When I read Savvy for the KidzBookBuzz Blog tour, I didn’t do what I usually do–write notes in the margins or put sticky notes in the good and bad places I’d want to remember to mention in my review. Why not? I quickly realized the effort would be fruitless. There were no bad places and the good placed were on every danged page.

So here I sit, ready to discuss some of the things I learned while reading and I have no passages marked to use as examples.

Never fear. I flip the book open to a random page and here are lovely passages, bursting with lessons for wannabe authors. Here’s one now:

Red-faced and mortified, I just stood there. I couldn’t believe those girls had just called me that horrible name in front of Will Junior, I felt like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. Fish scowled at the two girls, and a burst of wind hit us all so sharp and sudden that it sent them scurrying from the open doorway to check their hair and to fix up all their froufrou frippery.

The Critique Group Response:

I’ve been in enough critique groups to guess that some earnest writer critiquing this passage would say something like, “You’ve shown she’s mortified by her red face, you don’t have to tell us, too. And you’ve used the word ‘just’ in consecutive sentences when you shouldn’t ever use that word at all.”

I’d disagree with that critique. Great writing has a flow to it that is interrupted when we tinker too much with the sentences, trying to follow all the rules. “Red-faced and mortified” works. It flows. Sure we know from context that she is red-faced because she’s mortified and not because she’s just run a mile. We don’t need to be told she’s mortified. But the rhythm of the sentence is pleasing to the ear. The way Law extravagantly piles up words gives the reader a feeling of being pampered with Häagen-Dazs. This is rich fare, not some cheap store brand. 

And the first “just” is necessary. She is saying she did nothing but stand there. “Just” aptly modifies her standing.

The second “just” could be lost without damaging the flow of the words but it certainly doesn’t harm anything by its presence.

Cliché and Alliteration:

Clichés can actually help a writer if she can learn to recognize them as she writes and give them a twist. The cliché in the passage above is, “I felt like crawling into a hole.” Law changes it to feeling like crawling under the stained brown carpet and staying there. That’s much better than crawling into a hole. It’s familiar so we don’t have to work at understanding how mortified she is, but it’s different enough that our brain processes it instead of gliding over it without really seeing it.

And then there’s the alliteration. Sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying. Can you hear that? Do you like it? This a read-aloud book. This is a book that is pleasing to the ear. Not every book has to be written this way, but if you want to add a little pop to you prose, you might consider reading your work aloud and seeing if you can hear a buzzing behind the words. There is the meaning of the words–a gust of wind hit, and the girls ran away–and then there is the way the words are strung together. They give off a little buzz–a feeling of movement. They trip happily along. They trickle and build like a stream picking up power as is runs down the mountain.

So the buzz starts with red-faced and mortified, which is a redundant in context but gives us a sense of movement. That movement builds to sharp and sudden and sent them scurrying, which has four words starting with S but with all different second letters. And then the buzz bursts out at the end with  fix up all their froufrou frippery.

At face value we see that Mibs holds the girls in disdain. She finds their attempts at beauty to be pretty worthless because the girls are ugly on the inside. They have just called her a bad name but they are unaware of the fact that the filth coming from their mouths makes them ugly, and they rush off to fix up their outward appearances, as if those things matter. Mibs sees this as a pointless exercise.

But how great it is that the author didn’t tell me this. How great that she didn’t say, “Mibs looked at them with disdain. They could fix their outsides, but inside their hearts were ugly.” Instead Ingrid Law sent the girls scurrying to fix-up the froufrou frippery.

It just doesn’t get better than fixing up froufrou frippery.

This is not the best passage in the book. This is a random passage. If you want to gain an ear for rhythm, buy this book and read it. Aloud. Listen as the words roll across the page.