The Elements of Active Prose

by Tahlia Newland

  On Sunday, Nadima’s day off, she hung out at home trying not to wish that she hadn’t told him not to see her again. She lay on the couch, aimlessly flicking pages of a novel that paled into insignificance next to the excitement of her life since Aarod had arrived in it.

  Here’s the same passage shown:

  Nadima lay on the couch in the living room, aimlessly flicking pages of a novel that paled into insignificance next to the excitement of her life since Aarod had arrived. Part of her wished she hadn’t told him not to see her again because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Now she had a whole Sunday with no work to distract her from the handsome face that kept swimming into her mind. He’s a murderer, she reminded herself, remembering the Magan corpses.

  One of them suddenly had Daniel’s face. The man’s haunting eyes were her brother’s, and the blood from the dagger wound was Daniel’s life force spilt by the murderer they never found. Whenever she thought like that, a sick feeling lodged in her stomach, but it still didn’t banish her longing for Aarod.

  Do you see the difference? I’ve written everything into one scene as if it is happening now and applied the elements outlined in the rest of this book.

  Descriptions

  I often see books that either have too little description or too much, and I suggest that you try to write descriptions as part of your first draft because it’s easier to cut description back at the editing stage than to add description in because you may not even notice that it’s lacking. Also, if you’re writing descriptions, you’re more likely to be ‘in the scene’ as you write.

  I mentioned in the Think in Scenes section how important it is to set each scene with some description, but that doesn’t mean that you start each scene with paragraphs that do nothing other than tell the reader what a place looks like. Check for this and, if you find it, break up the blocks of description by peppering it into the action, or make sure that it’s written in such a way that it adds to the characterisation, symbolism and atmosphere of your story.

  Don’t think of descriptions as something separate from the story. If you stop the action to give a paragraph or more of description, the reader who just wants to know what happens next will be tempted to skip it. Instead, write what the character notices while he or she is engaged in the action.

  This example is from Stalking Shadows, book two of my Diamond Peak series:

  Trees straggled along this stretch of the path, sparse crowned eucalypts peppered with the occasional beech. Ariel and Nick crossed a muddy stream on conveniently placed rocks, wound around enormous clumps of granite, and climbed continually on a gentle grade. Ariel glanced back across the open landscape at the Observatory tower fading into the distance and wondered if she’d ever see the delightful Englishman and his manor again. Up ahead, a black line of trees looking suitably gloomy marked the start of the Morbid Forest. Nick set a blistering pace and Ariel’s pack soon began to weigh heavily on her back.

  I could have just described this scene as if we were standing still looking around, but instead I have Nick and Ariel doing something. They are crossing, winding around, and climbing. Ariel also looks back and wonders something. Also note the words that reflect Ariel’s feelings about the landscape—conveniently placed, gentle, suitably gloomy.

  The following description of a new character in Lethal Inheritance happens while the man—Tynan, the delightful Englishman mentioned above—smiles, peers at his visitors and shakes hands. I describe his clothes, not when we first meet him, but when Ariel fears he might catch her gawking:

  The door opened before they knocked, revealing a tall, well-built man, probably in his late forties. He smiled through his trimmed beard, and bright blue eyes peered at them through round wire-framed glasses. Silver lightly streaked his long fair hair tied at the nape of his neck. He reached out a hand graced with large silver rings and shook Nick’s hand.

  ‘Welcome. So good to see you again, Nick.’ He turned to Ariel and gave a small bow. ‘And you must be Ariel, a warm welcome to you too.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Ariel shivered. Her lips felt slightly numb. She hoped Tynan hadn’t caught her gawking at his long, loose pale lemon shirt and tie-dyed multicoloured trousers.

  What a character chooses to notice and how they describe it tell us a lot about them; a cheerful person is more likely to notice the sunshine than the shadows for instance, but when miserable, that same person would be more likely to dwell on the deep shadows in a room. A teen uses different language to an adult, and the words they use indicate not just what they’re seeing, but also how they feel about it. For example, what is a ‘stunning Rueben’s original’ to the adult with the art history background is ‘some kind of old picture’ to the teen more interested in stealing the flat screen TV. So your descriptions can deepen your characters.

  Settings can also be used as symbols for characters, relationships and even plot complications. For example, a woman who keeps repeating the same mistakes, or whose life seems to be going nowhere, looks up at the Ferris wheel in the fair ground and feels like she’s on it. You don’t have to labour the links, just having them there adds to the depth of the writing. The quality of the light in a scene is important too; the way light falls on a character (sharp or soft), the colour (warm or cold), the general atmosphere of the environment (tense or relaxed), and the time of day all make the writing more evocative.

  And don’t limit your description to what a character sees, also show what they smell, feel and hear, and even what they taste if it’s relevant. However, don’t overdo it. The examples I’ve shown above are not representative of the writing all the way through the books. They are sections where I’m introducing a new scene or character and so some emphasis on description is required. Readers don’t need or want a full account. If I described the hands of everyone, every time a character shook hands, it would soon become tedious. Just describe the things that are relevant to the characters and the action. The things they would notice or that are important for the story.

  Here is an example of an overwritten description:

  She pushed through the creaky gate into a garden of tall shrubs pressed up against the wooden fence on one side and bordered by grass on the other. Terrified of being seen, she dropped onto her hands and knees and scrambled beneath the shrubs. The bark chip mulch pressed painfully into her bare knees and palms, and twigs caught her hair, but she continued crawling until she came to the corner of the fence separating the garden from the party next door, then she pressed her back against the wooden fence and tried to still her heaving chest and convince herself that none of this was real.

  What’s wrong with this? Nothing when taken out of context, but if it’s in the middle of a scene where the character is running from a pursuer and the reader just wants to know if she escapes or not, then it slows the action down. Some authors fall into the trap of writing their whole novel like this, with every action being described in detail, but the effect is not an immersive experience as they probably hoped, but a tedious one—can we just get to the point!

  What you need to ask is: is how she gets to the place where she rests important in this scene? Or is the important point that she does find somewhere to rest? Is the fact that there is grass on one side, a fence on the other and mulch beneath the shrubs important for the story? Does it matter that her hands and knees are sore and twigs grab her hair? Not in the context of the scene in Lethal Inheritance that I used for this example. I did consider writing it this way, until I realised that I needed to keep the story moving at this early stage of the book, and that the next part of the story where she watches a demon feeding off the people at the party is much more important and really does need a detailed description. Had such a key scene followed a passage written like this, it may have lost its impact in all the words.

  This is how the above scene appears in Lethal Inheritance:

  She ducked into the shadowy garden next door to the party, flopped to the ground behind the wooden fence and tried to st
ill her heaving chest and convince herself that none of this was real.

  This is the same action pared back to its essentials, to only what the reader needs to know. The word ‘shadowy’ gives the feel of the garden without dwelling on its appearance and layout, something that actually isn’t that important. What’s important to the character and, therefore, to the reader is that she ‘flopped to the ground behind the wooden fence’, presumably safe for now. Leaving the description sparse means that the next revelation in the story stands out:

  She failed. On one count at least. Her breathing slowed, but even after squeezing her eyes shut and opening them again, she still found herself in her pyjamas tucked under a bush in a garden next door to a noisy party. She swatted at a mosquito that buzzed near her ear, and a sting on her bare arm proved she was awake; but what she saw when she looked through a hole in the fence proved that, if this was reality, it had irrevocably changed.

  People filled the Thompson’s backyard and every one of them glowed with multicoloured light. Clothes, flesh and blood, bones and organs had become ethereal, their solidity overpowered by the light that streamed through their corporeal forms from some internal source. It seemed as if the light was their real body and their physical one a mere illusion.

  I mentioned the mosquito because it not only proves she’s awake but also represents what she wants to do with the demon pursuing her—swat it away. That detail also creates a pause here—note that the reader now knows that she’s ‘tucked under a bush in a garden next door to a noisy party’ without me having to describe the process of crawling beneath it. She’s safe, so now we can take a breath before going on to the next discovery.

  This is how we can play with the pacing by the amount of detail we put into our descriptions. Don’t bog action scenes down with detailed description and thought processes. At the same time, don’t leave either of these things out completely. Each character and each scene needs a description, but the character description can be as simple and integrated into the action as this one from Stalking Shadows:

  ‘What business do you have on Lord Carvell’s lands?’ the brown-haired, leather-clad man, who appeared to be the leader, asked.

  And the scene setting can be as integrated into the action as this—also from the same chapter:

  When they drew close to the high stone wall of Carvell village, the captain slowed to a trot, then to a walk as they passed through the gate into the village. He led them along narrow cobbled streets past stone houses a great deal more ancient than those at the Observatory. Ariel loved the colour of their pale terracotta roofs and marvelled at how the builders had made the walls by fitting together rocks and stones of all shapes and sizes, like a jigsaw puzzle.

  On a micro level, try to write your descriptions without using ‘with’, ‘that’ and ‘had’. These words aren’t very interesting and can make your descriptions clunky and, if overused, amateurish. We can’t avoid these words entirely, and to do so would be unnatural and unnecessary. The point is to try not to rely on them. If you try to write descriptions without such words, you’ll find your descriptions become more interesting and lively.

  Example:

  Dull:

  Sally was tall and had long, messy blond hair with red streaks.

  Lively:

  Sally’s blond hair, streaked with red, hung in rat tails around her shoulders. She towered over George.

  Be Specific

  Be specific as much as possible. Vague words that have a variable basis for comparison like ‘big’, ‘huge’, ‘expensive’, ‘cheap’, ‘plain’, ‘old’ and so on mean different things to different people. Expensive to you and expensive to me may be two totally different things. I’d rather have ‘a diamond the size of my fist’ than ‘a massive diamond’, or ‘a hand-tailored cashmere suit’ than ‘a really expensive suit’.

  Being specific also gives a much clearer visual image to the reader, and that’s the whole point of descriptions.

  World Building

  World building is usually considered to be something only authors of speculative fiction need to concern themselves with, but that isn’t true. Historical fiction writers have to build a picture of a world in times gone past, and those writing about a contemporary world, though they have less to build, still need to make sure that the setting, both physical and cultural, rings true.

  Whether it’s Victorian England, a planet of technologically advanced spiders or a New York ghetto, the language of the characters, their values and the way their world functions around them must be consistent, either with known facts or within the imaginary world.

  I’ve read several historical fiction books that fall down because the characters use noticeably modern language. If you’re doing a time travel theme, the traveller from the future would have different speech patterns and values from those around him or her. And if you’re writing about impoverished Americans, the world you create will be different than if you’re writing about the privileged, even though both take place in America.

  The first thing is to be clear on the society’s values, religions, environment and history, and in addition for speculative fiction, the laws of physics that govern the world. If magic is possible, for example, how is it done and what are its limitations? If the planet has two suns, what effect does that have on daylight? Would it have a night time at all? These things must be logical and consistent.

  For each event that transcends the laws of physics with which we are familiar, you have to ask yourself: if this can happen, then what else can logically happen and do I want that to be able to happen? If James can do magic, we’ll assume that he can do it anywhere and anytime unless you provide some parameters. Without limitations, you’ll run into problems with believability.

  For example, in one of the early drafts of Lethal Inheritance, I had a ‘noble one’ transform into a ‘radiant body of light’ and rescue the heroine from reeds that were trying to strangle her. My husband read it and pointed out that if someone in a radiant body could have an effect on the physical world then the rest of the story was redundant. Why, he asked, couldn’t a noble one just pick her up and fly her to the top of the mountain? Had I left it in, it would have undermined the whole story. I had to change the parameters of the world so that couldn’t happen.

  The second thing to consider is how and when to impart the information the reader needs to understand and imagine the world. For contemporary and historical fiction, the reader knows enough that they can read on quite happily without you having to lay out all the specifics that you consider important to the story. The details will come out at the appropriate time in the story.

  For speculative fiction, it’s quite a bit trickier.

  Avoid (especially early on in the book):

  info dumps—a paragraph or more that delivers information in an obvious and cumbersome way.

  introducing lots of strange names and species in a short space of time.

  details of a complex system—politics, religion and so on—all laid out in one chunk.

  Instead, find a balance between the reader finding out the details as the story progresses and making sure there is sufficient information that they can see what’s going on in a physical and cultural setting.

  It’s not easy to find this balance, especially in your first speculative fiction story, but the question to ask yourself is: what does the reader need to know at this point to make sense of the story? To answer the question properly, you need to step back and pretend that you have never read the book before. Not an easy thing to do! Make sure you ask your beta readers this question too. Also ask them if the world you’ve created makes sense.

  Characters

  Good characterisation is vital for the success of a story. You need your readers to relate to your characters, to like them and want them to succeed. Readers should root for your central character, and you need that to happen quickly.

  First, make your characters complex. Give them faults, issues or weaknesses. Some pe
ople compose a character description before they write their first draft, others just write and the character develops as they proceed. Whichever way you do it, search for their vulnerabilities; we all have them and whenever you expose them in one of your characters, you deepen your portrayal of the character and increase the reader’s identification with them. Why? Because it makes the character real.

  A word of warning here, though—don’t make them unlikeable. A character flaw could be something that makes them whiney or bitchy, but readers hate such characters, so keep these traits for secondary characters. You don’t want your characters perfect, but you don’t want them to be annoying either. If readers hate your central character, they’ll hate your book.

  Second, don’t tell the reader the history and personality of a character when you introduce them. Such info dumps will mark you as an amateur. Let the information that readers really need to know about a character come out at the points where it’s relevant as the story unfolds. A sentence or two here and there is much better than a chunk of information in one place.

  Also, it’s very rare that the reader needs to know everything that you know about a character, so don’t feel you have to tell them everything. Readers will infer things about them and their past from conversations, actions and thoughts. You don’t have to spell it all out.

  And show us the character’s qualities, don’t tell us about them. Let the reader find out that Joe is a slob by describing the dirty clothes thrown on his bedroom floor. They’ll realise that Betty is brave when they see her dive into a flooded stream to rescue a child, and they’ll realise that Tom cares for his mother by the things he says to her and the way he reacts to what she says.