     

Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Road, would take that a step further.  I've never spoken with him, obviously, but from reading his works, I'd say he would suggest writing some long sentences broken up by some very short ones.  Somtimes sentences that aren't even full sentences, like the one you just read.  He'll write things like, "The man walked up to the horse and placed a hand on its head and stroked it softly and moved to its side and jumped up and jumped on and tightened his feet around its body and kicked softly and started forward down the path."  Then he'll follow that up with something like, "Hot sun on his face."  He certainly writes much better than I do, but the point is this: a constant flux in sentence length and structure will create a truly poetic flow for your writing, and will both delight and surprise the reader in every paragraph.