Brad Pitt is here to supercharge your writing – you’re welcome
As much as I love watching the movie Troy (the 2004 version with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Eric Bana – yes please), it does get a little old, always seeing history from the man’s perspective.
So, when I heard about The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker – a story from the perspective of Briseis, a Trojan queen and the “prize” (ehm, captive) of Achilles after he sacked her city, I immediately picked it up.
The story follows her and the other patrician women who were captured, retelling the famous stories we know and love but from their perspective.
Spoiler – ‘twas not a good time for them.
But what was a good time?
Barker’s writing.
Holy Wednesday Morning was her writing well done.
Something that I think the online business has forgotten – amongst all the 15 second videos and “3 quick hacks” style of content is this: The human brain is wired for story.
Which means, when you tell a story, no matter what, you will have your audience’s attention. And, if you’re going to tell stories, I want you telling the kind that your audience can't put down, the kind that make your content something your audience searches out – regardless of what the algorithm is doing.
So, we turn to writers who craft stories for a living and who bring words so vividly to life that the characters dance, love, and wage war in our minds (I’ve worked alongside many of them in the last decades of writing professionally). When you’re done with the post, you’ll have two really powerful writing tools to keep in your pocket and pull out when it’s time to make your audience fall helplessly, happily in love with your words, content, and message.
Speaking of happily in love . . . the opening of this book is *chef’s kiss* excellent. She employs a few of my favorite writing techniques that will supercharge any flimsy email or social media post and make your words so irresistible your audience will gobble them up.
So, we’re going to break it down.
This breakdown won’t take long, and with a little practice, it will totally change your writing.
Read it below or click here to hear and sample of the first part of the story on Amazon with audio (not an affiliate link but the reader’s voice is excellent).
“Nobody was ever allowed the last word; not even a god.”
Alright, here’s how her book opens:
“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.
Swift-footed Achilles. Now there’s an interesting one. More than anything else, more than brilliance, more than greatness, his speed defined him. There’s a story that he once chased the god Apollo all over the plains of Troy. Cornered at last, Apollo is supposed to have said, ‘You can’t kill me, I’m immortal.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ Achilles replied. ‘But we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead.’
Nobody was ever allowed the last word; not even a god."
GAH! SO GOOD, RIGHT?!
Here’s why you’re nodding your head.
Baker orders her words for importance and impact. The way you structure your sentences plays a big role in how easy it is for your readers to understand and get through.
When you want your words to have a big impact, put the second most important information at the front, the least important information in the middle, and the most important information at the end.
2-3-1
One easy way to do this is by always burying the character responses (she said, he replied, etc.) and expressions in the middle of the sentence. For example, Barker’s dialogue wouldn’t be nearly as impactful if it read:
Achilles replied, “Ah, yes, but we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead.”
Or
“Ah, yes, but we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead,” Achilles replied.
Including those clauses at the beginning and end of the sentences interrupts the flow for you readers. It causes them to pause when they should keep flowing. Because she buries the reply in the middle, the sentence starts off really strong and ends with the power and finality of the word dead.
Here are a few other sentences from her text broken down:
Cornered at last, Apollo is supposed to have said, ‘You can’t kill me, I’m immortal.’
This sentence starts with the powerful clause cornered at last. Then Barker skips over the character speaking, and finishes with the powerful phrase “I’m immortal.”
2-3-1
It may seem like a little thing but these “little things” build up over time to make your writing stand out and resonate really deeply with your reader.
Challenge: Go back through your last social media post or email and see if there are places you can reorder your sentences to make a bigger impact. Then note how much stronger your message comes across!
“We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
Another great mini lesson from Barker is her sentence pacing. In the first paragraph, her sentence pacing immediately pulls the reader in.
“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
Short sentence. Medium sentence with repetition. Short sentence. Long sentence. Her pacing is brilliant. If you have a paragraph that is full of long or medium length sentences without any variety, it’ll get real monotonous real fast. So change things up!
Challenge: Go back through your last social media post or email and see if you’ve got any paragraphs suffering from the monotony of sameness. Then change it up. Shorten and lengthen to create a paragraph that keeps the reader’s eye and keeps them reading longer.