For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.”
From Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor, as seen in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
“Even if sea level rise is more limited than what is anticipated, it will inundate coastal cities and coastal plains, as in Bangladesh, where tens of millions may be forced to flee in the fairly near future, many more later. Today’s refugee issue will be a tea party in comparison.“
From Prospects for Survival, an essay by Noam Chomsky, as read in Best American Essays 2018
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give context and commentary.)
“My heart would hear her and beat/ Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat/ Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet/ And blossom in purple and red.”
From ever-the-romantic Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” as read in Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace.”
I signed up for author K.M. Weiland’s Helping Writers Become Authors newsletter about a year ago, but only recently have I started really digging into her work.
It’s good stuff.
Her book “Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story” helped me finally understand the difference between the hook, the inciting incident, plot points, and pinch points. The breakdown, in fact, was so enlightening and easy to understand that it was key to me finally wrasslin’ all of my ideas into a workable plot structure (!!!).
The notecards method was doing me no good (so overwhelming, so much trash), and the thought of the time-suck-potential of “pantsing” made me feel super itchy (and breathy with anxiety).
That was a tough egg to crack, and girlfriend has got me cooking with gas now! How do you like your omelettes, baby?!
Weiland produces her own podcast (she’s already 450-something episodes deep) and has free e-books up for grabs on her website for newsletter subscribers. If you’re trying, like me, to wade into the vast waters of writing your first novel without drowning, her stuff is a good place to start to understand the mechanics of the whole thing.
As I move forward with my own process, I’ve been trying to work on character arcs. I encounter a sort of chicken-or-egg headache (no omelettes) when I try to think of plot and character arc as separate entities. In her podcast interview with Bulletproof Screenplay (below), Weiland once again helped me see the light!
I know that in a good novel or story, a character has to change in some way, for better or worse, but, as Weiland explains, an easy way to imagine this journey is to first consider the lie that a character believes in the beginning of the story and then consider what truth they have to face near the midpoint to do something climactic toward the end. So simple. I was really forcing matters with outlandish external events, but this pro-tip helped me understand that the writer has to understand the character’s internal events first. Because of course.
You can listen to the interview here:
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give you context and commentary.)
“We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.“
From Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture in Literature, as a younger generation speaks to the artists, the writers, the people who are struggling to make way before them.
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give you context and commentary.)
I’ve been so under the weather the past week. I could fill a landfill with all the innocent tissues I’ve violated of late. Most of my reading happened from my sick bed and on my smartphone. Thus, my #SundaySentence comes from PsychologyToday.com. (Of course, I try self-diagnosing my mental crises when I’m under physical duress. I’m sure that’s a symptom of something…)
Research by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA shows that college students’ number one value is now “being well off financially,” while for students in the 1960s it was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”
From “Why do so many college students have anxiety disorders?”
The generational divide is whatever. Millennials are screwed. I knew this. I’m more intrigued by that phrase “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”
Mm… that sounds nice.
So does more cold medicine…
and a down-the-rabbit-hole search for “college” on the NYPL database…
And, of course, this policy of denial is just another form of lying — a fanciful story we tell ourselves about our future even as we fight to free ourselves from the personal lies of our past.
Nancy A. Nichols, Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
This closing line from Nancy A. Nichols’ issue of True Story gave me a lot to chew on as I rode the train home (these mini magazines with one longform true story per issue are so perfect for commutes).
“And let us all thank Willa Cather for My Antonia.”
Barbara Kingsolver in the acknowledgements of “Unsheltered“
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
Showing (ie. I grabbed my back and fell to the floor. I was going to have to crawl from bed to bathroom.) not telling (ie. My back really hurt when I woke up this morning.) offers a better reading experience, whether you’re consuming a case study, a magazine article, or a new novel. But it’s surprisingly hard to do when you’re writing. (I always think first drafts are where you “tell” as you get the structure of a piece down. When you edit, you can find the places where “showing” would be better.)
Details are key to showing a reader what’s happening or what something looks/ feels like, says Jessica Brody, author of “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Every Need.”
“To bring your reader into your fictional world, you need to offer data for all the senses. You want to make sure your readers see the rain’s shadow, taste the bitterness of bad soup, feel the roughness of unshaved skin, smell the spoiled pizza after an all-night party, hear the tires screech during the accident.”
Chris Lombardi, “Gotham Writers Handbook”
“Show don’t tell” encompasses not only physical descriptions, but the way a story unfolds for the reader too. I think this is especially true considering how TV- and film-savvy readers are now. The omniscient narrator is so old-fashioned for a reason. We’d rather be in the moment, experiencing the situation with the characters, even if it’s a story in the past tense.
I’ve been binge-watching the TV show “New Amsterdam” during this #DeepFreeze, and the first episode is a great example. We see Max Goodwin wake up in a basically bare apartment. We don’t know his story, yet, so when a pregnant woman calls him and asks how the apartment is and how his first day at the hospital is going, our perception of him changes. He’s the father, clearly, and she asked about the apartment, so maybe he just moved to this city and she’s heading here soon? It isn’t until further on in the episode, through another “show don’t tell” sorta scene, that we realize they’re in the same city — they’ve just broken up.
“Show don’t tell” is a smart (not necessarily slow) reveal. And details enrich how you do it.
One of my favorite “show don’t tell” examples is one of thousands in Michael Chabon’s 2016 book “Moonglow.”
This simile has really stuck with me. Have you ever read a better description of what your elementary school smelled like than this?:
“He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp.”
“I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one.
The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list.
The pine tree, the leopard…and ourselves, we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other’s destiny.”
RIP poet Mary Oliver
“Bless the feet that take you to and fro…”