Learning From Authors
A juicy little aha moment that led me to exasperation
Learning From Authors is my new series where I use concrete examples to show how a writer—you!—can slingshot away from the mundane and into the extraordinary. Any educator worth their salt will tell you that modeling helps develop analytical skills, so hopefully the excerpts I choose will illuminate a path forward. Get out those flashlights.
Let’s start breaking it down
What is truly good writing? Everyone will chime in with something different, but to me, it’s those surprises that jump out and cannot be ignored:
Unusual verbs: “The Beaujolais’s arrived!” and everyone bubbled forward.1
Sensory detail: The Geiger counter cackled and sang like a dolphin when he took a reading from the sample.2
Creative metaphors: On three parallel clotheslines stretching across someone’s backyard, there was an abacus of sparrows.3
Ideas stated in clear but unexpected ways: Hate is a knife without a handle. You can’t cut something with it without cutting yourself.4
Read, read, and read some more
Achieving this level of inventiveness takes effort. Study your craft is such a cliché, I know, but for good reason. Classes, workshops, mentors, vocabulary exercises—they’re all fantastic. But I’d urge you to also read the genre in which you’re writing, and read a bit outside that realm for a different angle.
A skilled writer allows us each to make a mind picture of what we’re reading. Film and art are visual media; fiction needs specific creative language to build those same visuals. And when we can see and understand it, it’s a communication goldmine.
Digging long fingers into rich soil
Over the years—and I do mean years—I’ve highlighted phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in my Kindle that blew me away. Sometimes a word snuck up and floored me. Other times a passage offered up such beauty, I stared at it like a sleepy puppy. (Truth be told, it was usually at bedtime.)
When delight morphs into awe, that is a wonder, something to record and share.
I had amassed a library of bewitching prose—now what? Then my copyeditor brain lit up one day, wondering how a great writer goes from a simple sentence to a captivating line of literature.
So I reverse-engineered one of those sentences, writing a bare-bones version, and called it “first-draft language.” A very basic translation in which I could imagine a possible ground zero. Placing it next to what the author actually wrote made the writing process just a little clearer.
It’s a way to see how an ordinary sentence can bloom into something stunning.
Let’s play some make-believe
Imagine you had an assignment to write about a character who is exasperated, taken aback, at a loss for words. How would you go about it?
Example #1:
First-draft language
After Richard insisted they kiss, Elaine could only respond by emitting nonsense sounds from her mouth as she laughed.
Published excerpt
Kiss her, Richard said. But that only made Elaine laugh more, in suppressed guffaws that came out in a series of wheezes and snorts and shudders and hiccups, like some Victorian steam engine.5
Example #2:
First-draft language
He was about to argue with me but stopped cold and sputtered.
Published excerpt
He opened his mouth to rebut me, but incredulity stopped him cold. Little machine-gun sounds of astonishment caught in his throat.6
Both show us that drilling down into the specific animates everything: guffaws, wheezes, snorts, shudders, hiccups, a steam engine, machine-gun sounds…
And notice the cadence in that first excerpt, how the successive and’s pull the verbs along, allowing us to hear them all at once as if mimicking those sounds—mimicking the motion of a train.
It all conjures up images and explodes on the page.
Boredom is death
Why does this even matter? Because first-draft language is a snoozefest: be verbs, flat descriptions, repetition, redundancies… I could go on. The bottom line is, if readers can’t stay engaged they will look elsewhere.
Consider this passage:
“I have not used those words. But you have my sense, sir.” Father bowed his head slightly, as if he appreciated this distinction between the rind of the words and the core of their meaning.7
The rind versus the core? C’mon. Brilliant.
Can you recall any sentences that impressed you or any stories that excited you in a specific way? Comment below!
Footnotes
1: An Evening of Long Goodbyes, by Paul Murray
2: Light From Other Stars, by Erika Swyler
3: The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman
4: The Wishing Game, by Meg Shaffer
5: The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray
6: Playground, by Richard Powers
7: The Maze at Windermere, by Gregory Blake Smith
I love the concept of "first draft language" and wish more writers would embrace it to help get through their first drafts. Then, in the revision process, after the story is solid, and all scenes have been vetted for purpose, the sentence-level polishing is when to apply these techniques. Such great examples and tips for writing non-boring sentences!
Neat exercise! I like "cackled and sang like a dolphin"