“WASH YOUR HAND, WILL JUNIOR,” I screamed again, raising my voice to be heard over the brawl and over the sound of breaking glass. As my brother’s pressure system grew, the window closest to Fish began to fracture, spreading splintering cracks outward like spiderwebs zipping and pinging through the glass as Fish’s gusts and gales swelled in speed and strength. Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out as first one and then another window shattered outward. Ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching with every new explosion of glass, Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off his bus with Bobbi following after.

Screamed and raising her voice  are redundant, aren’t they?

You could say, “I screamed, trying to make myself heard over…” I suppose. But it’s not necessary. In the flow of conversation it works as written. 

But what I love about this passage is all the stuff that follows. The fracture spreading splintering cracks and the gusts and gales swelling with speed and strength. I love that Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out. I love the ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching and I love that Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off the bus.

It’s extravagant.

And I guess it’s a matter of taste. I have heard over and over and over that with action scenes you are to use short sentences  and fragments to speed up time. And I understand how that works. But in the midst of the storm Fish is making on the bus, I’m glad that Ingrid Law didn’t use short bursts. Instead she blusters and blows, piling up words like thunderclouds–like a storm building to a climax. She puts me in the middle of the noise and confusion. It’s kind of a “sensory overload” thing going on in that bus.

There’s only one thing I’d change in that paragraph if it were mine to change–I’d make the spider webs pop and ping. But perhaps she was right not to do that. With gusts and gales in the same sentence it probably would have been overkill to have popping and pinging, too.

Anyway, it’s beautiful writing. And it goes against all kinds of rules. It’s full of redundancies. It has long sentences cluttered with unnecessary words.

But there’s more to need than expressing a thought. Readers need beauty. They need sensory input. Cutting dead wood doesn’t mean you strip away all redundancies.

Pushed and pulled and dragged…is all that really necessary? It’s not necessary, at all, that’s what makes you feel like Ms. Law is giving you a generous helping of apple pie ala mode on top of the huge helping of meat and potatoes you just ate. The paragraph is fat. But fat doesn’t always mean bloated. 

Pushed and pulled and dragged gives you a picture of chaos, of a man trying desperately to restore order and not quite sure how to do that. He’s acting because he has to act and he’s deciding as he goes how he should act. First he pushes and then he pulls. But why dragged? It says the exact same thing as pulled.

It’s about rhythm. If you are looking at meaning, dragged is dead wood. It adds nothing to the story. If you are looking at rhythm it adds to the story. Pushed and pulled, for one thing, need dragged to keep you from feeling like there’s too much cutesy alliteration, I think.

But more importantly, it’s about mood-setting. In the paragraph above there is a storm going on in the bus, so the author paints a scene using words that give us a feeling of noise and chaos. 

When you match your prose to your content it gives the reader a fuller experience. Do you ever take time to write a paragraph several different ways? Lean and mean, fat and friendly? Noisy, quiet, crashing, dashing, plodding, plinking…there all kinds of ways to write the same thoughts.  

If you want to post a paragraph below that sets a mood, feel free. I’d love to see what you come up with.