Tag Archives: John Fante

How to Make Sentences Sing

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century member of Parliament known for his rousing speeches, regarded every word in a sentence as “the feet upon which the sentence walks.” He said that to alter a word—exchange it for a shorter or longer one, or give it a different position—would change the whole course of the sentence.

I thought about that recently while reading a thriller. It was good on the plot and character levels (which are, of course, absolutely essential). It started off like gangbusters, and carried me through the first three chapters.

But as it went on, I found myself without that feeling of compulsion to keep reading, as one has with the best fiction experiences. I wasn’t in a rush to turn the page. Naturally, as a writer and teacher of writing, I paused to ask myself why.

The answer came to me almost immediately. The sentences were all merely functional. They were like Dutch furniture. They did their job, but nothing more. I’ve quoted this many times, but it’s worth repeating. John D. MacDonald, writing about what he looks for in an author (including himself), said, “I want him to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases that really sing.”

Is that something worth going for? I think it is. MacDonald rose to the top of the mass market heap in the 1950s in part because his writing was a cut above what one critic called the “machine-like efficiency” of his contemporaries.

So let’s have a look at things you can do to make some of your sentences sing.

Rearrange

Consider this as the first line of a novel:

The small boys came to the hanging early.

Okay, fine. It works. But what if we did it the way Ken Follett does it in The Pillars of the Earth: 

The small boys came early to the hanging.

Feel the difference? On a subconscious level, it elevates the effect. Hanging is the most vivid word, and putting at the end gives the sentence snap and verve. A novel with sentences like that can mean the difference between a good read and an unforgettable one.

Overwrite And Cut

When I get to an intense emotional moment, I like to pause and start a text doc and write a page-long sentence. I just go, putting down everything I can think of without pausing to edit. As an example, here’s an actual sentence from John Fante’s classic Ask the Dust, in the voice of a young writer named Arturo Bandini in 1930s Los Angeles.

A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya hya: there’s a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett, not much that Arnold Bennett, but I’d be there to sort of bolster up the Bs, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame.

Write something like that, and keep going. Then you rest a bit, come back to it, and choose the best parts. It might just be one sentence, but it will be gold and will make your book glitter.

Cutting Adverbs

Sometimes a sentence sings best when it’s lean. Which brings us to the subject of adverbs.

Stephen King said, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein advises cutting all the adverbs in a manuscript, then readmitting only “the necessary few after careful testing.”

That’s good advice, and not hard to follow. Do a search for –ly words and see if you can’t cut the adverb or find a stronger verb.

Be especially (!) vigilant with dialogue tags. Elmore Leonard (who is quoted much too often these days, he said solemnly) called using an adverb to modify said a “mortal sin.” Perhaps a venial sin. I’m not a Robespierre about this, sending all adverbs to the guillotine. But do make them state their case before you “sentence” them.

Resonance at the End

The last sentences of your book are the most important of all. They may be the ones that get the reader to order another of your books immediately, as opposed to ho-humming and finding something else to read.

One of the most famous ending sentences in American Lit is from the short story that put William Saroyan on the map. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” was published in 1934, the height of the Depression. It’s the story of young writer who is starving to death. He walks the streets, looking for work, but there’s nothing for him. He’s down to one penny. He returns to his room, becomes drowsy and nauseous. He falls on his bed, thinking he should give the penny to a child, for a child could buy any number of things with a penny. The story ends:

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was all things at once—the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

That one word—unalive—is not in the dictionary. But who cares? It’s meaning is obvious. Saroyan could have written dead, but that wouldn’t have any zing. And the word perfect at the end is so surprising given the context that it leaves us pondering, feeling, perhaps even weeping. In other words, there’s resonance, that final, haunting note hanging in the air after the music stops.

Man, oh man, that’s worth reaching for.

Brother Gilstrap has written about the importance of last lines. His favorite is from To Kill a Mockingbird:

He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

Another resonant ending is from The Catcher in the Rye:

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

And this, from my favorite Bosch, Lost Light:

I leaned forward and raised her tiny fists and held them against my closed eyes. In that moment I knew all the mysteries were solved. That I was home. That I was saved.

My advice is to write your last few sentences several times. Each time, say them out loud. How do they sound? How do they make you feel? Go for the heart. Teach them to sing.

Discuss!

Herd Your CATS

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

We all know that getting a reader inside a lead character’s head is one of the keys to compelling fiction. But it has to be done seamlessly so it doesn’t jerk us out of the narrative and put a crimp in the fictive dream.

Which means we have to learn to handle what I call “Character Alone Thinking Scenes” (CATS) in a deft manner.

The first issue is whether to begin the book with a CATS. As last Wednesday’s first-page critique demonstrated (in my view, at least) the answer should almost always be No.

Why? Because we have to have a little personal investment in someone before we can care deeply about their feelings.

Imagine going to a party and you’re introduced to a fellow with a drink in his hand. You say, “How are you?” and the guy says, “I’m really depressed, man, I wake up every day and the room looks dark and the sun never shines, even though it’s out there, and I don’t see it because of the dark dankness in my soul, and life has lost its meaning, its luster, whatever it was it once had for me when I was young and ready to take on the world. Ya know?”

AHHHH!!!!

Well, the beginning of a book is like walking into a party. The reader wants to meet interesting people. And interest is aroused by what people do. The way you catch readers from the start is through action and disturbance, not feeling and expounding.

I can’t tell you the number of manuscripts I’ve read over the years that did not begin with a real scene, but instead opted for the inside of a character’s head. What I usually do in such cases is flip the pages until I get to some dialogue, because that automatically means we’re in a scene. And 98% of the time that is the best place to start. (Sure, an argument can be made that a great style might be enough to carry the opening pages. But it better be truly great and truly brief.)

So, re: the opening—save your CATS for later.

Once you’re into the novel there are two types of CATS to herd—active and reactive.

In an active scene, the character is alone but with a major scene objective (something that materially relates to the plot), and thinks while trying to overcome whatever scene obstacles are in her way.

In a reactive scene, the character is alone with a chance to reflect. She may be thinking about what’s already happened in the story, or her current psychological state, or the other characters. When done well, reactive scenes strengthen our emotional bond with the character.

A couple of examples. The first is from Dean Koontz’s Intensity. A young woman named Chyna Shepherd is thrust into the dark world of serial killer Edgler Vess. After Vess murders a family (not knowing Chyna is in the house, too) Chyna sneaks into his motor home in the hopes of saving her best friend, whom Vess has dumped there. Alas, she’s dead. But it gets worse. Vess starts driving away and Chyna is trapped in the back of the motor home.

Her objective now is survival. She must keep her presence in the vehicle a secret, find an adequate weapon, and somehow kill or disable Vess. As she looks for a weapon she makes a grisly find—the body of a young man hanging in the small closet, his eyes and mouth sewn shut.

She pulled shut the pleated-vinyl panel. Though flimsy, it moved as ponderously as a vault door. The magnetic latch clicked into place with a sound like snapping bone.

In all the textbooks she had ever read no case study of sociopathic violence had ever contained a description of a crime sufficiently vivid to make her want to retreat to a corner and sit on the floor and pull her knees against her chest and hug herself. That was precisely what she did now – choosing the corner farthest from the closet.

She had to get control of herself, quickly, starting with her manic breathing. She was gasping, sucking in great lungfuls, yet she couldn’t seem to get enough air. The deeper and faster she inhaled the dizzier she became. Her peripheral vision surrendered to an encroaching darkness until she seemed to be peering down a long black tunnel toward the dingy motor-home bedroom at the far end.

She told herself that the young man in the closet had been dead when the killer had gone to work with the sewing kit. And if he’d not been dead, at least he’d been mercifully unconscious. Then she told herself not to think about it at all, because thinking about it only made the tunnel longer and narrower, made the bedroom more distant and the lights dimmer than ever.

She put her face in her hands, and her hands were cold but her face seemed colder. For no reason that Chyna could understand, she thought of her mother’s face, as clear as a photograph in her mind’s eye. And then she did understand.

To Chyna’s mother, the prospect of violence had been romantic, or even glamorous. For a while they had lived in a commune in Oakland, where everyone talked of making a better world and where, most nights than not, the adults gathered around the kitchen table, drinking wine and smoking pot, discussing how best to tear down the hated system, sometimes also playing pinochle or Trivial Pursuit as they discussed the strategies that might bring utopia at last, sometimes far too enraptured by revolution to be interested in any lesser games …

Koontz then gives us a page-and-a-half of backstory, filtered through Chyna’s perceptions and thus relevant to the present action. She’s alone, but moving toward her scene goal. Her thoughts—which in real time would flash through her mind but in fiction time are detailed—are part of the action.

Now let’s take a look at a reactive CATS. This is from John Fante’s classic Ask The Dust. Arturo Bandini is a young writer living a meager existence in L.A. He has just decided to he’s going to steal milk off a truck. In his dingy hotel room, he reacts to his decision:

The night came reluctantly. I sat at the window, rolling some cigarets with rough cut tobacco and squares of toilet paper. This tobacco had been a whim of mine in more prosperous times. I had bought a can of it, and the pipe for smoking it had been free, attached to the can by a rubber band. But I had lost the pipe. The tobacco was so course it made a poor smoke in regular cigaret papers, but wrapped twice in toilet tissue it was powerful and compact, sometimes bursting into flames. 

The night came slowly, first the cool odor of it, and then the darkness. Beyond my window spread the great city, the street lamps, the red and blue green neon tubes bursting to life like bright night flowers. I was not hungry, there were plenty of oranges under the bed, and that mysterious chortling in the pit of my stomach was nothing more than great clouds of tobacco smoke marooned there, trying frantically to find a way out. 

So it had happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your flash-in-the-pan genius, your one-story writer: a thief. I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. Mother of God. Headlines in the papers, promising writer caught stealing milk, famous protégé of J. C. Hackmuth haled into court on petty theft charge, reporters swarming around me, flashbulbs popping, give us a statement, Bandini, how did it happen?

The scene continues, with Bandini eating an orange, doing some typing, all the while thinking about his prospects as a writer. The chapter ends with Bandini making the milk snatch, giddily bringing the two bottles back to his room, opening one and taking a long drink. And immediately spitting it out. He’d stolen what he hated—buttermilk.

There should be activity in a reactive CATS. It is often innocuous (rolling cigarettes, eating oranges, typing) but it provides the space for emotion and analysis.

The big thing to know about CATS is that they are the best way to control pace. If you need to slow things down a bit, give us more thinking. If you need to pick up the pace, compress the thoughts.

In other words, learn to herd your CATS and the readers will lap up your fiction.