I read books even before I became a writer. Dr. Seuss stories, Dick and Jane readers, Aesop’s fables, Old English fairy tales like Jack & the Beanstalk, Perrault fairy tales such as Bluebeard, and Grimm stories like The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In high school I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, all of Steinbeck’s stories, Mark Twain, Harper Lee and Shakespeare. When I earned my degree in English, I read and analyzed a new world of authors including Lady Mary Wroth, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Shelley.
I’m so grateful for storytellers. David L. Ulin, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Opinion writes that “countless studies have reinforced what many recognize from experience: Literature encourages compassion.” I agree. Through my reading, I’ve learned to empathize with people who are not even remotely similar to me, and I believe that this makes me a better writer.
Here are two more specific writing techniques I’ve studied recently from reading other author’s stories.
Reason 4: How to write about what a character is thinking
The best novels are ones in which the protagonist learns something profound. In order for a reader to witness the growth of a character, however, the reader must have access to what a character is thinking throughout the story.
In my current novel, a young woman graduates from college and decides to travel across South America for a year and a half to discover her purpose in life. She meets a variety of people who share their lives with her, but in order for my reader to see how these people affect her growth, I discovered that I needed to include her thoughts about these people and the ideas they inspire. My struggle was how to transition from dialogue with them to her thoughts about them.
I read Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark, a story about two distinctly different elderly women who have known each other their whole lives. They experience lost love, death, and disappointment in the story, and Elliott Dark shows how each of them react to these experiences by revealing their personal thoughts.
One way the author accomplishes this is by including letters that Agnes writes to her deceased sister Elspeth. In these letters, Agnes describes her love for the little girl who lives next door and her horror at the girl’s accident. She also tells her sister about her daily writing goals and about philosophical predicaments she has: “It’s . . . hard after only writing fiction to tell the exact truth. I find myself embellishing [the past].” Through these letters, which will actually never be read, Agnes reveals her most intimate feelings, views, and perspectives. The reader gets a deep understanding of who Agnes is and how her past has shaped her personality.
The other main character, Polly, has three grown sons. The reader learns a lot about how she thinks when, in Chapter 32, she is having a conversation with her son James. In between the dialogue, Elliott Dark includes whole paragraphs about Polly’s reaction to James’s comments about his brother. The reader sees that Polly feels tense and that her impulse is to confess what she is thinking. Then, as the paragraph continues, the reader finds out that Polly has learned that she no longer has to reveal all her thoughts. She has devised a method of counting to three before answering her son’s question.
Without the exposure to these characters’ innermost thoughts, the reader couldn’t stay connected to the story.
Reason 5: How to use long sentences to inspire a reader
In English class, students learn about dependent and independent clauses, and simple, complex, and compound sentences. But in writing fiction, the best writers break formal grammar rules in order to help the reader focus on ideas or feelings instead of structure.
One of the writing techniques I’ve been practicing over the last few years is the long sentence, a sentence that can take the reader on a journey, reveal a character’s ambivalent thoughts, expose a character’s emotions, or share a uplifting moment. Long sentences can contain energy, propelling readers from the beginning to the end. In my current novel, when my main character and her hiking group climb a mountain and look down upon Machu Picchu, an Inca paradise high in the Andes Mountains, I want the reader to feel the hikers’ contemplative and emotional states.
To study how to write a long sentence that emphasized one idea with clarity, I searched my library to find some. Here’s one that I read in Stuart Little by E. B. B. White.
“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
Wow. This single sentence gives a reader not only a panorama of the town, but also a feeling of both peace and intrigue, a great invitation to the story.
Now here’s the one I included in my novel: “The hikers sat in silence for a long while, thinking over the last four days, their pilgrimage to this place that would never leave them, their growth in learning that the pilgrimage was all important, every moment of it, every hour of hiking, every relic of human existence, every conversation between them, with their guide, in gratitude for their porters and cooks, every new realization about themselves, their lives, other people they knew, the places they’ve been, the people they loved and lost, the understanding about the mistakes they made in the past, the gaffs made on the pilgrimage, their insecurities, their overconfidence, their lack of confidence, their lack of empathy, their absorption of other people’s energies and what that felt like, their worries, their frustrations, their selfishness, their judgments about others, their changes of heart, their letting go of things they couldn’t change, their memories of pain, their attempts to forgive people who hurt them, their new concept of who they had become and where they sat now looking at a heaven made by people who lived long ago.” My sentence conveys that the hikers understand their journey to Machu Picchu is more important than the destination itself.
I hope to continue writing long sentences to make my readers relaxed, inspired or merely breathless.
The point is, however, that my reading is an essential component of my writing. I spend my days anticipating what I will learn when I sit down to read a novel, and then I practice that skill with enthusiasm. Ah, the writer’s life.
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