Welcome to Part Fifteen of our popular fiction series. This week, Lucy looks at paragraphs – important writing elements that apply not only to fiction, but to all good writing, so take careful note! For all the articles in the series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar on the right —>>>

Paragraphs (and more punctuation)

We’ve talked about different kinds of sentence structure, and how to punctuate a sentence. Now we’re going to look at combining sentences to form paragraphs – and a little more punctuation.

If sentences are the building blocks of prose writing, paragraphs are the panels, doors and windows in the walls of your narrative edifice.

So, what is a paragraph?

A paragraph is a group of one or more sentences, separated from other paragraphs by starting on a new line and finishing at the end of a final sentence, often in mid-line. Like a sentence, therefore, a paragraph can end with a fullstop/period, question or exclamation mark, closed inverted commas, a dash or ellipsis (three – exactly – dots)…

(It could also finish with a closing bracket, but brackets rarely have a place in fiction writing.)

In a printed fiction book, paragraphs are typically indented on the first line (except at the start of a chapter or section), have ‘trailing spaces’ after the end of the last sentence (ie, the last line is not justified to the right), but are not separated from the the paragraph above or below by a line space.

When formatting paragraphs in your manuscript, however, bear in mind that, for technical reasons, most editors and publishers prefer authors not to indent the first line of a paragraph (though if you do indent, use the tab key and not the space bar); and to insert a line spaces between paragraphs – in the same way as this web page is laid out.

What are paragraphs for?

Paragraphs have a physical purpose: they act as a visual break for readers, separating the text into distinct and variable-sized blocks, which help a reader keep their place on the page and also within the action of the story. Pages of solid text, or very long paragraphs, are intimidating, tiring to read and don’t draw the eye forwards through the story; too many short paragraphs, though, can make for a jerky and disrupted reading experience.

Just as sentences of differing lengths create changing rhythms for your narrative, so do varying-sized paragraphs. Longer paragraphs usually indicate extended action, detailed description or complex thought processes, so the story becomes slower and more measured as readers work their way through them.

Shorter paragraphs happen around quick exchanges of dialogue, rapid action and the introduction of vital information.

An occasional paragraph of a single sentence, or even one word, whether dialogue or narrative, can have a more immediate and powerful effect than several longer paragraphs. They can be used to shock the reader or to make a sharp or sudden point, but should be used sparingly so as not to dissipate their potency.

A good mix of paragraphs of different lengths keeps the reader engaged and varies the speed and tone of plot development. Look at this post and see where your eye is attracted to short, punchy paragraphs in the first instance and how, while you are reading longer ones, you are drawn in into more complex ideas and concepts.

When should you start a new paragraph?

• When you are writing dialogue. Every time a new character starts to speak, their dialogue should start on a new line and create an individual paragraph. (The word paragraph  comes from the Greek word paragraphos – para  ‘beside’ and graphein  ‘to write’ – meaning a marginal note used to indicate a change of speaker in drama.) While a single character continues to speak, even if there is action, internal thought or description alternating with their dialogue, it can all stay within one paragraph. As soon as new person starts to speak, their dialogue begins on a new line and paragraph.
• When one piece of action, narration or thought finishes, the new subject matter should start with a new paragraph. If you are covering a protracted event or exposition, use an introductory paragraph; an ending, or summary, paragraph; and as many paragraphs as you need to delineate the stages between.
• When the focus of your narrative changes from one character to another – especially if you are changing from one person’s point of view to someone else’s – begin a new paragraph.
• When none of the above apply and you are in the middle of a long section, but you need to give your reader some incentives to get through it.

In the same way as you punctuate a sentence to make it easy for your reader to understand, break up your prose into logical paragraphs, manageable bites, to give flow and structure to your story, and visual variation on the page.

How do you structure a paragraph?

If you think of a paragraph as a frame for a certain amount of information, how to give it the right shape and form becomes clearer. Each paragraph is acting as a boundary for the related items within it. In descriptive writing, it can open with an introductory sentence, followed by others that expand on the opening point, and close with a sentence which sums up or completes the point. Just as a picture frame should be the best size and shape to display the painting it contains, so a paragraph should neatly contain the chunk of information being conveyed to the reader.

Read the above paragraph again and note how it is shaped in this way.

A dialogue paragraph will start with a character’s first sentence of speech. They may continue speaking throughout the paragraph; you may break it up to tag the dialogue, to describe theirs, or another character’s, internal or external responses before adding more dialogue; or intersperse their dialogue with action. In most cases, the dialogue paragraph naturally ends when another character starts to speak, but if one character talks at length, you may need to divide their speech into subject- or emotion-related paragraphs.

How to order paragraphs

Dividing your story into well-formed paragraphs gives you a great opportunity to try out different ways of organising the plot. I said at the start that paragraphs represent the panels, doors and windows of your narrative: just as an architect will design a beautiful and functional house by moving these elements around until they look and work best, so a writer can order and re-order paragraphs until they tell the best possible story.

Often the most important thing to consider, when deciding which paragraph should go where, is the logic of the plot. What information does the reader need first – and which aspects should be held back to increase tension or build the action? In most cases it is best to tell your story in sequence. If you are experimenting with flashbacks, working with multiple perspectives or using a double time scheme, make sure that each one is internally consistent; each element of the plot progresses logically within its own development. It is one thing to intentionally mislead the reader – as is often the basis of crime or thriller fiction – but to inadvertently confuse is to risk them getting bored and giving up on your story.

Place related paragraphs together and check whether they progress logically. Try changing the order and see whether this enhances the effect you are looking for. If you have written several paragraphs of description followed by another set progressing the action, might it be better to intersperse them? Test whether your dialogue is correctly paragraphed by making sure you can tell who is speaking simply from the paragraphing of each character’s speech, without tags.

It can take time to become really adept with using paragraphs to make your fiction sing, so practise forming strong and logical paragraphs, which link to each other and/or break up sections, with everything you write. Paragraphs are a vital tool for the writer and act as signposts for the reader. Learn to use them to build scenes and action, develop and reveal character, introduce your themes and settings and control the tension and progress of your plot.

Next week we’ll look at how you are getting on with writing Act One, or the Beginning section of your story.

For all the articles in this series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar up a way on the right —>>>

Lucy McCarraher

Lucy

Managing Editor, Rethink Press.
www.rethinkpress.com
www.facebook.com/RethinkPress
www.twitter.com/RethinkPress

Meanwhile, let’s perfect your non-fiction, too…

“Banana Skin Words and how not to slip on them”...over 1,500 spelling and grammar tips to perfect your written English … INSTANT DOWNLOAD now available!
“How To Write Winning Non-fiction”…all you need to know to write a good non-fiction book and get it published
…plus take a look at Lucy’s novels here

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Welcome to Part Thirteen of our popular fiction series. This week, Lucy looks at how to write dialogue – a particularly important part of writing good fiction. For all the articles in the series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar on the right —>>>

How to write dialogue

A large part of “showing”, as opposed to “telling” your story is about creating scenes in which the characters interact – and interaction means dialogue.

Fiction dialogue has to appear realistic, but, paradoxically, if the reader is to believe in it, cannot be genuinely life-like. If you pasted into your novel a slab of real-life conversation, it would be unfocused, long-winded, boring and – strangely – would appear unnatural. If you’ve ever tried to read verbatim transcripts of interviews, you’ll know how hard they are to plough through. Readers don’t want to see in print the ums and ers, pauses, digressions and waffling that everyday chat consists of.

As a fiction writer, you need to give readers the essence of what your characters are communicating with the flavour of verisimilitude. So how do you do that?

First you need to find the individual voice of each character – especially your main characters – in your head. Don’t try to write their dialogue until you can hear them speak; recognise the pitch and tone of their voice, their accent and intonation; understand the way their speech reflects their thought processes; and the verbal tics that are uniquely theirs.

If a character doesn’t come easily to you, the simplest way to find their voice is to base it on that of someone you know well, whether personally or from the media. Find someone whose distinctive style of speaking is easy for you to reproduce in your head and apply to your character’s dialogue. As you keep writing, the character will come to life and subsume the style of your original model until you don’t need to refer back to them.

Give your characters character

Each character in your story – even the minor ones – should have an individual style of speaking. The test of this is for someone to be able to read a page of dialogue between two or more of your characters and always know, without referring to the tags (‘x said’, ‘y replied’), which of them is speaking. A sure-fire way to lose a reader’s interest is to have all your characters talking in the same style, despite their different ages, backgrounds, education, gender etc.

One shortcut to identifying a character through dialogue is to give them a couple of verbal habits – though subtlety is the key here. For example, an older man could always call other men ‘old chap’ and women ‘my dear’; a teenager might punctuate their speech with ‘like’ and ‘you know’; an academic could habitually use longer words where a short one would do; a hesitant woman might regularly start sentences with, ‘Well, …’. Using such words or phrases initially as an identity tag will help you define a character’s verbal style, and you might later be able to go back and remove the more obvious ones.

Don’t write phonetically

If a character speaks with an accent of any kind, do not try to write it phonetically. Everyone speaks with an accent of one kind or another, whether we consider it ‘received English’ or something else. Your readers themselves may come from any part of your country, or the world, and might find it offensive for their own manner of speech to be written in a different way to what you, the writer, consider ‘normal’ English. The best way to indicate national, regional, or age- or class-based accents is in the style and tone of the language along with a few judiciously placed words (spelled correctly) which are natural to and typical of your character’s accent. Along with the context you give them, the reader will ‘get’ what you intend and supply the appropriate accent as they read.

In general, when you are writing dialogue, use contractions (‘don’t’, ‘he’s’, ‘shouldn’t’), as almost everyone does in real speech, unless the character is very formal and not to do so becomes their verbal tic. Allow characters to speak in verbless phrases and incomplete sentences in a way that sounds authentic and  contrasts (probably) with your narrative style. The occasional ‘um’ or ‘er’ can sound natural, but a life-like amount would become tedious. Similarly, allow characters to interrupt and cut across each other occasionally, but not as much as people really do or your dialogue will become impossible to follow.

Make dialogue valuable to the story

In using dialogue to “show” your story, make sure that every exchange contains something that either furthers the plot or adds to character development and ties into one or more of your themes. Don’t use dialogue to give the reader information or back story in an obvious way, unless one character is telling another who doesn’t already know and needs to know this information.

Use dialogue judiciously. Readers don’t want or need to be shown an entire conversation, including exchanges such as: ‘Pass the salt.’ ‘There it is.’ ‘Thank you. And the pepper please.’ Summarise between significant pieces of dialogue – readers are quite capable of understanding ‘jump cuts’. Remember to keep your dialogue interspersed with action and description. People continue to eat, walk, drive, wash up etc, while they are speaking and you need to keep ‘showing’ this.

Use the right grammar rules for dialogue

There are grammatical rules for writing dialogue. Speech should be enclosed in inverted commas which contains the punctuation related to the dialogue. Start on a new line each time a different person starts to speak. Some publishers indent new lines of dialogue in typeset, but it’s easier for editors and typesetters if authors do not indent new lines of dialogue in a manuscript. If you insert a tag (‘he said’) after a sentence of dialogue, the dialogue sentence ends with a comma and the full stop/period is postponed until the end of the tag:

‘I would be happy to recommend you a very good hotel,’ said the taxi driver.

If you insert a tag into the middle of a sentence of dialogue, this is how the punctuation should go:

‘I would be happy,’ said the taxi driver, ‘to recommend you a very good hotel.’

Be sparing with tags; if your dialogue is well written for individual characters, you shouldn’t need to say who is speaking after every sentence. Try to refrain from using tags to ‘tell’ – as in:

‘That’s awfully good news,’ Eleanor shouted excitedly.

The context and the dialogue itself should tell a reader that Eleanor is speaking loudly and with excitement. Some experts say the only verb that should be used in a tag is ‘said’ and never with an adverb; that seems to me to be unnecessarily restrictive, but less is usually more.

More about sentence structure and punctuation next week.

For all the articles in this series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar up a way on the right —>>>

Lucy McCarraher

Lucy

Managing Editor, Rethink Press.
www.rethinkpress.com
www.facebook.com/RethinkPress
www.twitter.com/RethinkPress

Meanwhile, let’s perfect your non-fiction, too…

“Banana Skin Words and how not to slip on them”...over 1,500 spelling and grammar tips to perfect your written English … INSTANT DOWNLOAD now available!
“How To Write Winning Non-fiction”…all you need to know to write a good non-fiction book and get it published
…plus take a look at Lucy’s novels here

photo credit: Cesar Mascarenhas via photopin cc

Welcome to Part Twelve of our popular fiction series. This week, Lucy looks at “show and tell.” For all the articles in the series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar on the right —>>>

Show And Tell

You might have crafted a killer opening to your story, or you may have decided to come back and polish it after you’ve got to the end. Either way, you know that hooking your reader at the start depends on not giving too much away at once. That continues to hold true throughout your writing.

“Show, don’t tell,” is a piece of advice frequently given to new fiction writers, and there is a lot of value in taking this on board. What it means is that, instead of summarising action and telling your reader what is happening, you demonstrate and illustrate, allowing your readers to draw their own conclusions and make the links that draw them through the story under their own steam. For example, an author could tell you that a character was a controlling and mean-spirited man. As a reader you would have to accept this, but not be able engage your critical faculties in coming to this decision.

In Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks writes:

“Do you drink wine?” said Azaire, holding a bottle over Stephen’s glass.

“Thank you.”

Azaire poured out an inch or two for Stephen and for his wife, before returning the bottle to its place.

From this, and further dialogue and details in the scene, the reader gains the pleasure of creating their own picture of Azaire and his character without Faulks ever having told us this in so many words.

To “show” as opposed to “telling” your story means that you need to break down much of the action in terms of scenes, similar to a screenplay.

So as you come to each chapter outline in your fiction “bible”, decide what scenes you need to “show” in order to move the plot along. As you write each scene, remember to use all your senses in describing what is going on: not just what you (and the characters) can see, but what is heard, felt, smelled and experienced.

Consider this sentence:

He went to bed late, hoping his wife would be asleep so he would not have to talk to her, but she was not.

This gives a reader the same factual information as Elizabeth Jane Howard does in the following passage from The Light Years, but lacks the visual, sensory and emotional power – as well as additional, subtle knowledge we gain about the characters – that she includes by “showing” the scene:

“He opened the bedroom door hoping that Zoe would be asleep. She wasn’t, of course. She was sitting up in bed, her bed jacket on her shoulders, doing nothing, waiting for him. He fumbled with his tie and had dropped it on top of his chest of drawers before she said, ‘You’ve been a long time.’ Her voice had the controlled quality that he had learned to dread.”

“Showing” as opposed to “telling” also helps you to avoid the type of narration that is often called “And then, and then…”. This is when an author takes the reader through the plot via a series of events, one after the other, frequently not discriminating between the interesting/important elements of the story and those which link them but have no intrinsic significance to the theme or plot. The opposite to “And then, and then…” writing is known as the “Why? Because” style. In other words, the choice of scenes, description etc, is governed by motive, character development and interaction.

You will notice, however, from the above excerpts and my paraphrases of them that the “told” version is much shorter than the “shown” scene. . And, of course, a novel or short story are not the same as a screenplay for the very reason that, unlike a script, they include description, linkage, exposition and the interior thought processes of the characters.

So is there a place in good fiction writing for “telling”? The answer, of course, is yes.

Excellent narrative combines a majority (usually) of “showing” and some strategic “telling” to link scenes, provide contrast in pace and content, and provide information quickly and which can’t always be given in another way.

When you are deciding which are the key scenes to “show” in each section of your story, make sure that they are essential to the development of your plot, relate strongly to your theme and demonstrate character development.

Linking your key scenes and providing a change of tempo and style, use “telling” segments to get across information and get through less crucial events. The idea is to find a good balance of “telling” versus “showing”, summary versus action.

One tip is not to go into detail about, or develop dialogue for, characters who are unimportant or not going to reappear in the story. For example, an interchange with a receptionist when checking into a hotel is best summarised rather than “shown”, although a few specifics, as opposed to generalities, when describing the hotel foyer or the receptionist will always give the reader an additional picture to add into the rich mix of your story.

Next week we will tackle writing authentic dialogue for fiction.

For all the articles in this series check out the category “Fiction Without The Fuss.” Click on <<<— this link or go to the sidebar up a way on the right —>>>

Lucy McCarraher

Lucy

Managing Editor, Rethink Press.
www.rethinkpress.com
www.facebook.com/RethinkPress
www.twitter.com/RethinkPress

Meanwhile, let’s perfect your non-fiction, too…

“Banana Skin Words and how not to slip on them”...over 1,500 spelling and grammar tips to perfect your written English … INSTANT DOWNLOAD now available!
“How To Write Winning Non-fiction”…all you need to know to write a good non-fiction book and get it published
…plus take a look at Lucy’s novels here
photo credit: tarotastic via photopin cc