On the Secret to Writing Addictive Prose

With Daisy Chains

I once had a student once who wrote very well. Very very well.

She was admirably scrupulous about each individual sentence. But her writing was, in a way I at first couldn’t figure out, inert.

Perhaps even dead.

Although her novel — a historical novel — had a good plot, clear scenes, vivid characters, her prose created absolutely no desire in me to keep reading on.

But why?

I couldn’t work it out.

We would meet for another tutorial, and I wouldn’t know what to tell her.

And then one spring day, a little like this sunny morning, before the rain started, I figured it out.

The problem was that my student was taking each sentence and dealing with it — thinking of it — rewriting it — in isolation.

Not only was each of them admirable in itself, each of them was also grammatically complete by itself.

There was no imbalance to her writing, no sense of toppling forwards.

Toppling, although it sounds out of control, is how we walk, how we run — those of us that walk and run.

We set up a physical situation in which we need to take that next step or we stumble.

This is something experienced writers of most fiction, literary but especially genre, end up doing almost without thinking about it.

But my student needed to have this pointed out to her.

The solution — although it took a lot of effort on her part — was fairly simple.

I told her she had to stop writing sentences and start writing paragraphs.

That was her new unit of composition.

To do this, she had to make each sentence slightly incomplete in itself — so that it required the reader to go on to the next sentence, and the one after that, in order to reach the point where it made grammatical sense.

And here is where prose written this way becomes addictive, because it’s constantly deferring full satisfaction.

Oscar Wilde said —

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

You can find this deferral happening in Samuel Beckett just as much as in Lee Child.

When I’m teaching now, I’ll often describe this technique as toppling forwards, but you could also say it’s making daisy chains.

Writers of genre fiction, particularly of thrillers, will extend this chain-making so that it includes paragraph links and chapter links.

If you want to, you can think of each sentence as including a mini-cliffhanger — a tiny grammatical what happens next?

When I next read the student’s work, a month after I’d asked her to start write in paragraphs, not sentences, and to make daisy chains, link after link after link, her novel was no longer inert.

It was alive, had movement, and made me want to read on.