(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Elements of Craft

26 let­ters and 14 pieces of punc­tu­a­tion form libraries of mas­ter­pieces.  The only trick is the order­ing.

One of the true para­dox­es of art is that any art form is a holis­tic com­pos­ite of many ele­ments that are woven togeth­er.  In fact, a mea­sure of good art is an almost invis­i­ble and seam­less coop­er­a­tion between those ele­ments to all work towards the same impact.  The gestalt of the art tran­scends the mea­sure of its dis­crete ele­ments by leaps and bounds.  How­ev­er, art can rarely be either rich­ly under­stood or taught with­out break­ing those ele­ments down to exam­ine them with some scruti­ny, cre­at­ing a false sense of bound­ary between them.  Dis­sect­ing art into its ele­ments is like putting pins through indi­vid­ual but­ter­fly species to exam­ine them.  You have to do it to under­stand them, but it is noth­ing com­pared to the majesty of stand­ing in a field while myr­i­ads of mon­archs, satyrs, and metal­marks explode as a gush of col­or into the Arkansas sky around you.

When we exam­ine fic­tion with the intent of improv­ing our own craft, it becomes essen­tial for us to look at the dis­crete parts as well as how they are all work­ing togeth­er.  These ele­ments are sim­i­lar to lit­er­ary analy­sis, but often use an even high­er “mag­ni­fi­ca­tion.”

You have 26 let­ters and 14 pieces of punc­tu­a­tion.  With those forty sym­bols, rearranged, we can cre­ate any­thing from The Bell Jar to Son­net 23 to Ani­mal Farm.  So here is where I will do my best to explain the the ele­ments that writ­ers use, con­scious­ly or not, as the threads they weave into their craft.

Con­crete Imagery
Sig­nif­i­cant Detail
Fil­ter your Fil­ter­ing
Prose Rhythm
The Punc­tum (eas­i­er to show than explain) Ex 1, Ex 2 (Say Some­thing)
Tone
Nar­ra­tive Dis­tance

Relat­ed Arti­cles
Trope­cep­tion
Char­ac­ter Dri­ven Zom­bie Sto­ries (Mail­box)
Fridg­ing: Who’s dying for Whom?

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