Writing Tools

I recently read a book about creative writing to further my novel writing skills, and came across fifty strategies on how to make your work sing like a canary…

The author is Roy Peter Clark and the book title ‘Writing Tools’, this is a great read, elegantly crafted and ‘humungously’ useful. The great thing about these tools is you already know most of them. But I want to highlight a few in this post, the rest you can find in the book.

Begin a sentence with subject and verb

This technique is called the ‘right-branching sentence’. Writers compose stories that become rich and easily readable and understanding flow from the prose like spring from the ground. The subject is often separated from the verb in prose, usually to tell the reader something about the subject, but these types of sentences can easily become unreadable and confusing, so take care should you use the separation technique.

Do not fear long sentences – use them well

Whenever you read about creative writing, scholars and teachers always says to keep your sentence length to a manageable less than thirty words per sentence, but sometimes one can use long sentences to slow down the reading, or create a sense of wondering through a forest, lazily creeping along the ground snaking to a known destination where we, as writers, want to suddenly. Jump on the reader. Speed up the pace. Faster and faster until the action scene is complete. Then we can begin the process of slowing down the prose, bringing the reader out of the action to a more relaxed state. I hope this paragraph explain what the author wants to explain, the first sentence in this paragraph is sixty seven words in total, followed by a couple of short sentences and then a longer, and even longer sentence. This creates a slow, fast, slower and final slow pace to the text. You can even use this technique during action scenes, to momentarily slow down – in a slow motion piece – and then continue the action.

Order words for emphasis

Imagine text as a road with a stop sign at the end. Punctuation marks are techniques to control the flow of traffic down the road.  The full stop at the end of a sentence is the stop sign at the finish of a sentence. This place and focus the readers mind on the last word of the sentence. Writers use this technique to emphasize important information they want to convey to the reader. The white space at the end of a paragraph following a period sign, place even more focus on the last word of that paragraph.

This can help you keep the reader’s attention focused on the prose, and help you carry your story through to the end.

The rest of the book has many techniques to help you as the writer, compose beautiful prose that will sing like a canary.