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Hi all, Julie here!

This is the second post in a series. If you want to read them in order, the first post was Building Blocks of a Novel: Word Choice.

Although the central analogy of this series compares writing a novel to constructing a city, forgive me for switching to a different metaphor for a moment. If we think of a novel as a living body, sentences create the heartbeat. Choices a writer makes about sentences can alter that heartbeat—make it speed up, slow down, pound harder, or even skip out of rhythm.

Returning to the city analogy, if words are the bricks, then sentences are the walls. They provide support and structure, but they also control how a building is experienced. High ceilings, narrow passageways, walls of glass and steel–change these things and the whole building changes. In the same way, each sentence makes a difference, and each must be deliberately crafted.

Here are some tips for creating great sentences:

Use sentence length deliberately. Long sentences can force the reader to linger, allowing an image to appear in the reader’s mind. Here’s an example from Truthwitch by Susan Dennard:

“As Iseult det Midenzi wriggled free from her sea-soaked tunic, boots, pants, and finally underclothes, everything hurt. Every peeled-off layer revealed ten new slices from the limestone and barnacles, and each burst of spindrift made her aware of ten more.

This ancient crumbling, lighthouse was effective for hiding, but it was inescapable until the tide went out. For now, the water outside was well above Iseult’s chest, and hopefully that depth—as well as the crashing waves between here and the marshy shoreline—would deter the Bloodwitch from following.”

Long sentences can also carry the narrative along, picking up speed as they go. Here’s an example from The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry:

“The walls and floor are aging now, the light still juddering through its phases like a movie from a projector, until the drywall starts crumbling, spiderwebbed with vines and weeds. From those vines, flowers blossom and wither and grow back and die again. Seasons stretch into years stretch into decades stretch into centuries, all in moments, while I can hear Beau’s breath, make out his edges through the millisecond of dark before another morning comes.”

By contrast, short sentences cut out all the window dressing. They ensure pauses. Short sentences change a rolling pace to a staccato rhythm. This can be effective for focusing attention on the plain meaning of the words. Here’s an example from The Martian by Andy Weir:

“I ache all over. And the shovels I have are made for taking samples, not heavy digging. My back is killing me. I foraged in the medical supplies and found some Vicodin. I took it about ten minutes ago. Should be kicking in soon.”

One thing I love about the above example is how a sentence starts with “And…” rather than continuing from the previous sentence. If those two sentences were joined into one, the resulting long sentence would ruin the effect that the shorter sentences create: a man in pain giving a spare description of his circumstances.

Vary the structure. This is important advice if you have a favorite sentence structure, because you may not realize how frequently you repeat it. Your reader will notice, though, and those wonderful sentences will lose their power. I personally love parenthetical phrases—especially when set off by dashes—but if I use too many on a page the sentences become muddled. Changing up the structure keeps the reader engaged. It combats boredom. Here’s an example of varied sentence structure, from Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard:

“He stares at me, scrutinizing everything from my face to my worn boots. It makes me squirm. After a long moment, he heaves a breath and lets me go. Stunned, I can only stare at him. When a silver coin spins through the air, I barely have the wits to catch it. A tetrarch. A silver tetrarch worth one whole crown. Far more than any of the stolen pennies in my pockets.”

One of the things I like best about the above example is the fact that the last three sentences are fragments. Sometimes it’s hard to ignore that red underline in Word that tells you the sentence isn’t grammatically correct. Here, it’s clear that those sentences are thoughts in the narrator’s head, and we rarely think in complete sentences.

Check for clarity. Sometimes we try so hard to create prose that stands out that we let communication suffer in the name of style. You can create lovely, lyrical, complex sentences, but your writing will suffer if clarity is sacrificed. Parallel structure, consistent tense, and clear pronouns are all the more important when sentences become more intricate. Here’s a made-up example of what I mean:

“The trail was blanketed in snow and shadows, creating a patchwork design that climbed into the mountains. The hikers paused. Their feet ache in their damp boots, memories of so many miles imprinted on their soles. It’s terrifying, Megan thought. Terrifying, yet beautiful. Her freezing toes wiggle inside her boots as they press forward, leaning into the wind.”

This example is loaded with clarity issues. The first line seems to say that the trail was creating a patchwork design, when it’s actually the snow and shadows. There are multiple tense changes, and it’s unclear what Megan finds terrifying yet beautiful. The view, or her aching feet? The last line seems to say that her toes are pressing forward, leaning into the wind.

How’s this instead?

“Snow and shadows blanketed the trail, creating a patchwork design that climbed into the mountains. The hikers paused. Their feet ached in their damp boots, memories of so many miles imprinted on their soles. It’s terrifying, Megan thought, her gaze taking in the view. Terrifying, yet beautiful. Her freezing toes wiggled inside her boots as she and the others pressed forward, leaning into the wind.”

Still not great prose, but the sentences are clearer! They make more sense and better support the story.

What are your thoughts on sentences? Do you have any advice to add? Please share your ideas in the comments!

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As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile", a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories and didn't.

On Twitter, I said:

Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f

— Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015

And that about sums up my feelings.

Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences, and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

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Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people.

I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories. I started reading immediately.

Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter? No, this isn't quite Best American Rich White People. Was it the structure of the stories? Maybe a little bit, generally, as even the handful of structurally adventurous stories here feel perfectly in line with the structurally adventurous stories of 50 years ago, and somewhat tame in comparison to the structurally adventurous stories of 80-100 years ago. But that wasn't really what was bothering me.

And then I realized: It was the style, the rhythm. The paragraphs and, especially, the sentences. It wasn't that each story had the same style as the one I'd just read, but that most (not all) of the stories felt like stylistic family members.

And then I thought: What this book really demonstrates is the deep, abiding, and highly dispersed influence of Gordon Lish. Lish's shadow stretches across the majority of tales in Marcus's book, as it did the previous book, and understandably so: not only is Lish a good candidate for the title of the most influential editor of "literary" short fiction in the US in the second half of the twentieth century ... but Marcus was nurtured by him, with Lish publishing quite a bit of his early work in The Quarterly and then publishing Marcus's first book, The Age of Wire and String. (The title of both the Anchor Book and New American Stories is a bit of a give-away, too: the subtitle of Lish's The Quarterly was "The Magazine of New American Writing".) The effect feels more repetitious in the new book, perhaps because I'm now a decade older and have all those more years of reading short stories behind me (including readings tons for the Best American Fantasy anthologies); but also, I expect, because the new book is more than 200 pages longer, and so the opportunity for repetition is greater.

It's not that either the Anchor Book or New American Stories is an anthology of stuff from the School of Lish (as Sven Birkerts called it back in the '80s). Some of Lish's students are, indeed, in these books — in the new one, I know that Sam Lipsyte, Joy Williams, Christine Schutt, and Deb Olin Unferth all studied and/or were edited by him, and Don DeLillo is a good friend and admirer of him. Plenty of the writers in the book may never have even heard of Gordon Lish. The influence is easily picked up from the writers Lish not only guided or influenced directly, but venerated by publishing them or saying good things about them to the world. Lish didn't just teach people to write in a particular way; he taught them to value particular moves in texts.

The writers in New American Stories are all different in their approaches and backgrounds, certainly, and at least a few of them are writers whose work Lish would not himself value, but there's a bit of an echo between them, the echo of the Lishian sentence (the best analysis of which is probably that of Jason Lucarelli in "The Consecution of Gordon Lish"). These are stories that (overall) value straightforward diction, relatively simple sentence constructions, and conversational tones and syntax. They prefer the concrete and the active. Many are built with odd repetitions and quirky juxtapositions.

You can feel it in the first lines — Lish famously calls first sentences the "attack sentence" and reportedly tells students, "Your attack sentence is a provoking sentence. You follow it with a series of provoking sentences."

Here are some opening sentences from New American Stories (I'll identify the writers later):

1.) Davis called, told me he was dying.
2.) "What you got there, then?"
3.) "Just let me out of here, man," said Cora Booth. "I'm sick. I'm dying."
4.) Four of them were on one side of a dim room.
5.) Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window.
6.) "What are you doing?" a guy asked her.
7.) It was the day before his cousin's funeral and Del ended up at the Suds washing his black jeans at midnight.
8.) Once, for about a month or two, I decided I was going to be a different kind of guy.
9.) "I don't know why I committed us to any of those things," Otto said.
10.) The day I got my period, my mother and father took me to pick my madman.
11.) I know when people will die.
12.) Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who's doing it to you.

The first six of those are the entire first paragraph of the story. All of the sentences are pretty short, with the longest being #5 at 24 words. (And #3 is actually 3 sentences.) The diction is simple, with most of the words being one or two syllables, and none more than three syllables. Four of the openings are direct dialogue, with implied dialogue in others (e.g. #1). All of the openings are about people. The word guy appears more than once.

I chose these openings pretty much randomly by flipping through the book, and I only organized them to put the ones that are a paragraph unto themselves together. The 20 other stories that I have not sampled here would generally seem similar. From those 20 other stories, here are the opening sentences that, to my eyes and ears, seem most different from those above:

A.) Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there.

B.) Though alien to the world's ancient past, young blood runs similar circles.

C.) After they shot the body several times, they cut its throat with a scaling knife; after that, they pinched its nostrils and funneled sulfuric acid into its mouth; while some set to yanking the body's toenails out with a set of pliers, others fashioned a noose from a utility cord they had found in the trunk of their car.

A and C are longer than 1-12 (behold: semi-colons!), and B is not quite about a human being. Interestingly, they're all about bodies, bodily fluid, and, in the case of A and C, pain, death, suffering. A is notable for its lyricism, B for its weirdness, C for having the only 4-syllable word that I've noticed among any of these opening sentences ("utility"). These are, then, the most extreme and radical opening sentences in the book.

Most of the writers of all of these sentences, whether 1-12 or A-C, likely do not know Gordon Lish's commandments for writing attack sentences. But I suspect we see the influence of Lish in two ways here: first, in how Lish has influenced Marcus's taste, since the one thing we can say about all of these stories is that Ben Marcus valued them; second, in how Lish's protégés have gone on themselves to influence the perception of what is "good writing" in the lit world.

Let's look at who the writers are:

1.) Sam Lipsyte
2.) Zadie Smith
3.) Wells Tower
4.) Jesse Ball
5.) George Saunders
6.) Maureen McHugh
7.) Donald Ray Pollock
8.) Kelly Link
9.) Deborah Eisenberg
10.) Lucy Corin
11.) Deb Olin Unferth
12.) Charles Yu
A.) NoViolet Bulawayo
B.) Rachel B. Glaser
C.) Kyle Coma-Thompson

(It's amusing to note that the two writers whose opening sentences include the word "guy" are Maureen McHugh and Kelly Link — writers who admire each other, and Kelly Link's own Small Beer Press published McHugh's [excellent] story collections. There's nothing to say about this coincidence except that Ben Marcus apparently likes opening sentences that include the word guy.)

The only Lish students I know of among those writers are Lipsyte and Unferth. But sentences 1-12 seem to me more similar than different in their approach. To know how much of this is just Marcus's own taste selecting stories that have such sentences and how much is stylistic similarity between the writers generally, we would have to examine collections of each writers' stories and see if they tend to begin their stories in the same way. That work is more than I can do right now, but it would be an interesting research project.

Compared to most of the writers in New American Stories, the writers of A-C have fewer books published by major publishers and fewer awards (though NoViolet Bulawayo won the Caine Prize and her book, from which the story "Shhhh" is taken, has done very well — still, until recently she was not part of the big lit machine), and I think this matters. One of my disappointments with New American Stories is how much it reprints writers who have been published by major publishers and won major prizes. I had had hopes that the book would be more eclectic and surprising than this. For all his attempts at variety, what Marcus has given us overall is a bunch of stories that are valued by the kinds of people who give out major literary awards. And they are good stories — I don't mean anything I say here to reflect badly on any of the individual stories, many of which are extraordinary and all of which are in some way or another interesting. But the range of stories in the book is more narrow than I had hoped for.

Coming back to Lish, what's interesting is how his taste has so defined what I think of as the establishment avant-garde. We should put "avant-garde" in quotes, though, because it's not really out in front, and it's not particularly innovative anymore — indeed, it's the establishment because its structures and rhythms are passed down through writing workshops, editorial decisions, and awards committees. You can see this in the case of somebody like Gary Lutz, a Lishian who may not be well known to the general public, but who has had a significant influence on a lot of contemporary short story writers in the lit world, as well as on creative writing teachers, particularly through his essay/lecture "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place" (which I've myself recommended to some advanced writing students because it demonstrates to an overwhelming degree the depth with which one can think about sentences).

The effect of all this is to create a relatively narrow range for what is recognizable as "quality" in a short story. The familiar replicates itself. What a discourse community can perceive as good and bad, effective and ineffective, quality and kitsch depends very much on what it has previously seen as good, bad, effective, ineffective, quality, kitsch. Sometimes, that can be liberatory — Charles Yu, Maureen McHugh, and Kelly Link might be dismissed as writers of genre fiction if their tone and style was not close enough to that of the other writers in the anthology to sound familiar and thus be recognizable as part of the family of quality. I love that they're part of this book, but to understand why they fit so well in it, we don't have to speculate about the growing acceptance of genre content in the lit world, but simply note the similarity of tone, syntax, and diction to what is also here.

There's a long history to the particular qualities celebrated by Marcus and most of the writers he likes, and it's a history that predates Lish — if these stories feel like they have a lot of family resemblances, then it may be because they are the stylistic grandchildren of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. (Or, to make a different comparison, the music they seem to favor is that of chamber concerts and small indie rock bands, not jazz clubs. Indeed, the echoes I couldn't hear at all in these stories are the echoes of jazzier writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Maybe I'm tone deaf.)

So perhaps it is best to think of New American Stories as a kind of family portrait, a reunion of the offspring (whether they know it or not) of Grandma Gertrude and Grandpapa Ernie by way of Daddy Gordon (and maybe Mama Amy Hempel), along with a couple of kids who seem to have wandered in from the neighbor's house and who are nice to have around because they liven things up.  New American Stories is a good anthology, well worth reading, full of interesting stuff. It is not, though, a broad representation of what short stories can do or be, and for all its writers' concern with tone, resonance, and rhythm, the songs they play sound more alike than not.

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Forced by some reductive power to declare a single favorite essay, mine would be "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf. It is a marvel of concision, and yet it contains the universe. It is an essay both personal and cosmic, material and spiritual.

Whenever I teach writing, I use "The Death of the Moth" as an example of the interplay of form and content. (While I have seldom met a pairing I didn't want to deconstruct, the form/content binary is one I continue to find useful. Yes, the separation is problematic — what, in language, is content without form or form without content? — but I also find it a valuable way to talk about concepts that are otherwise invisible or easily muddled.) Usually, I take one sentence, scrawl it out on the board, and pick it apart. It's not always the same sentence, but recently I've been using this one:

Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him.

The first thing to do is break the sentence apart. Here's one way:


Yet, 

because he was so small, 
and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window 
and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain 
and in those of other human beings, 

there was something marvellous 
as well as pathetic about him.

One thing we can do is try to paraphrase the basic meaning of the sentence, to get at what it says and does before we tackle the how.

It says that there was something marvelous and something pathetic about the dying moth. It doesn't only say that, of course, but that gives us a starting point. All right. How does it say what it says?

The first word sets the sentence up in opposition to what has come immediately before it. The second word prepares us for answers to a question we don't necessarily know yet.

And now we can't avoid questions of form. The sentence is complex and, especially on a first reading, beguiling. It is possible that this sentence is difficult because Virginia Woolf is a bad writer, or she was half-asleep when she wrote it, or some other flaw. After all, this essay was not published in Woolf's lifetime. Maybe she thought it was a dud.

This is where, in class, I bring in Peter Elbow's believing/doubting game. In academia, we're used to playing the doubting game. We seek out flaws, weaknesses, troubles. But if we switch our frame of thinking, new insights are possible. Let's assume, for instance, that we are not smarter than the writer. Let's assume that the writer was vastly more skilled and intelligent than us. Let's assume that there are no flaws. Such an assumption (game) forces us to seek the reasons, rather than condemnations, for what perplexes us.

(As I said above, this is my favorite essay. Woolf is one of my favorite writers. I completely believe she was more skilled and intelligent than I. I have to force myself into the doubting game with Woolf, because all I want to do is believe, believe, believe. But I'm talking pedagogy here. My students typically find the essay boring and pointless, and they think Woolf writes difficult sentences to annoy them. I like to find ways to circumvent those feelings other than screaming, "Stop being an arrogant and defensive reader!")

If we look back to how I broke the sentence up above, we can see that it can break into three major parts: the introductory word (a transition that positions the sentence in relationship to other sentences), the because section, and the final statement. We know what the introductory word does, but what about the middle section? What does it do, particularly in relationship to the final statement?

The middle section elongates or prolongs. It keeps us away from the final statement. It's important, then, to look at how it does that: not with a randomly long statement, but with phrases connected with the word and. (Here, I often read the middle section aloud at least once, dramatically emphasizing the word and at the start of each section. The and between narrow and intricate can be a little confusing, as it's connecting something different from the other ands, but that's why I don't separate it out visually. I've sometimes thought of replacing the word with an ampersand.)

Each of these ands serves to push us away from the final statement one more time.

Thus, the sentence does to us what the moth is doing: it fends off, for as long as it can, finality. The moth's struggle is replicated in the sentence's structure.

Part of the wonder of "The Death of the Moth" is that it achieves so much in so few words. It does so by uniting form and content in a specific way. Over and over, the essay replicates in its structures what it is "about". Again and again, Woolf forces the reader to consider scope. We move from the very tiny to the cosmic. The cosmic is shown to contain the microscopic, the microscopic to contain the cosmic. Life is strange and death is strange, and the two are also, like form and content, inseparable.

It's not known when Woolf wrote the essay. It's tempting to read it as something she wrote late in life, as she struggled against her fears and depression as World War II began. But the insights of the essay are more universal than that, and the struggle the speaker identifies with is one that Woolf expressed through much of her life. (In the sixth volume of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Stuart N. Clarke writes that "it might have been composed in September 1927", but it's also just as likely that it might not have been.) The essay captures not only the scope and scale of existence, but it also represents many of the recurring ideas in Woolf's writing.

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Last night, my enormously gracious hostesses at St. Joseph's University—Ann Green and April Lindner—shared their students with me.  Some had read Dangerous Neighbors.  Some had read You Are My Only.  All of them, many in the graduate program, spend their days thinking about words and writing.

I talked about the future of young adult literature.  I also continued to talk about sentences.  Why they matter.  How they are crafted.  What we put at risk if we, as a nation, a culture, foist only plots upon one another, and not song.

Yesterday on this blog, I shared some of my own sentences in the making—a beginning place, a mid place—as well as a reminder of a NaNo contest I am conducting.  Last night, at St. Joe's, I read from that same James Wood essay in The New Yorker that I celebrated here not long ago—that lesson in beautiful writing. 

Today I mean only to share these few words from a Pablo Neruda poem.  These are simple lines, simple words.  No pyrotechnics, no self-conscious gloss, no unnecessary intricacies.  Good sentences, I am saying, don't have to be complex.  But they must always be true.

From Neruda:

Only the shadows
know
the secrets
of closed houses,
only the forbidden wind
and the moon that shines
on the roof

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I wrote the other day of a post-NaMoWri contest.  An editing exercise focused quite simply on the sentence.  The details and prize are described here.  I hope you'll enter in.

I am interested in the sentence—its arc, its clarity, its shape, its purpose.  I happen to think that it matters.  And so today I thought I would share a little of my own editing process.  These sentences below are from a novel-in-progress.  The first series is from the raw first draft.  With them, I am very baldly, without artistry, writing down what happens.  Making a record.

She hid the photographs beside the Leica beneath the bed.  She told Vin that she had been out in the garden and had turned to see a family of deer at the forest's edge.  She gave great detail to a lie too easily spun:  She had seen a buck and two does, and she had chased them.

Here, then, are those sentences two drafts later (with many more drafts, no doubt, still to come).  I have concerned myself not only with the what here, but with the rhythm and the movement of the words.  It's still not perfect, but it has been improved:

She hid the photographs beneath the bed, made up some story.  There had been deer, she said, at the forest's edge—a buck and two does by the stream.  They had stood there not moving, or perhaps one cusped ear of the buck had shivered—a sign, Becca told Vin, a beckoning. 

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When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it — it went on increasing in his experience.

--Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway

Today is Virginia Woolf's 129th birthday. Woolf is one of my touchstone writers, a writer I've been reading for the majority of my life (really, I first tried to read Mrs. Dalloway in middle school -- I didn't get too far, but I found the first pages of the book utterly entrancing, and by the time I read it fully for the first time eight or nine years later, I had those pages nearly memorized). I've read all of Woolf's novels at least once, and Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando many times. They are magic poetry.

I've known a couple of Woolf scholars over the years, and one of the things that made me a lifelong Woolf devotee was working at the 7th International Virginia Woolf Society Conference when it was held in my hometown of Plymouth, NH. I had only read Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando at that point, but I found the conference invigorating. I even coerced Hermione Lee into signing my copy of her brilliant biography while I signed her in. The next fall, I took an undergraduate course devoted to Woolf's work; I was the only male in the class, and some of the other students thought my passion for Woolf's writings was a little weird. "You don't understand!" I remember telling one of them when we happened to find ourselves sitting together on a bus. "There's nobody like her! Those sentences!" It was hardly one of my more eloquent moments, and probably led to me being considered weirder than I already was, but nonetheless the passion was real. (I had a similar, though I hope slightly more informative, moment this past term when I spent 10 minutes taking a class of writing students through one of the sentences in "The Death of the Moth." I wrote the sentence on the board, broke it into some components, talked with great enthusiasm about it and the genius of it ... and after class went to my department head and said, "Do you ever get really into something you're doing in class, then look at the students and think, 'Wow, I really am a freak.'" And she replied, "Yes, it's the foundation of my pedagogy.")

I knew Anne Fernald as a blogger before I knew she was a Woolf scholar, though she had been at the Plymouth conference. We used to hang out together at the LitBlog Co-op, and when I first moved to New Jersey, she gave me a tour of Jersey City and environs. Anne is editing an edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press, work that has consumed her for a few years, and though I don't envy her the tedium of some of that work, I do envy her getting to study all sorts of editions of the novel, to see it in all its permutations, to trace its meanings and influences. If I can find a li

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Revision update: On chapter 14 out of 30. I still think I can make my end of February goal.

In my first post about the Houston SCBWI conference, I’m featuring some tips from Balzer & Bray editor Ruta Rimas. Energetic, knowledgeable and obviously passionate about books, Ruta advised authors to read books by the authors they love both for pleasure and craft.

She gave a some examples of books she thought were worth reading:

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak for word choice
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White for sentences
• Not a Box by Antoinette Portis for use of punctuation to show emotion
• Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak for use of sentence structure to build tension
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman for paragraph length
• Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli (one of Ruta’s favorite books) for the treatment of the pivotal moment for the protagonist in chapter 16
• Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems for the way it allows the reader to experience the situation with the pigeon
• How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (which Ruta called “a remarkable piece of art”) for the way it’s so in the character’s head
• Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi for its use of word choice to show character, i.e. using the type of words this particular character would use
• The Astonishing Life of Octavion Nothing by M.T. Anderson for the way it shows the character’s voice right from the title page

Ruta also recommended Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer and quoted the book as telling writers to put “every word on trial for its life.” I love that!

To do that, Ruta told writers to look at their work in progress and:

• choose a section and look at the words. What words stick out? How do the words support the theme
  2 Comments on Editor Ruta Rimas on what makes a great book, last added: 2/25/2010
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  Editor Lisa Ann Sandell on query letters « Day By said, on 2/24/2010 6:27:00 AM
  

  [...] By Day Writer Balancing work, life and the desire to create « Editor Ruta Rimas on what makes a great book Editor Lisa Ann Sandell on query letters February 24, 2010 Revision update: On chapter 16 [...]

  Editor Alexandra Cooper on submitting to an editor said, on 2/25/2010 7:20:00 PM
  

  [...] Ann Sandell talked about making your query letter package stand out, and Balzer & Bray editor Ruta Rimas talked about what makes a great [...]

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First, I have to say that today’s lesson I taught, which was adapted from Session 11 of Calkins & Cruz’s Book on Fiction Writing in Grades 3 - 5 is AWESOME. It’s all about revising with different lenses. My students read my story yesterday and commented on it, which was helpful to me. [...]

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Jane Austen was pure genius when it came to creating interesting men in her books. And if you doubt this, check out The Men of Austen. Thank you, Laini, for posting about this bit of fun research.

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On Thursday, I posted about the Meanest Mom in the World. Yesterday, I posted about how I'm trying to catch up with technology. One of the things I was curious about, was the appeal of IMing. Check out the comments about it.

Today, this leads me to a totally different question. I've wondered about this one for awhile and am now going to put it out there to see what you all think. Put your teenager hat on, your parent hat on, your arguing for the sake of arguing hat on, your how could you hat on, or whatever you want to. I'd really be curious to hear it all, for the sake of research.

Here's the scene:
Mom finds out from reading her sixth grader's IM messages from her cell phone, that her daughter-A, has a boyfriend. A's boyfriend-M, wants A to go over to his house after school during one of the early dismissals. M writes to A, "Nobody else will be home."

Here's the problem:
Mom snooped. Plain and simple. But, her daughter, A, might be going to boyfriend's empty house, doing who know's what.

More on Problem:
When I was growing up, teenagers had diaries, journals, letters or notes that any Mom around the world could be able able to read if they dared to violate their child's trust to find out what was going on.

Today's teen doesn't need a simple lock on their diary anymore. Nowadays, teens have at their fingertips an assortment of technologically savvy tricks to get around Mom and Dad. There are passwords. There are spycams. Secret identities on the web. And more that I haven't mentioned and probably don't know about.

I can only imagine, teens will find more interesting ways to hide secrets from their parents as the technology advances.

Here are the questions:
1. Is this bit of invasion of privacy considered bad form?
2. Why?
3. If not, when is the invasion of privacy considered going over the line?
4. How should Mom deal with A, so the trust isn't completely broken off?
5. What will A do to hide things from Mom in the future?

Put your teenager hat on, your parent hat on, your arguing for the sake of arguing hat on, your how could you hat on, or whatever you want to. I'd really be curious to hear it all, for the sake of research. (Edited to add: I have a scene in a manuscript I've had difficulty trying to figure out the outcome. So I'd so appreciate your help on this one.) No judgements will be made here. All I ask is to keep this conversation respectful. Thank you!

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