Listing and Catalogs 1: Building a thin list
Writers frequently use lists and catalogs in order to pile up accumulations of details which make a point, set a mood, or reveal character. Lists come in an endless variety of forms.
Imitate the following form using your own subject as content. Your imitation is a loose imitation which does not have to match the form below exactly but which should attempt to capture the spirit of the exercise. Insert this in a appropriate place into your finished narrative.
The simple items in a series: Write a sentence which imitates this simple series.
The woman dumped chewing gum, change, and a gun onto the table. subject predicate item 1 item 2 item 3 prepositional phrase
The woman dumped chewing gum, change, and a gun onto the table.
The developed simple items in a series: Write a sentence which develops the simple series you wrote above into a developed list.
| The tall woman with the dark eyes | strode to the table and dumped | a six-pack of Wrigley's chewing gum, | six pennies, six bits worth of quarters and a dime, | and a snub-nosed .38 special | onto the table. |
| Add adjectives and prepositional phrase to subject | Add another strong verb and a specific detail to the predicate | Add detail and proper name to item 1 | Make item 2 specific | Keep item 3 simple but make it specific | prepositional phrase |
| Generally avoid piling up adjectives as in "tall, dark woman. Instead, distribute the adjectives. | This new information could have been in a separate sentence: "The woman strode to the table." Blending information into the same sentence streamlines your prose, makes it more concise, and easier to read. | This and the next set of details reveal character. | When writing examples into a set of items in a series, always move to the specific and concrete level. Specific and concrete is inherently interesting. | This list has been consciously arranged so as to save the most interesting and revealing information for last; in other words the list is climatic. Think about the order in which you are presenting detail. Generally, you want to present the most important last. |
The tall woman with the dark eyes strode to the table and dumped a six-pack of Wrigley's chewing gum, six pennies, six bits worth of quarters and a dime, and a snub-nosed .38 special onto the table.
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