Still training

My familiarisation exercise continues. What follows is one of my short stories
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Would you share a dream with me?

Nicholas Fourikis

This is the perennial invitation writers issue to readers because deep down writers want to be read. If readers accept the invitation to share a dream, the writers would move mountains to engage the readers from the first page of the book to the last.

How do writers keep the dream alive? What induces the readers to abandon the dream? These are natural questions that arise.

Hooks and interesting plots with intriguing subplots are the prerequisites to keep the dream alive. Readers fall in love with heroes who take risks to free the world from the forces of Evil. Subtle subtexts for the reader to discern establish a bond between the writer and the reader. And symbolism leaves the readers elated a longtime after they reach the end of a novel.

What about the dream killers?
Just imagine that our hero enters the Castle where the Nemesis of all humans lives. The reader senses that the mother of all battles is about to begin. On the edge of her seat she wonders whether the hero is up to the task when she comes across a five-page description of the Castle. The description is eloquent but is not what she craves for. She therefore skips the five pages and continues reading. She reaches the stage where the two men clash. She is distressed because the hero is wounded. Would he survive? She wonders. Instead of an answer the writer offers her a two-page description of the wound. Would she skip the two pages or abandon the dream? I think you know the answer.

Descriptions are however necessary because they define the where and when of the story. So what should the writer do? Shorten the descriptions but how short is short? In general the descriptions should be long enough to convince the reader that she is witnessing the action. Do you believe that a descriptive paragraph of five sentences can kill the dream? It could, so what should the writer do? One solution is to implant the five descriptive sentences among the sentences that describe action.

Suppose the reader comes across some long sentences that consist of long, unfamiliar words. What would the reader do? Would she abandon the dream to look up the meaning of these unfamiliar words in her dictionary? Here I assume that the readers are not professors of the English language; they don’t even have a tertiary education. I guess she would persevere for a while but would eventually abandon the dream because the text is hard to read.

I accept this scenario, but do we have any readability criteria? Fortunately Flesch and Kincaid came to our aid and the MS WORD programs have readability tests the users can easily install [1]. Personally, I wouldn’t use sentences having more than thirty words but there are further considerations. While short sentences are clearer than long sentences, I wouldn’t use short sentences through the book because my prose would read like a telegram. I use short sentences in dialog or whenever I describe a race or a match. On all other occasions I mix short and long sentences.

Should I prefer short words on all occasions? I don’t think so. While ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ are shorter that ‘doggy’ and ‘moggy’ a writer might prefer the latter set of words to express affection for the animals. In a similar vein an unusual character in a novel might use the words ‘canine’ and ‘feline.’ The hero of the story might use the verbs ‘liberate’ or ‘reside’ rather than ‘free’ or ‘live.’ So I follow the guidelines related to the length of words, judiciously.

My tutors taught me that adverbs and adjectives suck the life out of any sentence. And I follow this guideline most of the time. Occasionally and only occasionally I use an adjective.

Many writers hold strong views about cliqués. ‘Only lazy writers use them,’ they pontificate! And they are right but I’m not sure. Because people use clichés in dialog and I love tweaked clichés or twichés. I offer the following samples of twichés from reference [2]
A media guru described Madonna’s latest diet ‘Footloose and Fat-Free.’ Creative? You bet.
‘A cow in the ointment,’ that is how some unkind person might describe an unpopular woman.
I’m sure you’ve heard the twiché, ‘a legend in his own mind.’
‘George W. Bush has gone from abject wealth to riches,’ Jon Stewart quipped.

In you like examples of twichés, head for reference [2].

I’d like to leave you with a sentence the author of the same reference [2] wrote.
‘A good tweak leads readers one way, then jerks them into the delight-giving realm of the surprise.’
Keep on writing, my friends.

References
1 For the installation of the readability statistics, click: Tools, Options, Spelling & Grammar and Show Readability Statistics. Select a text or a file. Click: Tools, Spelling & Grammar. After the program checks the Spelling & Grammar, it will display the readability statistics: Number of Passive Sentences, Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
2 A Plotnik. ‘Twist worn expressions into winners.’ The Writer. August 2006, page 15.