Controlling the Reader

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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

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Have you felt your heart pound with fear during horror movies? Were you skittish when the slasher was about to knife a woman in the shower? The writer was controlling you. It isn’t difficult to control your readers in the same way. You can learn to control their heartbeat, and even how fast they read.

Maybe you’re wondering why a writer would want to control the rate of reading. The answer is that fast firing scenes yank the reader in, but lengthy, fast scenes wear them out. The reader needs the slow scenes to rest mentally and emotionally. The slow scenes will give them time to reassess the previous scenea.

Let’s look at some samples of how you can control the reader’s speed:

“We bounced up the stairs two at a time, slipped into my room unnoticed, and closed the door without making a sound.”

That sentence is fast because it has alliteration. (Alliteration is the constant sound of a successive letter, or what appears to be the same letter.) Note the words “bounced”, “stairs”, “slipped”, “unnoticed”, “closed” and “sound”. All have the S sound. There is also a T alliteration in - stairs, two, at, time, into, and unnoticed. Maybe you noticed the double alliteration, and how it increases the speed of reading.
Another way to speed up a scene is with action verbs, such as: “The roller coaster zipped and whirled at lightening speed,” or “The skater swished by in a rush.”
Slow the scenes with settings, scenery, or by using words with Ws and Ls, like this:

“A little lady watched from the crowd, and glanced momentarily at her watch.”

Note the four Ls in the last sentence and the three Ws. According to our rule, the double alliteration should make a faster flow, right? Not in this particular situation. The lulling sounds of Ls and Ws overtake the alliteration in the sentence to make it slow.

Let’s look at this sentence again, and apply what we know at this point:

“The roller coaster zipped and whirled at lightening speed.”

This is a fast sentence because it has the S sound of alliteration. Right? No. It’s slow because it has one W and four Ls? No, that’s incorrect.This sentence has to be fast. Why? Because Ws and Ls overpower alliteration but action words will command the Ws and Ls. You must know these tips in order to write affective stories, articles, and blogs.

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