The VERB - February '08

CLEANING UP PROSE

A sentence is an easygoing element of communication. It's happy squeezing into a half-inch area. It's happy stretching across a page. It's even willing to fill up an entire paragraph, if you possess a Faulkner fetish. All it really wants is to convey a complete thought.

Yet we writers have so much to say, we sometimes stuff a sentence like we're stuffing a phone booth. The sentence can bear the extra load, but in the end, what do we have?

Breathless readers.

EXAMPLE:
Katy sipped wine and watched Penn Street from the restaurant window on that hot July night in 1969 to see if he lied to her face and met Greta after all or if he really went to the meeting alone like he said he would.

CLEANED UP:
Katy sipped wine and watched Penn Street from the restaurant window. Either he lied, or he went to the meeting alone. She'd find out soon enough.

EXAMPLE:
She replaced the desk with an armoire which now held all the shirts, skirts, blouses, pants, shorts, skorts, jackets, coats, sweaters and scarves she never seemed to previously wear but that had been loaned to friends and family for years on a whim.

CLEANED UP:
She replaced the desk with an armoire. It contained all the clothes she used to believe she couldn't wear.

EXAMPLE:
Mitchell slammed the phone down and rushed out of the house in the middle of the night with tears streaming down his face like raindrops falling down the windshield that blurred his vision when he turned the key and drove down the busy street.

CLEANED UP:
Mitchell slammed the phone down and rushed out of the house. The midnight streets became a a blur.

OUR CURRENT CONTEST

When storytellers give us good guys, bad guys and at least one conflict, we’re happy. But when storytellers also give us a surprise—when they twist suspenseful plots like salt-water taffy—we hit our foreheads in awe. “Holy cow! I didn’t see that coming!”

It’s a thrill readers never outgrow.

So tilt your perspective, shake your plot and stretch your imagination. Give us a thriller that highlights your skill with the element of surprise.

Entry Fee: Zip

Prize: $100, publication in The VERB and a signed copy of Lee Child's thriller, Persuader

Complete details.

SAMPLE OF EXCELLENCE

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, "Alphabetical."

At the time I smiled too. But now I sit and wonder whether she was listing me by my first name, in which case I would trail Mozart, or by my last name, in which case I would edge in there between Bach and the Beatles.

Either way I don't come first, which for some stupid reason bothers hell out of me, having grown up with the notion I always had to be number one. Family heritage, don't you know?

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