Pattern Search

find and emphasize the existing patterns in your work

Analyze the patterns in your text. Start with basic shapes like chapter, section, paragraph and sentence length. One common structure is for a text to have chapters of regular lengths, but any pattern — say alternating long and short chapters, or long chapters from one point of view interspersed regularly with short chapters from another — will work. What rarely works is a text whose shape is erratic — a few short bits here and there, one long one, and several of intermediate scale. A series of texts within texts could be hugely connecting, but if not curated and made to interlock, multiple texts could simply be confusing and disorienting. For example, you could punctuate a novel effectively with recurring scenes of film or stage play-like dialogue. But a text that has a play within a play, two newspaper clippings and a telegram — that might seem random. One rule of thumb is that if there’s one letter or very long paragraph, there should probably be at least two.

To figure out exactly what you have, you could make a table of contents for yourself, including details about the length and shape of your sections, or just try zooming out to a 10% page view and looking at as many pages as you can on your computer screen, all at once. Where’s the white space? Dialogue? How big are your paragraphs? Once you’ve identified patterns in your text, ask yourself what form they take. Is there any sort of alternating or braided structure, where you switch between or among time frames, places or central or point-of-view characters? If so, it should be satisfyingly regular without feeling machinelike or robotic. Do you have a beginning middle and end, a twelve month or perhaps a 24-hour structure? A triptych with three points of view? A saga in which years and points of view fly past? How do you mark and delineate the changes?

Another sort of pattern can be created through the use of recurring imagery or language, such as the mentions of the discovery of ice, or firing squads, or the repetition of the the phrase “many years later” in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. These become essential refrains that help orient the reader and give shape to what might otherwise be too sprawling a story.

So, look to your own text and find the patterns — they are surely there — and then perfect, enhance, vary and generally tend to them. The work will pay off by creating a very real sense of satisfaction in your reader. We’re genetically predisposed to love patterns.