This is the first entry in the Nightingale Grimoire—a recurring series where we treat the craft of dark fiction like what it is: a magical craft. Like alchemy but with fewer heretics. Subscribe so you don’t miss out.
Today I want to talk about sentences.
Yes, you read that right. Sentences.
The
actual words in the actual order you choose to put them in, and why
that order is the difference between a reader who finishes your book at 3
AM and a reader who puts it down to check their phone.
Let’s talk about ways to fix that.
Table of Contents
Take their breath away — punctuation
Hold them hostage — using second person POV
Lead them astray — mix the horror with the mundane
Set the trap — building tension
Stab it in the heart — pattern disruption
The assignment — not required, obviously
Take their breath away
You dictate when your reader breathes. If the moment is supposed to be suffocating, stop giving them air.
A
period is a pause. A comma is a shorter pause. No punctuation at all is
no pause, and if you string enough clauses together, the reader’s eyes
start moving faster than their brain can process, and that gap between
seeing the words and understanding them is where dread lives.
Margot set her suitcase down. She found the light switch. It didn’t work.
That’s fine. Serviceable. You could put that in a police report and no one would blink.
There’s
also a good bit of breathing room there, and absolutely no tension.
Feels like each sentence ends right before I have a chance to feel
anything.
The smell hit her first, sweet and organic
like soil after rain, something that had been growing in the walls for
years without light or air or anyone to make it stop.
There
was nowhere to stop. Your eyes kept moving and the information kept
coming and by the time you hit the period, you’d already swallowed the
whole thing.
That’s the trick.
Hold them hostage
Second
person is a home invasion. The unearned intimacy triggers a gut
response in most people. Home invasions can be useful in literature.
Take that how you will.
Now drop a single “you” into a third-person narrative.
She
told herself the house was just old, and old houses settle. That the
sound she’d heard from the second floor was the bones of the place
adjusting to her weight, to the novelty of someone alive inside it
again.You would have told yourself the same thing.
It’s sort of like looking directly at the camera. It makes the reader complicit.
Be very mindful because it gets old, quick. Again—it is quite literally like a home invasion. You never truly know when the next one will be the one that blows it all to hell. Use sparingly.
Lead them astray
So
she went and made tea in the kitchen because that’s what you do in a
new house—you unpack the kettle first, you find a mug, you go through
the motions that make a place yours—and she sat at the table her aunt
had for forty years before she slit her husband’s throat in his sleep.
Everything
before the blood is a Sunday morning. It’s a cereal commercial. The
reader’s guard is down, they might even be near boredom—and BOOM, sucker
punch.
This is the principle: Put the horror in the bright kitchen. At breakfast. On a Tuesday. With grandma.
Set the trap
Do not let your reader write the story for you.
If
you tell them about the scary thing first, the absence of information
on aforementioned scary thing is an invitation for their imagination to
start filling gaps, and that thing knows what scares them better than
you ever will.
—their imagination does not, however, know
literally anything about the actual scary thing from the story, so the
experience is kind of ruined, RIP.
Give them the experience
first, then the subject. Bury the thing they should be afraid of at the
end of the clause. Make them walk the corridor, spend the whole sentence
knowing something is coming, and get to arrive at the scary thing last, just like your character did.
In the hallway upstairs, in the dark that seemed to devour any surrounding light, someone—or something—knocked.
Stab it in the heart
Read your work out loud. Find its literal pulse.
But the house settled. The pipes ticked. The wind pressed against the windows. The tea went cold.
Subject, verb. Subject, verb. Predictable. Like a heartbeat monitor. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
—then periodically give it an arrhythmia. Startle with story and structure.
And when she blinked, the man at the top of the stairs was still there.
Your Assignment
Pull
up something you’ve written. Find a scene where the prose feels
flat—don’t look at me like that, we’ve all got ‘em, I’m not judging—and
run it through these:
Breath check. Where
are your periods? Are you giving the reader permission to pause during a
moment that should be suffocating? Cut the period. Extend the sentence.
Make them earn the exhale.
Subject check. Where is the scary thing in your scariest sentence? If it’s at the beginning, move it.
Rhythm check.
Read it out loud. Break up any patterns. Repeat until the sound of your
own voice becomes distorted. Then hand it to a total stranger, and ask them to read it out loud.
Might accidentally fuck around and make it better. Who knows.
A bite sized treat
If
you were paying attention, you may have noticed that all of the example
quotes together form a little micro-short story. I’ve compiled them
below for easier reading. Enjoy.
Margot set her suitcase down. She found the light switch. It didn’t work.
The
smell hit her first, sweet and organic like soil after rain, something
that had been growing in the walls for years without light or air or
anyone to make it stop.She told herself the house was just old,
and old houses settle. That the sound she’d heard from the second floor
was the bones of the place adjusting to her weight, to the novelty of
someone alive inside it again.You would have told yourself the same thing.
So
she went and made tea in the kitchen because that’s what you do in a
new house—you unpack the kettle first, you find a mug, you go through
the motions that make a place yours—and she sat at the table her aunt
had for forty years before she slit her husband’s throat in his sleep.In the hallway upstairs, in the dark that seemed to devour any surrounding light, someone—or something—knocked.
But the house settled. The pipes ticked. The wind pressed against the windows. The tea went cold.
And when she blinked, the man at the top of the stairs was still there.
The Nightingale Grimoire is a recurring series from Nightingale Press. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.