Fine Tune Your Paragraphs to Pack a Punch
The first in a new series about crafting paragraphs to do more than show and tell
My chosen passages end with a punch. They land in the heart, the gut, or the soul. And they build to that wallop with intense command and quiet calculation.
Hello Loreates,
As many of you have noticed, for the past two months I’ve been posting daily notes with literary passages plucked from favorite books in my library. The only “rule” for selection of these quotes is their impact on me. Some strike me simply as beautiful. Some wow me with their mastery of metaphor. Some make me laugh out loud. Some move me to tears or make me feel as if I’ve physically moved across continents or oceans in the span of a few lines.
At first I gave little thought to the specific reasons they dazzled me. I simply wanted to use this practice to reacquaint myself with my library and to share examples of craft mastery. But I found that the act of physically transcribing these passages, rather than cutting and pasting them, gave me a deeper view into their musicality and meaning, a new appreciation for the dimensions of craft that they embody.
I’ve savored and studied passages like this one:
We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken.—Michael Ondaatje, Warlight (2018)
And the practice that began as a whim has expanded into an inquiry into this “confusing landscape” of “barely held stories,” specifically through the “invisible and unspoken” systems that do hold order within stories, one passage at a time. I want to share that inquiry with you here by annotating the collected quotes.
If you’re not sure what I mean by “annotating” read this post :
At first I thought this could be done in a single post under a pithy challenge like: Do Your Paragraphs Do More Than Show & Tell? But then I started sorting my collected quotes by technique. How, in a single post, could I do justice to the multiplicity of strengths, including irony, lyricism, metaphor, naked emotion, and intellectual bite, that these passages showcase ? No, I couldn’t. So, I’ve decided to turn this examination into a new occasional series on paragraph technique.
To be clear, I’m not going to be annotating paragraphs that typify the bulk of most books. Even the masters rely heavily on paragraphs that simply deliver lines of dialogue, description, or action to keep the narrative rolling. Not every prose writer is a poet, and not every passage in a story or essay needs to stun the reader with its glory. Propulsive plots, colorful characters, and explosive themes can drive novels and memoirs to success with or without breathtaking paragraphs. Arguably, prose written by poets like W.G. Sebald and Ondaatje can be so intense and relentlessly layered that it stops some readers from enjoying it. But most serious readers seek out literature that delivers a pattern of richly concentrated passages in tandem with more straightforward paragraphs. And, btw, spare language does not preclude a startlingly complex paragraph.
The first thing I noticed as I began this collecting practice was that many of my chosen passages end with a punch. They land in the heart, the gut, or the soul. And they build to that wallop with intense command and quiet calculation. How exactly do they do that? I wondered and so thought this would be a good focus to launch the series.
I invite you to continue the exploration with me below. And please do let me know what you think of this proposed series.
Read on!
Aimee
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The Paragraph with a Punch
Memorable paragraphs often take the reader on a journey that ends with a visceral explosion. Some vital quality builds, transforming quiet to noise, calm to terror, tranquility to violence, or thought to feeling— all in just a few lines. This rarely happens accidentally (never say “never,” but I actually don’t believe it ever happens accidentally). Yet to work, the effect must create the impression that the flow of words is purely organic, the building tension utterly natural, the final burst of ignition spontaneous. This illusion requires a narrative tour de force.
