Pet Peeve of the Week: One-sentence Paragraphs
Posted by: Lisa in Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and BoltsA new weekly feature in which I can be as peevish as I want, because I’m being up front about it! So don’t send me any “That’s so nitpicky and peevish” comments. And I do plan to get nitpicky. But I will always point out my bugaboos along with a reminder that while you should be aware of hazardous territory, you can and should venture into it if your story warrants it.
Two books I recently edited inspired today’s pet peeve: the overuse of the very short paragraph.
For the record, one of those books has not been placed with a publisher, and one has. One is “commercial”; one “literary.” Both, however, could be described as mystery/thrillers. In that genre, the one-sentence paragraph runs rampant.
It’s staccato!
It’s punchy!
Readers are left hanging. They want to know…
What will happen next?
Something very, very dramatic.
A sentence so full of drama it needs its own paragraph.
Raise your hand if you found that riveting. No? Annoying, you say? Short paragraphs can, of course, be effective, particularly when the writer is working to create a suspenseful or unsettling tone. Long paragraphs envelop the reader in a dense, complex labyrinth of words. A single sentence followed by a break is startling. It draws attention to its content. But only when it appears unexpectedly and with good reason.
The information in that sentence has to be pretty important to merit its own paragraph. But I see too many passages that read like this:
She heard a noise and turned around.
Ken stood in the doorway.
A moment of silence.
“How’ve you been, Tara?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
That kind of choppiness means the writer is lazily and artificially trying to create drama where the story itself fails to do so. It should be two paragraphs, tops. Instead, every paragraph becomes the sentence who cried “wolf.” If half the paragraphs in your novel take up only one line, what do you do with a sentence that really contains some drama? Give it its own page?
This style also results in one of two problems: (a) too many dull dialogue tags (”he said,” “she said”), or (b) confusion as to which character is speaking. If (b) happens, you’re dead. You’ve lost us. Paragraphs, among many other things, create context for dialogue, eliminating the need for repetitive pronouns whose only purpose is to identify who just said what.
The best writing varies both its sentence length and its paragraph length, so readers aren’t lulled into a rhythm (i.e., bored). They’re kept on their toes and genuinely affected when something different happens stylistically. Bad action movie directors think that squeezing as many brief shots as possible into every scene is the most effective way to create excitement or suspense. But after two hours, all it has created is a confused headache. The best filmmakers—and the best writers—have a huge repertoire of tools and know when to use each one.
And when not to.
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April 10th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I wonder if I agree with you. If you had written this fifty years ago, I most definitely would have agreed. But fifty years ago, the reading audience hadn’t grown up on thirty-second sound bites, action movies, and snippets from Youtube. This is not a criticism of your comment as much as a question of what today’s reading audience is most comfortable with.
While I have to agree that the examples you gave were dull and vacuous, I believe these examples were more a product of bad writing than stylistic mistakes. They would have been dull if they had been the only short paragraphs in their respective books.
And, while I agree that I wouldn’t want to read an entire book of staccato paragraphs, I’m not sure this holds true universally for contemporary readers, or the readers for which these books were aimed. Apparently, some publisher thought one of them was appropriate for some audience.
At the other end of the spectrum, look how many overly-wordy books Melville and Michener have sold. I can’t force myself to read either of them, but there is a huge audience out there who would argue that I’m missing something.
Remove publishers from the process, and literature is both fluid and democratic.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:58 am
I believe that today’s audience will read good writing, whatever its style or rhythm. I’ve never bought the whole “people today have no attention span” argument. The media may believe that, but the media underestimates people. And that goes for publishers, too… though I’m not sure we can remove them from the process, unfortunately.
If younger generations were comfortable only with the equivalent of snippets and sound bites, J. K. Rowling wouldn’t be buying small countries with the profits from her 800-page children’s books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy would have bombed. And Oprah wouldn’t have been able to convince her viewers to read Faulkner.
In fact, I just read somewhere that people who get their news online (who, I assume, tend to be younger) are more likely to finish an entire article than people who read newspapers.
My examples were dull and vacuous, but that was part of the point: that too many writers try to disguise otherwise unimaginative writing with this particular style. It’s not the style itself that’s inherently bad; it’s the overuse and misuse of it. I was imitating, without exaggeration, some of the stuff I’ve been editing lately. If more substance is there, and this style works with it, that’s great.
The best solution for most writers, as I say, is to keep things varied.
April 10th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Yeah. . .and what was your favorite book of 2006 again?
April 10th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
It was The Road, Kuul A my friend, which contains the following paragraph and many others like it: