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| The Single Most Important Element of Your Story |
| Rob W. Walker |
| The single most important element of your story is not the most important element of your story; that is to say, all the important elements of your story need to be treated as the single most important element of your story. Do I need to repeat that or can you just go back and re-read it, save me space here? The Voice above all must be consistent, just as your choice |
| of words, control of weak qualifiers, control of adverbs and adjectives, down to your grammatical skill all impacts on VOICE. The sound of the bell your narration and dialogue ring in the reader’s head. The difference between sounding wishy-washy or political mish-mash sounding as opposed to an assured, authentic, absolute voice that relies on absolutes over qualifiers, and relies on strong active voice over weak passive voice. These are the crucibles about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you or fail to utilize, but as small as the choice between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, is about extremely important elements –all of which BECOME your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset and is normally willing to follow it so long as it remains consistent and consistently believable. So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you have made from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt. All good writing relies on the reader falling for your narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, it is often because you and all writers are like the trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each at the end of long sticks. Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element but they all culminate in the overall effect your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. What he hears and pictures comes about as a result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—the author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice, and providing Kodak moments in the reader’s head that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like images. We call this simile and metaphor and detail, as in a Name is a photo in the mind as a Number is an instamatic shot in the mind. Verb choice then creates style and voice; and if we choose verbs that fire off shots of photographic moments as in SLAM, divorced, cuddled, crammed, leapt, jarred, frightened over the weak helping verbs as in the door WAS slamming, they were thinking about maybe getting a divorce, had been cuddled, was cramming, was about to leap, was feeling a bit frightened, we REDUCE the photo or blur it considerably and certainly helping and passive voice verbs, such as was, SLOW the action and the firing of the photo in the brain of the reader. There is/was/has been no more insidious word in the English language that insinuates itself on sentences like a parasitic leech than the verb to be, and in particular the word WAS. Take a moment and picture for me a was in your head; hell define the word was in the manner you might define any action/active verb and you cannot. Picture was now in your mind and tell me what you WAS seeing? Do the same for throw/threw/thrown or torched. He torched up his language when Fred entered--is far more photographic and Strong in Voice than is this: He was in the process of torching up his language when Fred was thinking about maybe entering the room. AND yes Fred, go to the head of the class. One Style or Voice is to the point, pointed, photogenic and active voice, while the second lacks control, hard to determine point, less than photogenic and entirely passive and riddled with WASes that often beget more Qualifying. A storyteller who peppers his tales with qualifiers and passives cuts his own throat and is easily the example to point to in an exercise for what not to do in fiction and dramatic writing. But do I, Rob Walker, practice what I preach? Damn straight. Take a look at these three examples taken all from works in progress: From Psi Blue: FBI Headquarters Secret Psychic Detection Lab modern day… Special Agent Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa sat clothed in a virgin white terry robe, in the lotus position, electrodes attached and grounded to the open air copper pipe pyramid which she had herself designed to enhance her psychic projections and astral journeys. |