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◦ Series · Popular science

The Writer's Craft

Rhythm, dialogue, point of view, punctuation. The mechanics of prose, one tool at a time.

by @latrame

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

The whole world is purging its em dashes. Too associated with machines, apparently.

Emily Dickinson's dash. Woolf's. Céline's. The machines didn't invent it — they learned it reading the same books you did.

We'll let you decide who has to give it back.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

You were taught to hunt down repetition. Find a synonym, vary, elegance.

Except. "I waited. I waited some more. I waited long after waiting had stopped meaning anything." Replace a single one of those "waited" with "lingered" and the whole thing collapses. Repetition isn't always a mistake : sometimes it's a hammer, and it hits the same spot on purpose.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

2w ago

Flaubert had a room for shouting. He called it his gueuloir : he would yell his sentences out loud, alone, for hours. Any sentence that failed the shouting test got rewritten.

The pretty word flatters on the page and dies out loud. The right word survives both.

Try it, nobody's watching. Read your last paragraph out loud and listen for where your own voice stumbles : that's the spot.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

Punctuation is the stage direction of the sentence. The period says : lower your voice. The comma says : breathe, but stay on stage. The ellipsis says : look away while you finish your line...

And the semicolon, the least loved of all, says something nothing else can say : these two sentences are independent ; they still refuse to be separated.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

Three paragraphs of impeccable, formal, almost ceremonial prose. And then, right in the middle, a word from the street.

The effect is physical. Not because the word is vulgar : because it comes from outside, like someone walking into a silent room without knocking. A register only has power if you know how far you're dropping it from.

Popular science

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

A novel in which a character writes a novel. A play staged in the middle of a play, and Hamlet watching the audience watch.

It could be just a hall of mirrors. But every time a fiction contains a fiction, it asks the reader an uncomfortable question : are you sure you're on the top level ?

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

There is an art to not telling.

She closed the apartment door, dropped the key in the mailbox.

Three years later, she came back for the box that was still in the cellar.

Everything that matters just happened between those two sentences, and you read it, even though it was never written. That's the ellipsis : the story keeps going while the text stays quiet.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

The narrator is lying to you. Not the author : the narrator. He polishes his role, forgets whatever suits him, swears he was calm that night.

And the strangest part is you love it. Because by the third inconsistency, you're no longer reading a story : you're running an interrogation.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

The same door opens three times.

"I opened the door. My hand was shaking, I think." — The reader is locked inside. They know only what the character knows ; they doubt when the character doubts.

"She opened the door. Her hand was shaking." — The reader sees the shaking, but from outside. Watching someone who can't see themselves shake.

"Across the hall, someone opened a door." — The reader no longer even knows who's shaking. Just a silhouette, and maybe that's exactly what's needed, for now.

One door, three cameras. And it resets with every scene : nothing forces chapter twelve's camera to be chapter one's.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

3w ago

Telling : he was lying.

Showing : he answered a little too fast. Then he repeated the question, as if buying time for the next answer.

The word "lying" appears nowhere, and yet the reader knows before the character across the table does. That's the whole exercise : remove the label, keep the gesture, and let the reader reach the conclusion half a second before you hand it to them. That half second is the pleasure of reading.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

A long sentence moves forward, piles up, refuses to stop, stacking commas the way you stack the thoughts of a sleepless night, until it finally falls.

A short sentence hits. Then stops.

A chase written in long sentences runs out of breath before the reader does. A grief scene chopped into short ones reads like a telegram. But flip it at the right moment : one endless sentence in the middle of a chase, and time hangs : the character sees everything, too much, at once. A three-word sentence in the middle of a grief that kept stretching, and that's the sob finally coming out.

An exercise, if you want one : reread the last page you wrote looking only at sentence length. Not the words. Just the lengths. We're curious what you'll find.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Two characters answering each other word for word, like two well-mannered fencers. Polite, symmetrical, dead.

Real dialogue stumbles. Someone answers the previous question. Someone isn't listening.