One of the things that I find interesting is how various writers achieve their prose effects. How does Cormac McCarthy achieve such deep emotional resonance using spare prose? How does Gene Wolfe use a slight twist in meaning of various words to create a sense of time and place without using description? These are the kinds of things that fascinate me. These are also the things that are seldom taught in writing books or classes, but they are important, incredibly important.
One of the reasons they aren’t taught is that the subject is incredibly complex. It is often much easier to just tell writers to read a lot and to use the lessons from the prose they are reading as a guide. The trouble is that I’m just not sure how effective that is. Be that as it may, let’s take a look at the most basic of prose tools, the simple period.
A period, as with most punctuation, has really only two jobs: To provide clarity and to provide rhythm. The clarity is simple enough–we use periods to let us know when a subject completes an action in a self-contained manner. Jack runs. Sarah reads. Toby presses the button on the microwave. Those sentences make sense because there is a period there. Try to parse this sentence:
Sarah reads Toby presses the button on the microwave Jack runs
It’s confusing. We need the period to provide a clarity that doesn’t exist otherwise. So in the writer’s toolbox, the period is pretty important. But, wait, the period also has a more subtle job–it helps convey rhythm as a device that means “stop.” It is here that things start to break down for the writing instructor, because rhythm is very much relative and clarity and rhythm are often in conflict. Summarizing simple rules for the period is thus a formidable task. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples why.
Let’s first take a quick look at rhythm. Rhythm is how the words and sentences flow as a reader reads them in his or her mind. Rhythm can be short and sharp:
There was a crash as the car slammed into the house. Siding fell onto the hood. A single brick dropped onto the windshield, creating a spiderweb of glass. John felt his forehead. At least he wasn’t bleeding.
Each sentence is intended to be foreground and consumed as a whole. This, this, and this happened. The rhythm of the prose tells us read-stop-read-stop.
Sentence rhythm can also flow like a single thought told in multiple sentences. Here’s Nick talking to Jay Gatsby. Note how this is all really one thought told in a few sentences, and as you read it there are no real hard pauses, even though there are periods. In this instance, the flow of the words overwhelm the pauses a period would normally demand:
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.
There is actually a slight pause after the first period, which just goes to show you how difficult this is to discuss.
Beginning writers often see comments like “stilted prose” or “awkward prose,” and this is very much an indication of not “hearing” how sentences flow to the reader. One valuable solution for someone frustrated over seeing lots of criticisms like this but not knowing what he or she is doing wrong is to read your work to yourself. Spoken word demands a rhythm, and often you will be shocked at how different your prose reads when it is spoken aloud versus in your head.
But what defines stilted prose? Generally speaking, prose is awkward when it is written without any real effect in mind. It is solely put on the page to get the message across. This is a common problem across all of prose tools today. With the period–and rhythm specficially–it means that the writer doesn’t know why he or she is putting the periods where they are. Note: The sentences may be clear, because that is certainly one of the jobs of the period, but they sound off.
In other words, whenever you use a period to construct a sentence–especially when you are revising–you need to know why you have made the choices you have made. It just isn’t enough to “wing it” until you have become accomplished enough that criticism of stilted prose are no longer aimed at you.
Okay, back to the simple elegant period and why this is very complex. We are told that a comma indicates a short stop, and a period indicates a longer stop. This is often true, but not always so. The words also have a huge impact. You can have a long paragraph of many sentences that reads as one flowing thought. But how is that so?
It is so because advanced writers know that more than just a period affects rhythm. The result we often find are writers who “break the rules” because the tool just isn’t getting the job done. And this is critical, because authors with great prose don’t start with the tool (such as a period); they start with the effect they are going for. After they examine the various tools at their disposal, they pick the best tool for the job. Sometimes it’s a period. Sometimes it’s not.
Let’s look at an example from a story I wrote recently:
We’ve isolated the failure to the rotating part of the fan structure. The moment he fixes it, the blades will turn, and he’ll be knocked off. It’s a long fall.
Now it was important to me to have a very hard pause between “knocked off” and “it’s a long fall.” Why? Because the person he is talking to has never been in the structure. The person speaking realizes this and quickly adds the “it’s a long fall” line to let him know it will most likely be fatal without saying it explicitly. Now normally I would use something like “there was no response, so he continued, ‘It’s a long fall.’” That neatly solves my problem, but there is one issue–I had already used a similar technique earlier in the paragraph. This put me in a conundrum. I really wanted to have a very hard stop after “knocked off,” but the sentence rhythm and the period didn’t stop long enough on their own. I had to artificially create this stop somehow.
You can come up with your own solution (including the conclusion that this isn’t a big enough problem worth worrying over), but the key takeaway here is that as you write your prose, think about how you want each sentence to be presented, and then make it happen. It’s something that will often be second nature, but there will always be moments where you’ll hear in your head a sentence not doing what you want it to do. That’s when you need to think about things like the period and it’s modest role–is it doing its job creating the rhythm you want or do you need to call in reinforcements.
