Punctuation orders thought and clarifies communication. There are rules for its use, which I will leave to our Style Maven to share. I'm headed into more creative territory, where writers also view punctuation as a series of pauses and stops that can order a reader’s emotional response to the work. Noah Lukeman wrote a book about it: A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation . Think punctuation is too dry to hold your interest? Think again. This book kept me reading until its final period, which comes shortly after this insight: If you cultivate awareness and are willing to learn, punctuation will perpetually teach you something new about yourself. As we learned throughout the book, punctuation reveals the writer, and revelation is the first step toward self-awareness. If you are willing to listen to what the page is telling you about yourself, and humble enough to change, you will become a better writer. I find this claim irresistible. Here are three excerpt...

When considering how to open their stories, authors too often ask themselves: What information do I want to feed out to the reader at the start?  This approach is fraught with problems. If you are a writer, you undoubtedly already know that we change our minds about this a lot, until our openings become the most often-rewritten aspect of a manuscript. Make no mistake: opening a novel can be tricky, and the effort deserves all of the time and attention you are willing to apply. But a surer approach can be found with a different question: What is it my reader wants from my opening?  The basic answer: He wants to gain orientation to the story while questions are raised. These questions create little mysteries that tip him into the story. Since this technique works regardless of genre, let’s look at the ways a few disparate authors successfully employ it—with only their first three sentences. The Salt God’s Daughter  by Ilie Ruby We ran wild at night,...

In some novels, setting can provide the beating heart of the story. It is to a writer's advantage to recognize this: a story that couldn’t just happen anywhere—that is specific to one location—is a story that will feel distinctive to the reader, whether that reader be agent, editor, or end consumer. In her novel,  A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton offers up many great examples of how to bring a setting to life. It is the story of Alice, a Kansas farm wife overwhelmed by the demands of parenting—yet while charged with the additional task of watching her friend’s children, the youngest toddles off and drowns in their pond. Let’s look at several passages to see how Hamilton does it. In the opening, she ties the description of Alice's farmer-husband to his work setting: I had never said out loud a little joke I used to say to myself now and again: Everywhere that barn goes, Howard, you are sure to be close behind.  ~and~ His was a musky smell, as if the source of a m...

In his novel A Long Way Down , Nick Hornby uses four different points of view to explore the ramifications of one shared incident. On New Year’s Eve, these characters encounter one another on the roof of the most famous suicide tower in London. Ultimately they talk one another off the ledge and into a pact that will delay the decision for six weeks, until the second most popular night for suicides—Valentine’s Day. If any of them still want to die that day, they will honor those wishes. Despite their huge differences, the characters spend a lot of time together. Check them out: Maureen is a conservative middle-aged woman who has had intercourse once in her life—with a fiancé who then left her—and that act produced Matty, a brain-damaged son who even as an adult cannot speak or interact with her in any way. Maureen has no life; all of her time is spent caring for her son. And once you have a child like Matty you can’t help but feel, That’s it! That’s all my bad luck, a whole life...

Sometimes novels come up short. It may happen to you. Before beefing up the story with new characters and subplots, however, make sure you’ve tended to its depth. You might want to follow this simple plan: Seek out the “hot” story moments worthy of further mining (they will look suspiciously like emotional turning points). Apply added word count there.  We readers want to linger in emotionally rich moments. Such turning points are the purpose of the fiction—we've suffered along while extreme pressure is brought to bear on the protagonist, and reveling in her moments of indelible change, both small and large, is our reward. To make that change believable the reader needs access to the inner torment of the point-of-view character. Real change never results from hasty decisions—the protagonist needs to be wrestling with some big issue that will ultimately reveal her true character. In the gothic novel The Thirteenth Tale , here’s how author Diane Setterfield pulls off a lon...

It was Christmas afternoon, my older son was curled up on the couch with a book I’d given him, and he wouldn’t stop giggling. The book was You Might be a Zombie and Other Bad News, from the editors of Cracked.com , and I'd known as soon as I saw the title that the book would be a perfect gift for my son. I hadn't necessarily planned to purchase anything the fall day I'd been browsing through my local bookstore, but a quick flip through confirmed the notion, and soon thereafter my Christmas shopping season had officially begun. This son is 24 and I’ve read aloud to him his whole life long. A fringe benefit is that he also likes to read aloud to me. So when I asked him what was so funny, he started reading from a chapter called “Four Things Your Mom Said Were Healthy That Can Kill You.” The countdown was in reverse order and began with #4: Exercising. He read: Exercise is good for you. Exercise is hard. Therefore the more you exercise, the better off your body will be...

Language lovers, grammar geeks, and students of story structure will glean added satisfaction from the tale Roland Merullo spins in his most recent novel, The Talk-Funny Girl , in which Merullo uses language itself as a barometer of character change. His protagonist may bring to mind flower girl Eliza Doolittle, whose stumbling block in George Bernard Shaw ’s play Pygmalion was the way her Cockney accent revealed her working class roots. But Merullo’s Marjorie has even worse problems: she knowingly mangles syntax. It’s page seven before this seventeen-year-old girl, raised in rural New Hampshire, speaks a sentence at all: “I come for a try for paying work,” she says, keeping it short and simple so as not to expose her quirks of speech. But we have already picked up the problem. By the time we hear her speak to her parents at home, an excerpted exchange includes sentences like: “Mister Warner told he might have a work to give.” “Look on me in my eyes, you Majie you….Might?” “Probly wi...

Authors can get away with breaking almost any writing rule if they do it artfully, intentionally, and without pulling the reader from the fictive dream. Today I bust Andre Dubus III for breaking his own rule—to wonderful effect—in his novel The House of Sand and Fog . At the outset of his book, Dubus sets this rule: the story will be told in alternating first person accounts limited to Behrani, an Iranian colonel who lost his money and stature in his native Iran and must start over in the United States, and Kathy, an alcoholic house cleaner. The two come together by administrative error when Kathy’s house goes up for sheriff’s sale for unpaid taxes, and Behrani purchases it for a song. The colonel is thrilled to provide a home for his family with his meager resources; Kathy is devastated to lose her inheritance and only connection to her deceased father. Here are the points of view Dubus adopts to tell his tale, pulled from each character’s first words: First page The fat one, the rad...

In her recent post on Constructing Your First Chapter , Elsa Neal wrote, “The first chapter should begin just before a pivotal event in your protagonist’s life. This is something that forces a change or a decision.” Sound advice, to which Christopher Hudson sent a witty retort: "Now you tell me! Perhaps I shouldn't have started my last book with, 'When I was born ...'" Today, I want to bust Leif Enger for doing just that, in one of my all-time favorite novel openings. His Peace Like a River begins: From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and the air to fill them with—given circumstances, you might presume, for an American baby of the twentieth century. With one sentence Enger plunges us into the story of his narrator, Reuben Land. The words “all I wanted” make character motivation clear from the start. In the second paragraph we learn that Reuben’s lungs refused to “kick in,” providing what Elsa would call a "pivotal event,...