1.5 The Nuts and Bolts of Writing

Effective writing requires a basic understanding of English composition, as well as a sense of how readers read our stories. The words we choose and the way we arrange them are almost everything we have in crafting compelling stories, so we need to learn to use these tools correctly.

Choices about writing take place at different levels. At smaller levels, we decide which words we will use and how we will arrange them in relation to other words. From there, we design sentences that convey more complete ideas. We string sentences together to form paragraphs, whole units that offer a substantial amount of information about something. Larger pieces of writing, like news articles, books, or scripts, are composed of paragraphs and maybe other units as well, like sections, chapters, or acts.

In this course, we will look at the decisions we make at all these levels to see how those decisions influence the precision and appeal of our stories. We will study tools that help us control our narratives at each level so that each part makes a clear and unique contribution to the story as a whole.

Let’s look at some examples of how decisions at different levels can affect the stories we tell.

Sentences

A sentence is a basic unit of discourse that conveys a complete idea. Fundamentally, a sentence is composed of a subject (the “character” of the sentence) and a predicate (the “event” of the sentence). Most sentences affirm or deny that the predicate is true of the subject.

Consider the following sentence:

In this sentence, the pronoun “they” is the subject of the sentence, and everything else—“watched me”—is the predicate. According to this sentence, the predicate “watched me” is true of whoever “they” are. The predicate “watched me” would be false if whoever “they” are wasn’t watching me or if the sentence was stating something false.

We’ll get a bit more background in these concepts later on, but for now, let’s see how decisions about constructing sentences can make a difference in how we tell a story.

Active and Passive Voice

The sentence above is in active voice, which means that the subject of the sentence is doing the action spoken of in the predicate. In contrast to the active voice is passive voice, or when the subject is receiving the action (done by someone or something else) named in the predicate. In this example, the corresponding sentence in the passive voice would be “I was being watched by them.” Here, the object of the original sentence, “me,” becomes the subject, and the predicate now states that the subject receives the action, or that the action is done to it. In the passive voice, we mark the agent of the action, or whatever’s doing it, with “by.”

Sentences in the active voice are usually shorter and more direct than passive voice sentences. Active voice sentences also closely connect the subject to the action of the predicate, which can make them a bit easier to understand. In general, sentences in the active voice are just more active themselves, suggesting a sense of motion and activity that passive voice sentences lack.

Voice Tells a Story

Later in our course, we will learn that most writing is better with active-voice sentences. But this isn’t always the case, and, in fact, the decisions we make about active and passive voice influence how we tell the stories we want to share. Imagine, for example, that the following sentence was the very first line in a book:

What comes to your mind when you read it? Maybe it’s a story about a child whose parents have come out to watch her play soccer. Maybe it’s about a figure skater hoping to impress the judges. Whatever it is, the emphasis is on the subject.

Now imagine that we begin a story with the same line, but this time in passive voice:

Sounds ominous! For even more effect, we can cut out “by them” and leave the rest:

Now we’re talking! Since we don’t know yet whether the person being watched knows who she’s being watched by, we’re left wondering what could be going on. Are there cameras in her home? Is someone tailing her car? We can add two more sentences to increase the suspense:

All of a sudden, we’ve got the beginnings of a story. Notice how the sentence-level decision of active versus passive voice impacts how our story unfolds.

Paragraphs

A paragraph is a collection of sentences that usually form part of a larger work, like a section, chapter, or book. This textbook contains many short paragraphs; longer paragraphs are common in more professional settings.

Later, we will learn some useful guidelines for constructing effective paragraphs. It isn’t just about throwing sentences together, skipping a line, and calling our creation a paragraph. Paragraphs have a logic of their own, and clear paragraphs will allow readers to digest them easily. The logic of paragraphs gives us the guidelines for building good ones.

In fact, the previous paragraph attempts to follow some of those guidelines explicitly. Many effective paragraphs begin with a sentence that sets the theme for the paragraph, and the sentences that follow it develop that theme or provide evidence for it. The final sentence then connects all of those middle sentences back to the theme as a kind of summary. Each paragraph tries to follow a similar pattern.

Different kinds of writing have different rules for paragraphs. In a novel, for example, it’s common to start a new paragraph not only when the story changes focus but also when one character stops speaking and another begins. We should know and follow the conventions governing the story we’re telling, and we’ll learn a few of them in this course.

Grammar

The rules we use to arrange words and sentences make up the grammar of English. A story that makes lots of grammatical mistakes is not easy to understand. On the other hand, clear, grammatically correct prose allows our story ideas to shine through the text unimpeded.

The focus of this course is on storytelling; it isn’t an English class. This means our study of grammar will focus on common mistakes and how to decide for ourselves the best way to construct phrases and sentences.

Word Choice

We make decisions about sentences, paragraphs, and grammar based on principles of good writing and the English language. In some cases, as with sentences, those principles allow a lot of flexibility to accommodate an author’s style and goals; in others, as with grammar, the rules are more rigid.

Decisions about word choice give us another area in which we can play with style and set the tone for an interesting story. Consider the following two examples, built off the sentence we mentioned earlier:

In most circumstances, being watched isn’t a good thing, so “loathing” it may seem like a more natural attitude to have. “Cherishing,” on the other hand, is pretty different from “loathing,” and it is not the attitude we’d expect someone to have if they were being watched. Why do they cherish being watched? Is there something special about the watchers or about the experience of being watched? The choice of one word over another kindles our interest by going against our expectations about how someone should feel toward being watched.

The process of revising our stories is the time when we’ll make many word-choice decisions. Revision also cleans up grammar and other mistakes, smooths the narrative flow of a story, and deepens our ideas.

Improving Our Writing: The Keats Fallacy

Gaining skills with the English language will allow us to tell clearer, more engaging stories. And these skills really are ones that we can gain—when we understand the principles and apply them, we’ll improve. And we’ll only get better with practice.

This point about practice runs contrary to the idea that many people have about writing: that being a good writer is an innate gift that some people have and others simply don’t. In our course, we will call this idea the “Keats fallacy,” named after the English poet John Keats, who was famous for producing brilliant writing on the first try in very little time.

But few people are like John Keats, which is why the idea that writing is an innate gift is a fallacy. Most good writers have become good by practicing and are able to tell compelling stories because they understand how. We, too, can learn those same skills and create impactful stories.