This is the first in an intermittent series of posts I hope will be useful to the authors and prospective authors out there but also an interesting insight into the things editors (or at least THIS editor) notices in manuscripts and submissions.

Today I’d like to talk about the order in which events happen. The main mantra of any series of events is Action THEN Reaction.

In order to jump away from a threat, the threat has to exist. It doesn’t make much sense for a person to leap backward first, then for the speeding car to turn the corner and veer toward where they had been. (Well, not for anything other than a paranormal story, perhaps).

Readers notice these issues. Sometimes consciously but sometimes all they will be able to tell you is the scene seemed odd or mixed up.

But there’s a deeper sequence within reaction. Some reactions normally happen faster than others. Sub-conscious or instinctive reactions will always take precedence over conscious reactions.

Think about what happens when:

Action:
- Put your hand down on a hot stove.

Reactions:
- Snatch hand back
- Clutch or wave hand to try to stop the pain
- Yell “OUCH” (or bad words of choice)
- Put hand under cold water

So if you look at what the reactions are, you can see the most instinctive reaction is first — the reaction to a pain stimulus. Then an only slightly less deep-seated reaction to ease the pain. Then comes the more conscious ones, ending with the most conscious one which is to remember what to do about the pain as far as first aid.

A trick to figuring out if you have events in the correct order is to sort of picture the scene in your mind and walk through what would happen, sort the reactions in order of instinct, then write it that way.

If a character hits the wall hard enough to lose his breath, you shouldn’t have the character impact the wall, then the character say something (other than “oof”), then say he has his breath knocked out of him and grunts. If you impact the wall, the first instinctive reaction and one that is out of the character’s control is to lose his breath. A conscious thought to say something wouldn’t be able to happen in there.

It’s also important to remember that readers like to have discrete actions in sequence rather than many actions happening at once. I’ll talk more about that later, though.

Action THEN Reaction in the correct order will help readers to follow your story the way you intended.

Feedback is welcome and feel free to suggest things you’d like to see in this blog series.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Editors Desk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.