Post #31 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
By Promptly Portland
WORDS
Just Words
but, more than words
especially when we string them together into a sentence
and sentences into paragraphs.
In the two previous memoir writing prompts, I wrote about our marvelous tool — words. Writers can go on and on about their tool and there are many aspects to using words effectively to convey the meaning and the style we want. But in my trilogy, I’m only looking at words, sentences, and today, paragraphs.
I’m not going to deal with the official definitions of paragraph construction. What I want us to consider is the way that paragraph lengths — another way of looking at words — help us better tell our stories.
After a long paragraph, a short one, even a sentence fragment, can bring the reader to an abrupt stop. The excess white space around a single sentence paragraph changes the visual and mental perception. This is accentuated when briefness precedes or follows a dense, long paragraph.
Consider the following two paragraphs from the opening of Chapter 1 in Danielle Trussoni’s memoir Falling Through the Earth:
“Winter of ’85, and we were on the run.
“Dad veered the truck into an alley, cut across a parking lot, and merged with traffic running alongside the frozen Mississippi. ‘Cops don’t come down this road,’ he said, checking the rearview mirror. ‘If they’re here, it’s because they followed us.’ My father was prone to paranoia, but the police were real. We’d been picked up twice for drunk driving that year. After the last arrest, he’d lost his license. We tried to keep a low profile, but the cops knew our truck and where we lived–Those sons-of-bitches got nothing to do but bother hardworking taxpayers. Faster, faster we drove. If they caught us again, Dad would go to jail.”
Notice that the first paragraph is just one sentence — nine words. The second paragraph is nine sentences — 113 words. The powerful first sentence sets the time and draws us in. We wonder: Who is the ‘we?’ Who are they are the run from? Then the second paragraph begins to tell us more and to give us a sense of her father, one of the two main characters in the memoir.
500 Words (or More) Writing Prompt:
1. Pick up a memoir on your bookshelf. Find the longest paragraph in the first chapter. How many words are in it? How many sentence? Is it preceded by another long paragraph or a short one? Is it followed by another long paragraph or a short one?
2. Take the longest paragraph that you just found in the first chapter of a memoir. Find a logical place and create two paragraph. Then read them. Does it work better as one long paragraph? Try to figure out why. What is you create two roughly equally long paragraphs from the one paragraph? What is the effect if you create one long and one very short paragraph from the source material? Decide which arrangement you like the best. And more importantly, decide why. This will help you become more mindful of your own use of paragraphs.
Note: Missed Parts 1 and 2? Here are the links:
Words, Part 1
Words-Sentences, Part 2
Be sure to enter the Comments Contest by leaving me a comment below about this post. The February contest has just begun and you can be the winner. Leave the most comments this month and win a special women’s memoir prize. Perhaps you’d like to comment on what memoir you used for this exercise? What did you discover about paragraphs?
Until next time,
Promptly Portland
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