Pacing prose - blunt sentences vs vivid descriptions

Okay, so I have this problem; In a story I'm writing, one of the characters has mania/hypomania - they perform all their actions with a high level of speed and energy. I want the text and their dialogue to convey this to the reader but I'm not sure how.

Plan A was togivetheirdialoguenospaces, but this rapidly became unreadable.

Plan B was to make both their dialogue and the narration use lots of run on sentences and intentional comma splices, but this rapidly became unreadable.

Plan C was to make her cut off other characters a lot and have long swaths of dialogue to herself, but well, it was hard to read.

Plan D is a little more complicated, and where I'd like your advice. I'm trying to make all the sentences that describe her actions feel short and to the point, but I'm not sure whether this is best done via Beige Prose or a more accurate description.

Examples

She stabbed him.

She swiftly stabbed him.

She stabbed him suddenly.

Suddenly, she stabbed him, and then swiftly withdrew the knife.

She stabbed him without warning, and withdrew the knife just as quickly.

I write a lot of beige prose anyway, so that is my predilection, but her actions are not blunt - more like high-energy, varied, and constant. There's also the issue of the Said Bookism (not a lot of ways to say "she said rapidly" and even if there were, I try to use them as sparingly as possible)

Which writing style would match this frame of mind best? Which would contrast most sharply with normal/more evenly-paced narration, without being too grating?

Thanks greatly in advance for your thoughts, and if I've failed to explain things properly (as I often do) please say so!

You could test skipping to the effect of the stabbing(or whatever). Stuff happens so fast that even the narrator can't see what's happening.

Using the example:

He suddenly falls to the floor bleeding, she swiftly withdraws the knife and walks away.

edited 31st Oct '12 8:11:14 AM by m8e

Depending on how you set that up, there's a lot of Deus ex Machina moments waiting to happen with that style.

right.

This should probably only be used on simple quick movements, and everything shouldn't be written like this. The aim is to make it clear what happens and jumping straight to the point(effect) without writing it straight out just when it happens.

Usually this just end up as Effect=>Confirmation of the deed, instead of Deed=>Effect. Sometimes it possible to do stuff like "He suddenly falls to the floor bleeding, she swiftly withdraws her knife from his back.". If she was holding the knife before this happened there's only one explanation of how the knife ended up in his back.

Done right this end up as the stabbing motion itself happened so fast/suddenly that the narrator and reader missed it.

edited 1st Nov '12 1:34:03 AM by m8e

Hmm, so kind of a literary version of the Jump Cut? An intriguing idea, but set up would definitely be really important, otherwise it would get incredibly disorienting (just like a visual Jump Cut), but it might work in small doses

You could shave the bluntness down even farther if you combine actions, and never describe just the one thing she's doing. Ex: "She stabbed him six times, kicked a rock, and killed a dog with her car on the way home." When so many actions are given, but unrelated, our brains make stories to connect them. We connect the stabbing to the rock to the whole story we give to the dog, so it seems like a whole lot more action has been crammed into a short amount of time.

As my post noted, I already considered the use of copious comma splices (ending a sentence with a comma when a period is better; 'He ate a sandwich, the door to the restaurant opened loudly.' vs 'He ate a sandwich. The door to the restaurant opened loudly.').

It works, but it also becomes much harder to read, and I don't think I'm a good enough writer to pull off breaking the rules that badly :P

edited 2nd Nov '12 9:53:31 PM by CleverPun

It just sounds wrong there, and technically is. Granted, there is a certain kind of stream-of-consciousness style in which you can make such things work, but those two sentences are too... normal to low into each other, and too far removed from each other in content.

You could experiment with intentionally disjointed sentence fragments:

Obviously it would get tiresome in an extended scene, but in short bursts it could be quite effective.

Comma splices should come naturally, they're normally something you do because you're not putting deliberate thought into your choice of grammar. The point is to make it sound natural so it sounds like speech. If you haven't developed a sense for when it works, then yeah, it'll be harder to pull off, but you need less good-writer-ness to do it, as opposed to a sort of conversational comfort with the language. If you wanted to try it regardless, a good rule of thumb might be if you would naturally be able to replace it with a semicolon so that it's grammatically correct and still feels right; alternatively, dropping a subordinating conjunction between otherwise-independent clauses works. Like everything else, you don't want to overuse it, but you seem to be aware of that. Run-ons are harder to pull off without being annoying since comma splices often go unnoticed due to the mistake being made in the first place because they feel natural but a better way of doing things might be to have long sentences that happen to be sorely lacking in commas and sentence breaks in multiple places where they could let the reader catch a mental breath. (Definitely don't overuse that one.)

Dae Brayk wasn't talking about comma splices, though...? That's a grammatically correct sentence. I'm not certain it gives the same effect (short sentences confer speed; summaries kind of don't have the same feel even if more time passes over one summarising sentence, at least as far as I can tell) but it could have its place if used properly.

Literary jump cuts might work for sufficiently big moments, and works well if you want to be disturbing. A more watered-down version of that is to portray the action without making it be about the character—rather than "She stabbed him" you have "The knife pierced his liver"—or strictly skipping the moment her action has its effect, like "He swung the axe. Her head thunked onto the floor." This is more for a disjointed or slightly dissociated effect than strictly energy, so I couldn't tell you if it helps with mania itself.

If you go with disjointed sentence fragments like Specialist suggests, but aren't going for a faintly traumatised flashback, you could add brief but vivid descriptions of events to the middle of the scene. Conversation, flash to the weight of the knife in her hand, conversation continues, the expanding pool of blood is now touching her shoe, conversation's still going, etc. Meanwhile the stuff she isn't noticing is getting ignored, so the effect is kind of like beige with splashes of colour.

Cut down on adverbs. This isn't only for general concise writing purposes, but in this case they slow the pace of the writing down and that's exactly what you don't want. Suddenly, quickly, rapidly, whatever—for those kinds of adjectives especially, there should be a better way of conveying speed. Short sentences with unexpected content for suddenness, for example (like they're having a conversation and the next line has her blade buried in the guy's stomach).

edited 2nd Nov '12 11:43:03 PM by greedling

Your description kind of reminds me of the narrative style of Joey Swallows The Key. Yeah, it's a children's book, but it has this nice 1st person POV of the main protagonist, who has ADHD. When reading it, you get the feeling he's just motor mouthing the entire narrative nonstop.

So, keep the grammar, but...make it feel as if you haven't stopped for a single breath in the prose, so perhaps keep a limit on commas, but don't eradicate them completely. Beige prose can work too, but remember: If it's too beige, then the narrative becomes boring and/or it lacks the visualization needed.

As for book saidism, don't worry about it too much. Just don't overuse the synonyms of 'Said' and you should be fine.

@ JHM: Yes, my example might've been better, but I didn't feel like digging through any of my stories to find a proper comma splice.

@ Specialist: Interesting idea. It might just be your example, but to me it conveys a disjointed detachment from reality rather than an excess of energy. I'll see if it can work in short bursts to get the effect I want.

@ Greedling: A very thorough summary! Thanks for the advice, though you'll understand if it takes me some time to process it all

@ Tehpillowstar: I read a bit of it, and I can see what you mean. The narration does have a very rapid pacing, and I think it's a combination of varying sentence length, long paragraphs, and a few other things (I think I even saw implementations of some of the ideas from this thread). My story isn't in first person, but thanks for the tip