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.

Over on Jonathan Rogers’ blog, he has a feature each week called Audience Participation Friday. He asks us to tell a story or to weigh in on some issue and because he has some witty followers we usually have a lot of fun. I’m not sure how honest the others are, but I sometimes play with facts a little bit when I tell anecdotes on his site. It’s not that I’m not telling the truth. It’s that I’m trying to tell one particular truth that I think the story illustrates.

My son has grown up with me pounding into his head that there is too such a thing as objective truth and this bit about “that’s true for you but not for me” is completely false. What’s true to God is true for both of us no matter what we believe about the issue. I’m afraid the boy has grown into quite the Pharisee, though. Demanding obedience to the letter of the law. When I say I’m playing with the facts, he says I’m lying. So if I say I spent fifty dollars on dinner and my son saw the bill and he knows I paid fifty-two dollars and thirty cents, he corrects me. (He’s Jiminy Cricket to my Pinocchio in the picture above.)

Of course, the exact dollar amount has nothing to do with the story I’m telling. To tell a good story, you can’t get bogged down in the minutiae. I tell him to quit being such a control freak. Loosen up, child. Live a little.

OK, the dinner bill thing is straightforward enough. Most of us understand that to round fifty-two dollars down to fifty is a matter of convenience and is not lying.

But what about when we add in a line of dialogue to make our point or to add a comical twist? Or what about when we camp on certain details one time we tell a story, and the next time our literalist sons hear it we’re telling it to a different person and we’re trying to make a different point, so we hone in on different details and we trot them out in a different order than the previous time?

I recently wrote a post for Spec Faith about my conversion to Christianity. Because the site is all about speculative fiction written from a Christian worldview, I wanted to highlight the fact that I was saved while I was reading a novel that didn’t overtly preach the gospel. So I reported the facts that related to that. And because I had to write my story in less than a thousand words, I combined some steps of the process and left other steps out completely.

The story I wrote was true. The points I made about how the author and the reader and God all interact in the giving and the receiving of a book were valid points. But some of the facts were left out. Or even wrong. I forgot, for instance, when I was writing the piece, that I was in Anchorage when I read the novel, not in Fairbanks. I bought the novel in Fairbanks, and I read the first in the series there. But I didn’t read the second book until I got home to Anchorage.

Did this matter? Did the Spec Faith readers need to know that I was in Anchorage? Not at all.

When we tell stories, even true stories, we have to organize them. We have to give them a focus. We tell stories to interpret something that happened to us or to tell something that is true about the world, so we bring forward one bit and push back another, in order to make our point. We are the narrators. We are the ones interpreting events and deciding which facts are important. We fill in background noise and color even though we can’t remember the exact setting. We do this to try to give to the reader the experience we had. We give him trappings that are true, even if they aren’t accurate. We want to lead our readers to see the event the way we saw it, to feel the same awe we felt, to understand the rich truth that lies under the bare facts.

I’m not talking about saying God raised someone from the dead if He never did that. I’m talking about an Author telling a story once and saying that one thief on a cross repented and failing to report that fact the next time he tells the story. Both tellings paint the same event, but they focus on different points of the canvas.

And, no, I’m not saying that God, when He inspired the Bible, played with the facts the way I do. Scripture is God-breathed and He didn’t forgot things or make up lines of dialogue to enhance His stories, the way I sometimes do. I’m just using the Bible as an example of how storytellers can tell the same story from different angles to highlight different points.

Kristen Lamb explains quite well why we need to see Normal Life before an author throws us into a massive car wreck:

1. Normal world lays the foundation for genuine drama.

Les Edgerton, in his book Hooked explores this problem in detail if you would like to read more, but to keep it short and sweet I’m going to explain it this way. Most of us have driven down a highway at around rush hour, so picture this scenario. We notice emergency lights ahead.  The oncoming traffic lane is shut down and looks like a debris field. Two mangled cars lay in ruins, and there are still figures draped with blue blankets surrounded by somber EMTs. Do you feel badly? Unless you’re a sociopath, of course you do.

Now…

You look into that same oncoming lane, and one of the cars you recognize. It belongs to the nice family you chatted with in line at Wal Mart when you had to wait 40 minutes in the customer service line. You even helped the dad load groceries and put away their cart so the mom could buckle in their babies. You had to stop for gas, but 30 minutes ago that family was alive and well and now the coroner’s van is showing on the scene.

Before you cared…now you are connected. (That’s just point number 1. Read her whole, excellent article here)

I’m going to argue, that while we don’t need to be thrown into a wreck, we do need to see the wreck coming. Or we need to suspect it is coming. What if on the way to the Wal-Mart store we fly over a big rig that has two tires beginning to wear through? What if after that we meet the nice family at the store and we watch them head off in the direction of the big rig?

I think we need to meet characters in Normal, but we also need to know that something is threatening Normal. We need conflict pretty quickly. We don’t need a wreck, but we need tension.

I’m thinking of my favorite book openings and in every one there is tension on the first page.

Rachel wondering where Matthew is going all dressed up. Sara Crewe, stuck at Miss Minchin’s and finding that she is not a select young lady. Miri, wanting to work in the quarry and not being allowed. Poor little Grady, wanting to know where he came from and stuck trying to get information out of the merciless liar who runs his life.

I could go on, but I think the reasons these openings work is that someone wants something, and that creates tension. The kind of tension that is likely to stand Normal on its head.

Even in The Hobbit and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, there is the knowledge that trouble is coming because the authors are painting too jolly of a picture. They are giving you Normal in hyperbolic fashion—going out of their way to tell you how idyllic it all is. So you know a bomb is about to be detonated in their peaceful little neighborhoods.

So read Kristen’s wonderful blog post, because it is really helpful and full of meat. But don’t think she’s saying that you can sit down to tea with your characters and let them chit chat to your readers about nothing at all. You have to give us a hint that all is not right with the world from the very beginning. Maybe we need Normal with cloudy skies and barbed wire.

Yesterday I read an interview that Marie (Fireside Musings) did with Lise Haines, and one of the questions and answers jumped out at me.

Marie asked:

What obstacles would you warn beginning authors of?

And Lise answered:

One of the primary things an author has to come to grips with is: who holds the emotion in a work of fiction—the author or your reader. If you dump your emotions onto the page, the author holds the emotional content—and the reader observes things from a distance. If you show some restraint and simply convey very specific, concrete details and show us what happened, the reader feels the emotion in an almost effortless, and deeply satisfying way.

I think that’s worth considering. One of the things that Stephen Roxburgh kept repeating at the workshop I went to last month was, “Ask yourself what you want to the reader to be feeling at this moment.”

So at the bottom of one of my pages he wrote something like, “This is getting long and boring.”

I laughed and laughed, thinking, “No, that was definitely not what I wanted my reader to be feeling there.”

But I guess my point is this: We do need to care about what our readers are feeling. We do need to manipulate the readers’ emotions. The question is: How best to do this?

Do we do it by pouring our emotions onto the page? What does Lise mean she says we should paint the specific details and then let the reader have the emotional response?

I think of several scenes in Girl in the Arena–sad scenes. I wasn’t crying for any of them. I think I felt what the main character felt. She was rather numb and I felt numb. It was well done. I assume that numbness was exactly what the author wanted me to feel.

But I want to know how to make people sob the way Bridge to Terabithia made me sob.

I cry when a character I love cries. But I also cry when people I don’t know cry. I am a huge sympathy crier. So I can turn on a TV show with characters I’ve never met, standing around a grave crying and within a few seconds, I’ll be crying, too. I sympathize with the crying people at the grave because I know what it feels like to lose a loved one to death.

On the other hand I was watching a TV show the other night where a character I liked died, and I didn’t even tear up.

The show ended with her death so there were no pictures of anyone mourning her. And the death was not foreshadowed. Not even a hint. So the death came as such a shock I didn’t have time to build up an expectant dread and sorrow. The death flashed on and off very quickly. What a waste of a huge moment. Why did the writers do that? Why didn’t they wring some emotion from me?

Maybe they didn’t know how. I plan to read up on this. I’ll try to have something helpful to say about it shortly.

I am no seat of the pants writer. I have to brainstorm my entire novel out from the start. I do this because the first time I wrote a novel I wandered around for seventeen chapters, having no idea where I was going, before I fizzled and gave in to writers’ block for six months. I finally had to take the book all the way back to chapter four and rewrite it all.

Even so, that book never worked. There was no pay-off. The ending fell flat.

Why? Because when you don’t know the end from the beginning, you can’t foreshadow the end. You can’t build reader anticipation. You can’t hint early on that there is a problem needing to be solved and there is only one way to solve it.

This is not to say that seat of the pantsers can’t write books with stellar endings that wrap up the trouble that was introduced in the beginning in a satisfying way. I believe, though, that once they find their endings they have to go back to their beginnings and do a lot of revising.

This is a necessary step.

And yet, so many writers seem to want to skip this.

You can see this on the big scale–the end of the book has nothing to do with the beginning. That’s how my first novel was going. But I wonder if writers will learn how to foreshadow the smaller steps along the way,  if they won’t also learn to foreshadow their endings.

You can’t introduce a completely new element into the middle of book. Let’s say you’ve decided that the main character needs a ladder so he can climb into a window. He’s outside a warehouse in the middle of the night. You can’t just make him stumble upon the ladder left behind by the painter. You have to show that ladder three chapters earlier. You have to have the character visit that warehouse earlier in the day and notice the painter working.

Do you want your character to be kidnapped? You have to show us the kidnappers taking kids that fit your character’s description, early on. Do you want your character to run away from home? you have to show us that he’s attempted to run away a couple of time previously. Do you want your adult to be called away by a phone call so your kids can be left alone? You have to show that the adult has pressing business matters that often make him take phone calls even when he should be watching the kids.

Books that are made up of a series of convenient coincidences aren’t satisfying. They feel false. We can’t get into the dream. We can’t get lost in the story world and feel like we’re visiting a real place and reading about real people.

So whether you’re a plotter and planner or a seat of the pantser, take the time to foreshadow. Your readers will thank you.