NaNoWriMo Snacks: Tricks From Strunk and White

I just ate a Baby Ruth bar for breakfast. Actually, that's a total lie. I just ate breakfast, and then ate a Baby Ruth bar. Snacks, especially sugary ones, are essential to the whole NaNoWriMo experience. Haven't you noticed that most traditional story arcs mimic a sugar high and subsequent crash?

Snacks are also the most practical option because they don't take much time to prepare, and we future NYT Notable Authors don't have time to be churning out three course meals right now. Kind of like how I don't have time to write long posts, and how you don't have time to read long posts, because we are (say it with me now) writing a novel.

For the month of November, I'm going to be whipping up snacks - little tidbits that will give you a bit more fuel for your daily 1,667 words. This week, we're going to be mining morsels from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, an elegant little slip of a book about writing that's been considered an essential for decades. Here's a quick tip that helped me:


KEEP RELATED WORDS TOGETHER

Compare the two:

She noticed a small tear in the shirt that was in the left armpit.

She noticed a small tear in the left armpit of the shirt.

In the first sentence, it's almost like the shirt itself is in the left armpit, like this woman is some kind of spatially challenged bra-stuffer who ran out of socks or something. The second sentence takes more a direct path to that pesky hole.

Let's try another:

A shirt, if you fail to wash it, becomes a maelstrom of putrid odors.

Unless washed, a shirt becomes a maelstrom of putrid odors.

The difference between two sentences lies in the separation of the subject (the shirt) and the principal verb (becomes). The second sentence clearly tells us what we need to do in order to avoid rancidity, whereas the first sentence is a bit more nebulous. You never want to be nebulous about anything that smells bad. Never.

Happy writing today. Keep those 1,667 words together now. But more importantly, keep yourself together. If you're falling to pieces, have a snack. Candy just so happens to be a remarkable glue!