Mike Duran recently read and reviewed a romance novel, Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers.

He said some nice things about the book—about what he called the “redemptive arc and its parabolic whimsy,” and about the way Rivers captured the gospel of grace with the story. Mike also found some weaknesses, though, one of which was the author’s overuse of pronouns. He posted this paragraph to illustrate:

She didn’t want him bothering her anymore. He wanted her. She felt it radiating from his body, but he never did anything about it. He talked. He asked questions. He waited, for what she didn’t know. She was tired of trying to think up lies to make him happy. He just asked the same question again in a different way. He wouldn’t give up. Each time he came, he was more determined.

A couple of people commenting on Mike’s post said they didn’t have trouble with the paragraph above. Someone rightly stated that pronouns are invisible words, and the reader can skim right over them. I think someone else pointed out that pronouns are preferred over proper nouns. That’s true, too. The problem is that when you start every sentence with a pronoun, and when you don’t vary your sentence structure, you run the risk of boring your reader.

When I write a first draft it almost always looks like that paragraph above. I’m seeing the scene in my head and I’m moving quickly and I write in short sentences, starting every sentence with a pronoun because I’m seeing the character act. I’m watching as she does this and she does that and she does the other thing.

When I edit I try to clean up such paragraphs. There are ways to write that paragraph without starting the sentences with pronouns or proper nouns. Those are not our only choices.

Here’s what I came up with:

Mary didn’t want him coming around anymore with his money and his maddening questions. Clearly, he wanted her—desire radiated from his body—but he never acted on that desire. All he did was ask questions. Sitting in the corner, as far from her as he could get, he’d eye her hungrily and press her for answers.

Night after night, she wore herself out, trying to think up lies that would make him happy, but nothing satisfied him. Every time she gave an answer, he’d ask again in a different way, piling questions upon questions until they filled the room and she felt like she would smother under their weight.

I don’t have the book here, so I don’t know the context of the original paragraph. Maybe I took this in a way she wasn’t going. But the point is that there are all kinds of ways to vary sentence structure and language to make a paragraph interesting.

My guess is that we don’t want to fill every paragraph with word pictures and heavy emotion because that will tire readers and take away from the important paragraphs we want to emphasize. If all the paragraphs are slow and weighty, then no paragraph rises up tell the reader, “Look at the emotion here. Feel the tension. This part is important.”

Still, we shouldn’t have any paragraphs where nine out of ten sentences begin with he or she. I doubt very much that Ms. Rivers was being lazy when she let that paragraph go. I suspect she simply missed it. That happens.

But now that we’ve seen it, who wants to take a stab at fixing it? Give it ten minutes and see what you can come up with. Take it any direction you want—make it a sci-fi paragraph or pretend the book is a mystery, if you want. Or a horror story. No holds barred. Let’s just say that no more than two sentences can start with a pronoun. If you do well on this one, next week might try to rewrite the love scene Mike also posted.

It might be fun to give that one a dystopian or steampunk-ish twist.

Anything to keep from having to work on my own WIP.

“WASH YOUR HAND, WILL JUNIOR,” I screamed again, raising my voice to be heard over the brawl and over the sound of breaking glass. As my brother’s pressure system grew, the window closest to Fish began to fracture, spreading splintering cracks outward like spiderwebs zipping and pinging through the glass as Fish’s gusts and gales swelled in speed and strength. Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out as first one and then another window shattered outward. Ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching with every new explosion of glass, Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off his bus with Bobbi following after.

Screamed and raising her voice  are redundant, aren’t they?

You could say, “I screamed, trying to make myself heard over…” I suppose. But it’s not necessary. In the flow of conversation it works as written. 

But what I love about this passage is all the stuff that follows. The fracture spreading splintering cracks and the gusts and gales swelling with speed and strength. I love that Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out. I love the ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching and I love that Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off the bus.

It’s extravagant.

And I guess it’s a matter of taste. I have heard over and over and over that with action scenes you are to use short sentences  and fragments to speed up time. And I understand how that works. But in the midst of the storm Fish is making on the bus, I’m glad that Ingrid Law didn’t use short bursts. Instead she blusters and blows, piling up words like thunderclouds–like a storm building to a climax. She puts me in the middle of the noise and confusion. It’s kind of a “sensory overload” thing going on in that bus.

There’s only one thing I’d change in that paragraph if it were mine to change–I’d make the spider webs pop and ping. But perhaps she was right not to do that. With gusts and gales in the same sentence it probably would have been overkill to have popping and pinging, too.

Anyway, it’s beautiful writing. And it goes against all kinds of rules. It’s full of redundancies. It has long sentences cluttered with unnecessary words.

But there’s more to need than expressing a thought. Readers need beauty. They need sensory input. Cutting dead wood doesn’t mean you strip away all redundancies.

Pushed and pulled and dragged…is all that really necessary? It’s not necessary, at all, that’s what makes you feel like Ms. Law is giving you a generous helping of apple pie ala mode on top of the huge helping of meat and potatoes you just ate. The paragraph is fat. But fat doesn’t always mean bloated. 

Pushed and pulled and dragged gives you a picture of chaos, of a man trying desperately to restore order and not quite sure how to do that. He’s acting because he has to act and he’s deciding as he goes how he should act. First he pushes and then he pulls. But why dragged? It says the exact same thing as pulled.

It’s about rhythm. If you are looking at meaning, dragged is dead wood. It adds nothing to the story. If you are looking at rhythm it adds to the story. Pushed and pulled, for one thing, need dragged to keep you from feeling like there’s too much cutesy alliteration, I think.

But more importantly, it’s about mood-setting. In the paragraph above there is a storm going on in the bus, so the author paints a scene using words that give us a feeling of noise and chaos. 

When you match your prose to your content it gives the reader a fuller experience. Do you ever take time to write a paragraph several different ways? Lean and mean, fat and friendly? Noisy, quiet, crashing, dashing, plodding, plinking…there all kinds of ways to write the same thoughts.  

If you want to post a paragraph below that sets a mood, feel free. I’d love to see what you come up with.

When I read Savvy for the KidzBookBuzz Blog tour, I didn’t do what I usually do–write notes in the margins or put sticky notes in the good and bad places I’d want to remember to mention in my review. Why not? I quickly realized the effort would be fruitless. There were no bad places and the good placed were on every danged page.

So here I sit, ready to discuss some of the things I learned while reading and I have no passages marked to use as examples.

Never fear. I flip the book open to a random page and here are lovely passages, bursting with lessons for wannabe authors. Here’s one now:

Red-faced and mortified, I just stood there. I couldn’t believe those girls had just called me that horrible name in front of Will Junior, I felt like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. Fish scowled at the two girls, and a burst of wind hit us all so sharp and sudden that it sent them scurrying from the open doorway to check their hair and to fix up all their froufrou frippery.

The Critique Group Response:

I’ve been in enough critique groups to guess that some earnest writer critiquing this passage would say something like, “You’ve shown she’s mortified by her red face, you don’t have to tell us, too. And you’ve used the word ‘just’ in consecutive sentences when you shouldn’t ever use that word at all.”

I’d disagree with that critique. Great writing has a flow to it that is interrupted when we tinker too much with the sentences, trying to follow all the rules. “Red-faced and mortified” works. It flows. Sure we know from context that she is red-faced because she’s mortified and not because she’s just run a mile. We don’t need to be told she’s mortified. But the rhythm of the sentence is pleasing to the ear. The way Law extravagantly piles up words gives the reader a feeling of being pampered with Häagen-Dazs. This is rich fare, not some cheap store brand. 

And the first “just” is necessary. She is saying she did nothing but stand there. “Just” aptly modifies her standing.

The second “just” could be lost without damaging the flow of the words but it certainly doesn’t harm anything by its presence.

Cliché and Alliteration:

Clichés can actually help a writer if she can learn to recognize them as she writes and give them a twist. The cliché in the passage above is, “I felt like crawling into a hole.” Law changes it to feeling like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. That’s much better than crawling into a hole. It’s familiar so we don’t have to work at understanding how mortified she is, but it’s different enough that our brain processes it instead of gliding over it without really seeing it.

And then there’s the alliteration. Sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying. Can you hear that? Do you like it? This a read-aloud book. This is a book that is pleasing to the ear. Not every book has to be written this way, but if you want to add a little pop to you prose, you might consider reading your work aloud and seeing if you can hear a buzzing behind the words. There is the meaning of the words–a gust of wind hit, and the girls ran away–and then there is the way the words are strung together. They give off a little buzz–a feeling of movement. They trip happily along. They trickle and build like a stream picking up power as is runs down the mountain.

So the buzz starts with red-faced and mortified, which is a redundant in context but gives us a sense of movement. That movement builds to sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying, which has four words starting with S but with all different second letters. And then the buzz bursts out at the end with  fix up all their froufrou frippery.

At face value we see that Mibs holds the girls in disdain. She finds their attempts at beauty to be pretty worthless because the girls are ugly on the inside. They have just called her a bad name but they are unaware of the fact that the filth coming from their mouths makes them ugly, and they rush off to fix up their outward appearances, as if those things matter. Mibs sees this as a pointless exercise.

But how great it is that the author didn’t tell me this. How great that she didn’t say, “Mibs looked at them with disdain. They could fix their outsides, but inside their hearts were ugly.” Instead Ingrid Law sent the girls scurrying to fix-up the froufrou frippery.

It just doesn’t get better than fixing up froufrou frippery.

This is not the best passage in the book. This is a random passage. If you want to gain an ear for rhythm, buy this book and read it. Aloud. Listen as the words roll across the page.