Storytellersunplugged

by George Guthridge

We just learned that our son, who turned 13 on the last day of the year (and, ohmigod, in now officially a teenager), has Attention Deficit Disorder. That makes studying difficult for a kid who already is adverse to it, and makes it doubly hard for him to catch up – he has spoken English only for three years, so he is behind his classmates.

But what does that have to do with fiction writing?

Several years ago it occurred to me that many – perhaps most – readers today have ADD. Accustomed to television and video games, or perhaps just accustomed to a faster pace of life than their ancestors may have experienced, or maybe just because all of us seem to have little free time, they are far less inclined to the languid prose of, say, Victorian days. Clive Cussler noticed that and cut his chapters to minimal length, figuring – correctly, I think – that people neither want long chapters nor have time to sit still for long periods. I am not a great fan of Cussler, but I read an interview about him in which he equated his success specifically to his having started using short chapters.

Romance writer Barbara Cartland has said somewhat the same thing, albeit regarding paragraphs. Each of her paragraphs is three sentences long. That makes the job of her secretary – Barbara dictates her novels – rather easy. End of sentence three? Hit Enter. But there is more to it than just short paragraphs. As she says, each paragraph gives her readers a little sense of completion, plus it makes it easier to read quickly (and thus finish the book faster and start another Cartland novel. . .)

I mention the above because a few days ago I read Koontz’s Velocity and admired how he kept me reading almost breathlessly. Obviously, expert plotting was involved. But so were several little things, a couple of which I would like to mention.

At 15 pages, his first chapter is the longest in the book but is necessary to set the stage for what is to come. It reads at breakneck speed. The first 2/3rds of the chapter consists largely of dialogue interpolated by cleverly planted – and equally clever – characterization. Then there is a break. The last third of the chapter has considerably more characterization and far less dialogue.

The chapter has 174 paragraphs. One, the longest, is five sentences; another is four. There are 273 sentences in the chapter (this was easier to count than you might think), for an average length of 1.5689655172413793103448275862069 sentences per paragraph. (I did that in my head, of course.) Okay, about 1.6. The last third of the chapter has 51 paragraphs and 83 sentences, or 1.6274509803921568627450980392157 sentences per paragraph. Again, about 1.6 – even though the last third of the chapter is markedly different in texture and tone than the first two-thirds. It therefore must be Koontz’s intention, and not the difference in tone, that keeps the sentence-per-paragraph count so evenly matched.

Master craftsman that he is, Koontz breaks paragraphs in novel ways, often sacrificing the gestalt-like fulfillment that we may have been taught to create in college, in favor of keeping us focused on story instead of letting us stop and savor the prose. For example:

Ivy had mahogany hair, limpid eyes the color of brandy, and the body for which Hugh Hefner had spent his life searching.

Although twenty-four, she seemed genuinely unaware that she was the essential male fantasy in the flesh. She was never seductive. At times she could be flirtatious, but only in a winsome way.

Her beauty and choirgirl wholesomeness were a combination so erotic that her smile alone could melt the average man’s earwax.

The second paragraph summarizes the details of the first, and the third summarizes those of the second, but by breaking the paragraphs where he does, Koontz moves readers forward instead of letting us loop back to see how the pieces of the prose fit together.

(She is also, interestingly, somewhat of a red herring – almost a literal one, given the color of her hair. She plays an important part in the book though is not central to it; but by keeping the focus on her, Koontz does not let the reader focus too keenly on a character who, for the time being, he wants in the background. ‘Nuff said about that. You will have to read the book for yourself to understand what I mean.)

The opening paragraph of the chapter – which of course is the beginning of the book – catches the reader’s attention: “With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him.” It makes you want to read. We expect that in a novel.

What impressed me more from a technician’s viewpoint, though, was the opening of the second chapter. The ending of the first chapter is a great cliffhanger – a killer gives the protagonist a choice of having a lovely blond schoolteacher or an elderly woman active in charity murdered – so hypothetically there is little need for another clever opening. When Chapter Two begins, Koontz simply could have informed us that Lanny Olsen is target shooting. Perhaps, though, he knows that readers suffer from ADD. He takes no chances with inattention:

Mickey Mouse took a bullet in the throat.

The 9-mm pistol cracked three more times in rapid succession, shredding Donald Duck’s face.

I am not a fast reader, but I read the book in about three hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wonder why.