Guiding the Eye
Unlike other narrative media, I don't really have much control over how fast you consume my story. We all read at our own pace, and you are free to put down/get distracted from/fall asleep during my book at any time. You're not locked in a movie theater, there's no steady beat, so how can I have any influence on when something is especially dramatic or try to force you to take a beat and let a moment or line of dialogue sink in?
Well, there are a few tools.
One is using negative space. What is that? Blankness, where words aren't. Isolating a sentence/word by itself makes it stand out as important, and also forces the reader to move their eyes, giving just that little breathing space to whatever I wrote. I try not to use big blocks of text in my books, and one reason is that by breaking it up I can give it varying 'shapes'. Due to the way ebooks work, I don't have control over the size or font you use, so I can't shape it deliberately, but I can prevent it from becoming one monolith, which helps it go by faster and draws the eye to things that are important or emphasizes who is talking/doing.
Contrary to what we might intuit, we (English speakers, at least), don't read words individually, one by one. When we read quickly, we take in the shapes and contours of words and derive meaning from that! Cool, right? (Also why some typos are so hard to catch, we literally don't see them sometimes.) It's why we find it more tiring when accents are written out (and why I chose not to write out Millie's), the 'shape' of the words are altered and we have to focus more. Paragraphs are the same way. If it's all lumped together, it must be connected; it's also easier to get 'lost' in, and long paragraphs also tend to use longer sentences, which can slow down the pace of reading. We understand this subconsciously, so by breaking them up and using negative space, I can draw your eye to the next line and the next--combining this with shorter, punchier sentences can speed things up!
A tool I use to draw emphasis or force a mental beat on you (fear my power! Haha!) in dialogue is being judicious where I put the 'said'. If a character says something important, and I want it to sit for a moment, I put the 'she said' right after it, even if it's in the middle of a much longer thought. Training sentences together makes them all feel equally important:
"No, I don't think that's a very good idea," she said.
"No," she said. "I don't think that's a very good idea."
Which 'no' sounds more emphatic? The second one, right? Especially if that character is normally shy or slow to volunteer an opinion, by putting the 'she said' there, it gives an extra beat for it to sink in that 'wow, she made a decision!'
Another one is sentence length and punctuation. Have you ever read a whole paragraph only to realize at the end that 'holy sh*t, that was one sentence?' Yeah. Not always great, but sometimes useful! It's kinda slow, but can also be exhausting. If I don't give you time to take a mental 'breath', then you might feel as tired as the character if I rattle off a dozen things she had to do that morning before she got a chance to eat anything. (Conversely, this can backfire; it may just make you wonder if the editor took a phone call at that point or something. Be careful with this one.) But a string of short sentences can make things go faster. This is used a lot in action scenes (or sex scenes, which are the action scenes of romance), it keeps the eye moving and can build up a rhythm by use of periods. (A bunch of commas don't make you stop.)
That said, I use a lot of commas, even if they aren't grammatically necessary #teamoxfordcomma in order to control, uh, eye flow? I guess? Again, I have so few tools to control speed that I will take what I can get. Semicolons, parentheses, ellipses, em-dashes, I sprinkle in a lot of punctuation that are a bit disruptive to the flow of things, and can even make you fill in the blanks...
Like that. Thought about it a second before you came down here, didn't you? An ellipses + white space can be very effective, you just can't abuse it. It can come off as pretentious and stupid, so you have to be really careful.
"My dog pooped in the living room..."
Okay?
"But if she wasn't there that night, then who...?"
Oh, sh*t!
A lot of these techniques apply best to print books, where I have 100% control over the final formatting, but can still work in e-books, albeit probably less effectively. You know, I've been thinking a lot about print books recently...
Well, there are a few tools.
One is using negative space. What is that? Blankness, where words aren't. Isolating a sentence/word by itself makes it stand out as important, and also forces the reader to move their eyes, giving just that little breathing space to whatever I wrote. I try not to use big blocks of text in my books, and one reason is that by breaking it up I can give it varying 'shapes'. Due to the way ebooks work, I don't have control over the size or font you use, so I can't shape it deliberately, but I can prevent it from becoming one monolith, which helps it go by faster and draws the eye to things that are important or emphasizes who is talking/doing.
Contrary to what we might intuit, we (English speakers, at least), don't read words individually, one by one. When we read quickly, we take in the shapes and contours of words and derive meaning from that! Cool, right? (Also why some typos are so hard to catch, we literally don't see them sometimes.) It's why we find it more tiring when accents are written out (and why I chose not to write out Millie's), the 'shape' of the words are altered and we have to focus more. Paragraphs are the same way. If it's all lumped together, it must be connected; it's also easier to get 'lost' in, and long paragraphs also tend to use longer sentences, which can slow down the pace of reading. We understand this subconsciously, so by breaking them up and using negative space, I can draw your eye to the next line and the next--combining this with shorter, punchier sentences can speed things up!
A tool I use to draw emphasis or force a mental beat on you (fear my power! Haha!) in dialogue is being judicious where I put the 'said'. If a character says something important, and I want it to sit for a moment, I put the 'she said' right after it, even if it's in the middle of a much longer thought. Training sentences together makes them all feel equally important:
"No, I don't think that's a very good idea," she said.
"No," she said. "I don't think that's a very good idea."
Which 'no' sounds more emphatic? The second one, right? Especially if that character is normally shy or slow to volunteer an opinion, by putting the 'she said' there, it gives an extra beat for it to sink in that 'wow, she made a decision!'
Another one is sentence length and punctuation. Have you ever read a whole paragraph only to realize at the end that 'holy sh*t, that was one sentence?' Yeah. Not always great, but sometimes useful! It's kinda slow, but can also be exhausting. If I don't give you time to take a mental 'breath', then you might feel as tired as the character if I rattle off a dozen things she had to do that morning before she got a chance to eat anything. (Conversely, this can backfire; it may just make you wonder if the editor took a phone call at that point or something. Be careful with this one.) But a string of short sentences can make things go faster. This is used a lot in action scenes (or sex scenes, which are the action scenes of romance), it keeps the eye moving and can build up a rhythm by use of periods. (A bunch of commas don't make you stop.)
That said, I use a lot of commas, even if they aren't grammatically necessary #teamoxfordcomma in order to control, uh, eye flow? I guess? Again, I have so few tools to control speed that I will take what I can get. Semicolons, parentheses, ellipses, em-dashes, I sprinkle in a lot of punctuation that are a bit disruptive to the flow of things, and can even make you fill in the blanks...
Like that. Thought about it a second before you came down here, didn't you? An ellipses + white space can be very effective, you just can't abuse it. It can come off as pretentious and stupid, so you have to be really careful.
"My dog pooped in the living room..."
Okay?
"But if she wasn't there that night, then who...?"
Oh, sh*t!
A lot of these techniques apply best to print books, where I have 100% control over the final formatting, but can still work in e-books, albeit probably less effectively. You know, I've been thinking a lot about print books recently...
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