Heroic Storytelling

Last month I was asked to lead a workshop on style in children's writing. It had been awhile since I wrote for children or read their books, so I assigned myself time in libraries and bookstores pulling kids' books off the shelves and scanning their pages at random for beautiful writing. Immersed in the magical world of kidlit, I felt like the ten-year-old I used to be, the one who read ten books a week during the lazy, unscheduled summers of childhood.

One of the books I plucked off the shelf simply because of its lovely title was Snowbone, a heroic fantasy by British writer and storyteller Cat Weatherill. Her energetic writing demonstrates the power of simple but vivid verbs to bring a story to life so well that modifiers become unnecessary. Here's an example describing a fire that has broken out on the deck of a pirate ship:

"It spat and clawed like a flaming tomcat. It pounced on the shattered crates. Mauled the decking. Snapped the bones of the ship. It hissed and growled. Whipped an angry, fiery tail till the hold fizzed with sparks. Then it crept forward on its belly and started licking at the remaining crates."

The Rhythm of Prose

Here's the opening sentence of Raphael Sabatini's Scaramouche: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

There's nothing overtly unusual about this sentence. Its words are short and ordinary. Its sentence structure is clear and uncomplicated. What makes it so catchy?

What grabs our attention here, I think, is the music underlying the words. Read the sentence aloud and tap your foot or finger as you feel the beat. To me it sounds like this:

He was BORN with a GIFT of LAUGHter // and a SENSE that the WORLD was MAD.