Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  The stories about my childhood, the ones that stuck, that got told and retold at dinner tables, to dates as I sat by red-faced, to my own children by my father later on, are stories of running away.

  So begins Anna Quindlen’s memoir How Reading Changed My Life, a lead sentence with thirty-one words between subject and verb. When the topic is more technical, the typical effect of separation is confusion, exemplified by this clumsy effort:

  A bill that would exclude tax income from the assessed value of new homes from the state education funding formula could mean a loss of revenue for Chesapeake County schools.

  Eighteen words separate the subject, “bill,” from its weak verb, “could mean,” a fatal flaw that turns what could be an important civic story into gibberish.

  If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later. As I just did.

  Kelley Benham, a former student of mine, reached for this tool when called on to write the obituary of Terry Schiavo, the woman whose long illness and controversial death became the center of an international debate about the end of life:

  Before the prayer warriors massed outside her window, before gavels pounded in six courts, before the Vatican issued a statement, before the president signed a midnight law and the Supreme Court turned its head, Terri Schiavo was just an ordinary girl, with two overweight cats, an unglamorous job and a typical American life.

  By delaying the main subject and verb, the writer tightens the tension between a celebrated cause and an ordinary girl.

  This variation works only when most sentences branch to the right, a pattern that creates meaning, momentum, and literary power. “The brilliant room collapses,” writes Carol Shields in The Stone Diaries,

  leaving a solid block of darkness. Only her body survives, and the problem of what to do with it. It has not turned to dust. A bright, droll, clarifying knowledge comes over her at the thought of her limbs and organs transformed to biblical dust or even funereal ashes. Laughable.

  And admirable.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read through the New York Times or your local newspaper with a pencil in hand. Mark the locations of subjects and verbs.

  2. Do the same with examples of your writing.

  3. Do the same with a draft you are working on now.

  4. The next time you struggle with a sentence, rewrite it by placing subject and verb at the beginning.

  5. For dramatic variation, write a sentence with subject and verb near the end.

  TOOL 2

  Order words for emphasis.

  Place strong words at the beginning and at the end.

  Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style advises the writer to “place emphatic words in a sentence at the end,” an example of its own rule. The most emphatic word appears at “the end.” Application of this tool will improve your prose in a flash.

  For any sentence, the period acts as a stop sign. That slight pause in reading magnifies the final word, an effect intensified at the end of a paragraph, where final words often adjoin white space. In a column of type, a reader’s eyes are likewise drawn to the words next to the white space. Those words shout, “Look at me!”

  Emphatic word order helps the writer solve the thorniest problems. Consider this opening for a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The writer, Larry King, must make sense of three powerful elements: the death of a United States senator, the collision of aircraft, and a tragedy at an elementary school:

  A private plane carrying U.S. Sen. John Heinz collided with a helicopter in clear skies over Lower Merion Township yesterday, triggering a fiery, midair explosion that rained burning debris over an elementary school playground.

  Seven people died: Heinz, four pilots and two first-grade girls at play outside the school. At least five people on the ground were injured, three of them children, one of whom was in critical condition with burns.

  Flaming and smoking wreckage tumbled to the earth around Merion Elementary School on Bowman Avenue at 12:19 p.m., but the gray stone building and its occupants were spared. Frightened children ran from the playground as teachers herded others outside. Within minutes, anxious parents began streaming to the school in jogging suits, business clothes, house-coats. Most were rewarded with emotional reunions, amid the smell of acrid smoke.

  On most days, any of the three elements would lead the paper. Combined, they form an overpowering news tapestry, one that reporter and editor must handle with care. What matters most in this story? The death of a senator? A spectacular crash? The deaths of children?

  In the first paragraph, the writer chooses to mention the senator and the crash up front, and saves “elementary school playground” for the end. Throughout the passage, subjects and verbs come early—like the locomotive and coal car of an old railroad train—saving other interesting words for the end—like a caboose.

  Consider also the order in which the writer lists the anxious parents, who arrive at the school in “jogging suits, business clothes, house-coats.” Any other order weakens the sentence. Placing “house-coats” at the end builds the urgency of the situation: parents racing from their homes dressed as they are.

  Putting strong stuff at the beginning and end helps writers hide weaker stuff in the middle. In the passage above, notice how the writer hides the less important news elements—the who and the when (“Lower Merion Township yesterday”)—in the middle of the lead. This strategy also works for attributing quotations:

  “It was one horrible thing to watch,” said Helen Amadio, who was walking near her Hampden Avenue home when the crash occurred. “It exploded like a bomb. Black smoke just poured.”

  Begin with a good quote. Hide the attribution in the middle. End with a good quote.

  Some teachers refer to this as the 2-3-1 tool of emphasis, where the most emphatic words or images go at the end, the next most emphatic at the beginning, and the least emphatic in the middle, but that’s too much calculus for my brain. Here’s my simplified version: put your best stuff near the beginning and at the end; hide weaker stuff in the middle.

  Amy Fusselman provides an example with the first sentence of her novel, The Pharmacist’s Mate: “Don’t have sex on a boat unless you want to get pregnant.” The most intriguing words come near the beginning and at the end. Gabriel García Márquez uses this strategy at the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude to dazzling effect: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

  What applies to the sentence also applies to the paragraph, as Alice Sebold demonstrates in this passage: “In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.” That final word resonates with such pain and power that Sebold turns it into the title of her memoir, Lucky.

  These tools of emphasis are as old as rhetoric itself. Near the end of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, a character announces to Macbeth: “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” This astonishing example of the power of emphatic word order is followed by one of the darkest passages in all of literature. Macbeth says:

  She should have died hereafter;

  There would have been a time for such a word.

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury,

  Signifying nothing.

  The poet has one great advantage over those who write prose. He knows where the line will end. He gets to emphasize a word at the end of a line, a sentence, a paragraph. We prose writers make do with the sentence and the paragraph—signifying something.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and study emphatic word order.

  2. With a pencil in hand, read an essay you admire. Circle the first and last words in each paragraph.

  3. Do the same for recent examples of your work. Revise sentences so that powerful and interesting words, which may be hiding in the middle, appear near the beginning and at the end.

  4. Survey your friends to get the names of their dogs. Write these in alphabetical order. Imagine that this list appears in a story. Play with the order of the names. Which should go first? Which last? Why?

  TOOL 3

  Activate your verbs.

  Strong verbs create action, save words, and reveal the players.

  President John F. Kennedy testified that a favorite book was From Russia with Love, the 1957 James Bond adventure by Ian Fleming. This choice revealed more about JFK than we knew at the time and created a cult of 007 that persists to this day.

  The power of Fleming’s prose flows from active verbs. In sentence after sentence, page after page, England’s favorite secret agent, or his beautiful companion, or his villainous adversary, performs the action of the verb (the emphasis is mine):

  Bond climbed the few stairs and unlocked his door and locked and bolted it behind him. Moonlight filtered through the curtains. He walked across and turned on the pink-shaded lights on the dressing-table. He stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom and stood for a few minutes under the shower.… He cleaned his teeth and gargled with a sharp mouthwash to get rid of the taste of the day and turned off the bathroom light and went back into the bedroom.…

  Bond gave a shuddering yawn. He let the curtains drop back into place. He bent to switch off the lights on the dressing-table. Suddenly he stiffened and his heart missed a beat.

  There had been a nervous giggle from the shadows at the back of the room. A girl’s voice said, “Poor Mister Bond. You must be tired. Come to bed.”

  In writing this passage, Fleming followed the advice of his countryman George Orwell, who wrote of verbs: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

  I learned the distinction between active and passive voice as early as fifth grade. Thank you, Sister Katherine William. I failed to learn, until much later, why that distinction mattered. But let me first correct a popular misconception. The voice of verbs (active or passive) has nothing to do with the tense of verbs. Writers sometimes ask, “Is it ever OK to write in the passive tense?” Tense defines action within time—when the verb happens—the present, past, or future. Voice defines the relationship between subject and verb—who does what.

  • If the subject performs the action of the verb, we call the verb active.

  • If the subject receives the action of the verb, we call the verb passive.

  • A verb that is neither active nor passive is a linking verb, a form of the verb to be.

  All verbs, in any tense, fit into one of those three baskets.

  News writers reach often for the simple active verb. Consider this New York Times lead by Carlotta Gall on the suicidal desperation of Afghan women:

  Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.

  Both Fleming and Gall use active verbs to power their narratives, but notice an important difference between them. While Fleming uses the past tense to narrate his adventure, Gall prefers the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting—right now—beside the poor woman in her grief.

  Both Fleming and Gall avoid verb qualifiers that attach themselves to standard prose like barnacles to the hull of a ship:

  sort of

  tend to

  kind of

  must have

  seemed to

  could have

  used to

  begin to

  Scrape away these crustaceans during revision, and the ship of your prose will glide toward meaning with speed and grace.

  The earnest writer can overuse a writing tool. If you shoot up your verbs with steroids, you risk creating an effect that poet Donald Hall derides as “false color,” the stuff of adventure magazines and romance novels. Temperance controls the impulse to overwrite.

  In The Joy Luck Club, novelist Amy Tan exercises exquisite control, using strong verbs to depict the authentic color of emotional truth:

  And in my memory I can still feel the hope that beat in me that night. I clung to this hope, day after day, night after night, year after year. I would watch my mother lying in her bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa. And yet I knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them. I still heard Mrs. Sorci and Teresa having terrible fights, but I saw something else.… I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable.

  Ian Fleming’s verbs describe external action and adventure; Amy Tan’s verbs capture internal action and emotion. But action can also be intellectual, in the force and power of an argument, as Albert Camus demonstrates in The Rebel:

  The metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe.

  Notice that even with all the active verbs in that passage, Camus does not pass on the passive when he needs it (“he is frustrated”), which brings us to the next tool.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Verbs fall into three categories: active, passive, and forms of the verb to be. Review your writing and circle verb forms with a pencil. In the margins, categorize each verb.

  2. Convert passive and to be verbs into the active. For example, “It was her observation that” can become “She observed.”

  3. In your own work and in the newspaper, search for verb qualifiers and see what happens when you cut them.

  4. Experiment with both voice and tense. Find a passage you have written in the active voice and in the past tense. Change the verbs to the present tense and consider the effect. Does it seem more immediate?

  5. I described three uses of the active voice: to create outward action, to express inner or emotional action, and to energize an argument. Look for examples of all three in your reading and for opportunities to use them in your writing.

  TOOL 4

  Be passive-aggressive.

  Use passive verbs to showcase the “victim” of action.

  So the gold standard for writing advice is this: use active verbs. Those three words have been uttered in countless writing workshops with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?

  Check out that last paragraph. In the first clause, I use a form of the verb to be, in this case “is.” In the next sentence, I use the passive voice: “have been uttered.” In the final sentence, I resort to another form of to be, in this case “are.” My point is that you can create acceptable prose, from time to time, without active verbs.

  Why, then, does voice matter? It matters because of the different effects active, passive, and to be verbs have on the reader and listener. I’ll call on John Steinbeck again to describe this true-life encounter in North Dakota (the emphasis is mine):

  Presently I saw a man leaning on a two-strand barbed-wire fence, the wires fixed not to posts but to crooked tree limbs stuck in the ground. The man wore a dark hat, and jeans and long
jacket washed palest blue with lighter places at knees and elbows. His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare and his lips scaly as snake-skin. A .22 rifle leaned against the fence beside him and on the ground lay a little heap of fur and feathers—rabbits and small birds. I pulled up to speak to him, saw his eyes wash over Rocinante, sweep up the details, and then retire into their sockets. And I found I had nothing to say to him… so we simply brooded at each other. (from Travels with Charley)

  I count thirteen verbs in that passage, twelve active and one passive, a ratio George Orwell would admire. The litany of active verbs heats up the scene, even though not much happens. The active verbs reveal who is doing what. The author sees a man. The man wears a hat. The author pulls up to talk with him. They brood at each other. Even inanimate objects perform action. The rifle leans against the fence. Dead animals lie on the ground.

  Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: “His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare.” Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb.

  That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action. When columnist Jeff Elder described the extinction of an American species, the passenger pigeon, in the Charlotte Observer, he used passive verbs to paint the birds as victims: “Enormous roosts were gassed from trees.… They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car.… In one human generation, America’s most populous native bird was wiped out.” The birds do nothing. They are done unto.