Writing St

yle
Putting Ex
perienc

e on the P
age

The Creat
ive Writing
Workbook

Experience on the Page

0 All creative authors, from memoirists to poets to travel

writers, need to master style. The proof of your

pudding as a writer needs to be in the words on the
page. Readers wont know how worth reading you are
if its not there in black and white.
0 For many, mastering style is the first great
breakthrough in their writing the moment when
whats on their page first begins to match up, in terms
of reading experience, with the work of writers they
admire. It can take a while, because your developing
skills continue to fall short of standards set by your
reading, but its important to remember that mastering
style is a process, but one of inexorable progress. As
you add to your skills, your competence grows: its as
simple and rewarding as that.

Tell me
0Tell me about a writer you admire

and what you like about their

writing style.

Pace and Power

0 The problem all creative writers face when they sit

down to write is that they have a lot to say many

perspectives and insights and observations to
transmit, but only the tight little structures of wellbalanced sentences to convey it all on the page.
0 Much of the pleasure and art of writing is finding
those succinct sentences, but writing is a business
of set-up and pay-off. Sometimes the set-up has
more complexity than even a succession of short
sentences can convey, and sometimes the pay-off
does, too. But as any comedian will tell you, the
key to structuring set-up and pay-off is timing; so in
these all too frequent situations, where the page
needs zip but the material needs space, creative
writers turn to their toolbox to solve the problem.

Big-truck Sentences
0 A popular writer technique many use is

the big-truck sentence. Its a special

sentence design that allows writers to
pack a lot of information into a few
sequenced clauses. Its used most often
in non-fiction, where establishing the full
picture is a priority, and where necessary
and often complex information must be
delivered to the reader.

Information Dense
0 Heres the kind of information-dense set up

paragraph a big truck sentence is designed to

solve:
0 Ancient Hawaiian surfers were not like modern

wave-riders, with their lightweight fiberglass

boards. Old-style surfboards were big up to 18
feet in length and heavy, needing to be made
from hardwood. Enthusiasts whove built replicas
find them tiring to paddle and maneuver because of
this extra weight. But surfing was both a royal and
a national sport in the days of the Hawaiian kings,
so old-style wooden surfboards are challenging but
effective to ride some modern-day enthusiasts
even prefer them when surf conditions are optimal.

Information Dense
0 There was nothing too burdensome to read, and to an

enthusiast it delivers all the information youd want to

know if youd seen someone riding an old-style
hardwood board, for example, and googled wooden
surfboards when you got home. The paragraph
would make a reasonable caption to a blog photo of
an old Hawaiian surfing scene, perhaps.
0 Although it is a coherent and reasonably effective
piece of writing, its slow to read. Theres little sense
of pace. If this paragraph wasnt a blog caption, but
appeared in a non-fiction book about surfing, and
occurred in the middle of a couple of pages of similar
paragraphs, then this would perhaps seem like a slow
couple of pages to a reader, for all the information
delivered. Its a slow read.

Problem Solved
0 This is exactly the kind of problem the big-truck

technique was designed to solve. The paragraph

on surfing, with its four long and complicated
sentences, can be rewritten as a single,
comprehensive big-truck sentence:
0 Old-style Hawaiian surfboards were big and heavy,

up to three times the size of todays fiberglass

decks; though their solid hardwood makes them
challenging to ride, some modern-day purists will
still ride old-style when the surfs up.

0 Its not a sparkling transformation, but all the

information is delivered in around half the space:

a sense of pace, and of forward movement, is built
into the big-truck version.

Practice 1
0 Read the following travel-piece opening, and make notes on it where

you think the material could be honed. Its a long paragraph, so

expect to use three big-truck sentences, but if you can make it
shorter without losing anything, then go for it!

0 Its a long way from the Chelsea-tractor school run for a

young girl and her kid brother in northern China. Every

school day the 11-year-old must walk hand in hand with her
five-year-old sibling through the jungle from their
mountainside farm, where their family has grown tea for
generations, to the side of a terrifyingly precipitous river
valley, and the zip wire across it that is their only transport.
There the little girl must bundle her brother into a sack
hes too young to suppress automatic panic reactions at the
gaping gulf below then hook him on the zip wire, cobbled
together by her father, and climb into the sack herself.
Then she leaps into space. For three heart-stopping
minutes the pair travel at speeds approaching 60 miles an
hour, the little girl braking with a forked piece of wood,
until they land safely on the far side of the vast river valley.
At the end of the school day, they must perform the feat
again in reverse.

Example
0 For a northern Chinese little girl and her

brother, the daily school run from the family

tea farm means zip-lining on cables Dad
tinkered together high above a precipitous
mountain valley. Each morning, the five-yearold boy too young to cope with the dizzying
gulf below must climb into a sack before this
11-year-old sister hooks him on to the wire, and
climbs on herself. Then she pushes off into the
void, hurtling high above the valley at 60 miles
per hour or more, braking with nothing more
than a forked timber; at the end of each school
day she repeats the feat, in reverse.