from the archives: paragraph structure & writing multi-pov

hello friends! i haven’t had a lot to say recently, non-fictionally, these last few months. (if you’re looking for resources, i highly recommend naseem jamnia’s newsletter, and qasim rashid’s let’s address this, and, if you’re an author, joining authors against book bans). also i’m back in school and holding down a full-time day job, so a sub-optimal amount of sleep has been slept since at least early january! but all my friends are writing newsletters (lol), and i recently dug up a blog post i wrote in 2019 when someone asked me about writing multi-pov. that blog is down now, but i thought i’d give the piece a more permanent (?) home here. lightly edited for clarity, concision, and re: the near-inevitable cringe from rereading something published six years ago.

anyway, without further ado:

Building Palaces out of Paragraphs: Sentence Linkage and Character-Informed Description in V. E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic 

Hello! Today I’m going to talk paragraph structure, mostly as it applies to description. I’ll examine V. E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic not only because it’s a gem of a book, but because of the unique way Schwab ties sentences together—not just in the general sense of oh yeah writing grunt grunt but literally linking each individual sentence together with each individual other sentence in a way that blew my mind when I first encountered it.

This paragraphical rigor might well just be a component of “voice” or “style”—plenty of books do fine with paragraphs like “He [verb]ed. He [verb]ed. And then he [verb]ed”—but since Schwab’s prose has fascinated me for almost two years now, I’ll attempt to make sense of a few passages here.

First, the opening:

There’s so much good stuff here—that snappy first line! The rule of threes, four times over (can you spot them all?)! Focusing on a single character when introducing readers to a fantasy world with an unusual premise!—but for the sake of word limit I’d like to draw your attention to the way each sentence starts. At risk of stating the obvious, the first begins with Kell, and ends with coat; the second begins with the coat, and ends with the impossibility of its multiple sides; number three begins not with “Whenever he stepped out of one London…” but “The first thing he did,” which centers Kell’s action, his tendency, rather than himself. We get variety without clogging up the flow, and still absorb the same information we would have if the sentence began with “When he…” It’s just a matter of word order. Which is by no means a rule—obviously, there are times when leading with the character works best—but in this context I think the diversity of sentence beginnings adds to rather than detracts from the whole. The overall effect of this opening is one of movement—from Kell to coat, coat to sides, sides to how he gets them to appear—much like my attention shifts from one thing to another more often than I actively think, “now I’m doing X. Now I’m doing Y. Now I’m doing Z.” 

Skipping a bit ahead, we meet thief and aspiring pirate Delilah Bard as she’s settling into a rented room on a dilapidated ship:

Again, we get the satisfying linkage of sentence/clause beginnings and endings: Lila “slouching into a chair” segues neatly into the groaning of said chair, then we follow her boots as she kicks them up to the desk, where we then encounter the maps. “Surely, someone knew…” provides a fresh change in subject (as opposed to “Lila didn’t know what kind of map it was”), and “To her” adds a touch of interiority. In a less fortunate parallel universe, this description might have been approached with Lila walking into her cabin and noting her creaky chair, her desk, and her maps, some pinned down by stolen trinkets, before sitting down with a dramatic sigh. Instead, we encounter each of these objects as she interacts with them, giving what could have been a mundane description of a cramped room a dynamic, cinematic feel. 

Another thing to remember, whether one is writing in first-person, second-person, or third-person limited, is that a character’s perceptions and experiences are often subjective within the world in which they exist. The passages above don’t simply describe what’s happening or how things work; even though Kell and Lila are “narrating” through third-person limited, they feel something about the worlds (yes, plural) they’re moving through. In Lila’s passage above, the last three sentences are actually pure “opinion,” or what I’ve heard called editorialization re: editorial columns in newspapers. Were I to film this scene, I could capture the creaky desk, Lila’s kicked-up boots, the trinkets pinning down the maps. But the fact that the blank map is her favorite, that she wonders where it leads, that she thinks someone out there knows, is completely inside her head. If you read even the first few pages of A Darker Shade of Magic, you’ll notice there’s a rhythm to the way Schwab alternates more external, “objective” description with her characters’ interior dialogue / editorialization, which is another cool thing to look out for while you’re reading and writing.

Finally, I have strong opinions about describing buildings in particular, and this third and final passage takes us into a bone palace ruled by twin blood-drinking, magic-wielding psychopaths:

As a former architecture major, I’ve learned that the only pertinent question to ask about a building is: is it seductive? The description of this throne room answers that question with a resounding yes. Friendly, no, but it’s sexy af. With a few broad strokes, we get the essence of the room, the power it’s meant to convey, and, in a couple quick lines of editorialization, how it makes the main character feel (actually I lied—how does it make you feel? is the other important question you need to answer, setting aside that arousal is also a feeling), and we can move on to the dialogue and action taking place within the room. Personally, I don’t need to know that there’s a wing that descends into a claustrophobic passage that veers off into a garden, which turns left toward a pond that ends in a cliff. At this point, I don’t really care, even if a character is going to run through all those twists and turns later in the scene. We can see that convoluted geography as the character interacts with it. In stranger worlds, simplicity can be your most powerful weapon. 

In conclusion: the techniques I’ve learned from marinating in Shades of Magic have radically changed the way I write. The process feels more like a puzzle these days— playing around with transitions and objects being subjects and the occasional passive voice, checking to make sure enough of my characters’ thoughts have been baked into the (hopefully) sexy architecture, the near-audible click when everything finally slides into place—and I hope some of my thoughts will be helpful to you as well.

(Also, for more breathtaking descriptions, I recommend In the Night Garden and Deathless by Catherynne Valente, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and In the Woods and The Likeness by Tana French.)

news

• may 25 12:30–1:30 p.m. est: i’ll be speaking at weeknight writers’ storycrafting sessions (virtual & free) on how to find and frame book comps! here’s the full schedule.

watching/listening:

• chuck tingle’s episode of no write way—i think this lowkey changed my life? he talks about letting go of perfectionism by framing his mistakes as punk, and his self-pubbed shorts as vehicles for capturing how he felt at the time vs. the usual shiny polished thing. highly recommend.

• the river has roots by amal el-mohtar and the particular sadness of lemon cake by aimee bender—i’ve been thinking lately about the restrictions we tend to place on the novel, especially in modern commercial (“commercial”?) fantasy: the belief that its conclusions need to be airtight, every strangeness scaffolded and locked in by internal logic. el-mohtar’s and bender’s books both feel like unfoldings of possibility, in different ways, an embrace of the make-shit-up part of writing fiction. magic as an opening-up instead of a sealing-in.

• holy terrors by margaret owen—the perfect conclusion to the perfect trilogy. hilarious. heartbreaking. arsch doodles abound. yes i made a playlist. sorta wish [slight spoiler] an overthrowing the monarchy plotline wasn’t so relevant in the year of our lord 2025 but here we are.

• rakesfall by vajra chandrasekera—i’m not that far in yet, but holy shit!!! if you liked the way the spear cuts through water and the broken earth trilogy play with pov & narratives of colonialism / oppression, or the prose of this is how you lose the time war, or the bodysharing gender FLESH stuff in the locked tomb, get on this one!!

thanks for reading! see y’all in another four months (jk i have an event announcement later this month, keep an eye out~)