Writers in the Storm

By Lori Freeland

Are you a comma criminal? Do you steal commas from places where they really need to stay? Or maybe you’re a comma enthusiast and stick them in wherever you “feel” they need to be? If you said yes to one or both, you’re not alone. When it comes to commas, most people don’t go by any solid rules. Not only can that make your sentence structure inconsistent, it can confuse your readers about what you’re trying to say.     

It’s comma time again. I know. Try to contain your groans. We’re almost done! In this fourth part of the series, we’ll talk about pauses, sentence clarification, places, people, dates, words at the end of a sentence, and dialogue. And yes, it’s going to be easier than it sounds. Once you get the hang of commas, using them will come more naturally. I promise.

Have you missed any of the first three installments? No worries. Click on the links below to catch up. Here’s a quick guide if you’re looking for something specific.

• To Comma, or Not to Comma (Part 1): Part 1 covers general comma abuse, dependent and  independent clauses, plus everything else you thought you didn’t need to know about sentences, clauses, and predicates.

• To Comma, or Not to Comma (Part 2): Part 2 covers essential and unessential information, “that” clauses, and names.

• To Comma, or Not to Comma (Part 3): Part 3 covers adjectives, including size, color, and number, and the dreaded Oxford (serial) comma.

Take a Pause

Sometimes, even if we follow the comma rules, the meaning of words in a sentence can be unclear or need some contrast. Especially when those words fall at the end.

Incorrect: He’s just being quiet silly.

This literally means he’s being “quiet silly.” Which isn’t really a thing.

Correct: He’s just being quiet, silly.  

Incorrect: He was only distracted not stupid.

Correct: He was only distracted, not stupid.

As a general rule, use a comma before “not” at the end of a sentence.

Incorrect: Our robotic math professor seemed different today almost human.

Correct: Our robotic math professor seemed different today, almost human.

Incorrect: That’s John’s new car isn’t it?

Correct: That’s John’s new car, isn’t it?

Sentence Clarification

Commas come in handy if there’s ever an issue with understanding what a sentence means. 

Incorrect: Jeremy gestured at the herd of stampeding horses yelling wildly.

Above, the horses are yelling wildly, not Jeremy. But with a comma added in the right place below, it becomes clear that Jeremy is the one yelling.

Correct: Jeremy gestured at the herd of stampeding horses, yelling loudly.

Places, People, Dates

Use commas to set off specific geographical places and addresses, people’s titles, and dates.

Examples of Places:

• Dallas, Texas, is where I’m from.
• I used to live in Madison, Wisconsin, before I moved.
• My sister lives at 676 Maple Lane, Plano, Texas.

Yes, you need a comma after the state too if it’s not at the end of the sentence. The odd way it looks throws many people off.

Examples of Titles:

• My primary care doctor is Glenda Green, MD.
• Glenda Green, MD, is my primary care doctor.

Examples of Dates:

• September 11, 2001, is a date no one will ever forget.
• May 18, 1943, was the day my mom was born.

Yes, you need a comma after the year too. Even though it seems weird.  

Exception: There is no comma with just the month and year—unless the date is used an opening clause.

• I married my husband January 1991.
• In January 1991, I married my husband. 

TOO, ALSO, EITHER at the end of a sentence

Just like we no longer type that extra space after a period, we can scratch that comma before too, also, and either, providing the words come at the end of a sentence and the meaning is clear.  

Correct: Keep the comma.

• I, too, like fruit.
• I, also, like fruit.

Correct: Ditch the comma.

• I like fruit too.
• I like also.
• I don’t like fruit either.

Dialogue

Finally, something most writers are familiar with—dialogue. There’s a simple rule here. We always use commas to set off dialogue. That’s it.

But remember dialogue means what your characters say out loud. It’s external. We’re not talking about the thoughts inside their heads. That’s internal and doesn’t need quotes either. See my post on Dive Deep into Dialogue for, well, a deeper dive into dialogue.  

Incorrect: Jean said I’m not hungry. / I’m not hungry Jean said.

Correct: “I’m not hungry,” Jean said. /Jean said, “I’m not hungry.”

A Final Hint

Use commas when your reader will be confused without them.

Incorrect: To George Lucas was the father of Star Wars.

Because the two names, George and Lucas, usually belong together, we read them as if they are together. But that’s not what the writer of this sentence meant.

Correct: To George, Lucas was the father of Star Wars.

We’re done. You made it! I hope you walked away from this comma series with some concrete takeaways. I’d love to hear them. What have you struggled with? What did you learn? Do you have any comma advice to share? And what other punctuation would you like me to cover? I love requests as much as I love your comments.

Looking for more help? Check out my favorite grammar sites.

• My favorite go-to or commas is Purdue Owl, where they break down the basic comma rules into a quick guide as well as an extended guide. You can check them out here. Quick Comma Rules and Extended Comma Rules.

But you can also find great information at:

• The Chicago Manual of Style
• The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
• Grammarly.com
• The Grammar Monster
• Grammar Girl
• I’m also loving the PerfectIt 5 software. It’s partnering with The Chicago Manual of Style.

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About Lori

An encourager at heart, author, editor, and writing coach Lori Freeland believes everyone has a story to tell. She’s presented multiple workshops at writer’s conferences across the country and writes everything from non-fiction to short stories to novels—YA to adult.

When she’s not curled up with her husband drinking too much coffee and worrying about her kids, she loves to mess with the lives of the imaginary people living in her head.

You can find her young adult and contemporary romance at lorifreeland.com and her inspirational blog and writing tips at lafreeland.com. Her book, Where You Belong: a runaway series novella, is currently free on Kindle Unlimited. 

Structuring your novel’s big picture is important. The structure of your scenes all the way down to your character’s motivations and reactions are equally important. If you get the sequence out of order, you risk confusing or completely disengaging your reader. Don’t worry. You can create compelling scenes with the MRU. The motivation-reaction unit (MRU) is a tool introduced by Dwight V. Swain in his book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. This post is only an introduction to the MRU. In his book, Mr. Swain does a deep dive into the MRU and other tools writers can use to be a selling writer.

"A story is a series of motivation-reaction units. The chain they form as they link together is the pattern of emotion.”

Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain.

What is the MRU?

In Techniques of the Selling Writer, Mr. Swain uses his understanding of the pattern of emotion (how people’s brains work) to create a guideline for writing fiction. He calls it the motivation-reaction unit (MRU) and breaks it down into parts. 

At its simplest, the MRU is—

a.) Motivation.

b.) Reaction.

In the book, Mr. Swain talks about each part of the MRU in great detail. Read it to get a deeper understanding of the MRU. He also discusses what story is, story structure, character, conflict, and ways to be a successful professional writer. 

How Your Brain Reacts to Stimuli 

People react to a stimulus predictably. There are simple responses, more detailed responses and complex responses. What we think varies. What we feel varies. What we do and say varies. But each of our brains reacts to a stimulus in the same pattern. 

A stimulus is something that directly rouses a reaction or activity. We pick up stimuli with one of our senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste. Neurons in your brain process the stimulus and cause a sequence of responses. The blink of an eye is one reflex that happens instantly. Some responses we learned at an early age— don’t touch the hot stove. We gain some after repeated experiences, and some responses need to be processed on a higher level of thought that might take hours to months.

Simplest Stimulus and Response

A reflex is your body’s simplest response. A dangerous stimulus causes an immediate motor response. 

Stimulus: Something flies toward your eye.

Response: You blink without a conscious thought. 

More Complicated Stimulus and Response

The more complicated the stimuli, the more complicated your response. Your brain processes this in nanoseconds and your body responds in seconds or minutes. 

Stimulus: You feel the pain of a bee stinging you.

Reaction: You want to stop the pain, slap at the bee, and yell. 

Complex Stimuli and Response

Some stimuli, particularly social ones, are far more complex and trigger a complex response.

Stimulus: Your ex-husband confronts you at a public event and loudly demands that you admit your much loved, recently departed, second husband abused you. 

Reaction: Confused and hurt, you play the words in your head again,. You knot your hands into fists. You politely deny the accusation and you excuse yourself from the uncomfortable situation. Later, you replay the scene in your head; you remember similar conversations with your ex, and your suppressed anger boils. You curse loudly and deface your ex’s expensive car. 

How to Create an Effective Motivation

Motivation always comes before reaction. But what motivation is Mr. Swain talking about? He’s not talking about the motivation to pick up a coffee mug or sniff a flower on your morning walk. He refines the term motivation to motivating stimulus. A motivating stimulus is “anything outside your focal character to which he reacts.” The important word in that definition is “outside.” It’s not a thought or worry. Those may be part of a scene’s sequel, but the motivating stimulus comes from outside—another character’s presence or actions, the weather, or the situation.  

Motivating Stimulus

To be an effective motivating stimulus, it must be something that is significant to your focal character. It must be significant enough that it demands your focal character react actively. Because of her personality or needs, or wants, she must act.

The best motivating stimulus is also pertinent to your story. The writer selects a stimulus that sets up the change you want your focal character to experience. It is a change in your focal character’s external world. This change stimulates the focal character to change his internal thoughts or ways of doing things. 

The stimulus also must make sense to your reader. You will jerk your reader out of the story if your focal character has hated guns from the beginning and in chapter twenty, she picks up a gun and shoots accurately. 

If your motivating stimulus doesn’t do all these things, your story or scene will be less effective and possibly be the place your reader puts it down, never to pick it up again. 

The R (Reaction) in MRU

Your character’s reaction is anything your character feels, says, or thinks because of the motivating stimulus.

Mr. Swain breaks the Reaction portion of the MRU down into three parts: feeling, action, and speech. This is the order in which they should appear on the page in order for your reader to process the story. Below is the M-R from the reaping scene in The Hunger Games.

Motivating Stimulus:

Effie Trinket announces Katniss’s little sister, Prim, is the next participant in a deadly competition. 

Reaction:

Shocked, Katniss stands rooted to the spot and watches her sister move forward. She follows her sister. She shouts Prim’s name over and over. Then, realizing Prim will never survive the “game,” Katniss volunteers to take her sister’s place.

How to Create an Effective Reaction

Like the Motivating Stimulus, the Reaction must be significant, pertinent, and motive. It also must be characteristic and reasonable.

The reaction is significant when it creates the character change and moves the story forward in a way that you, the writer, intended. We see that in the reaping scene from The Hunger Games. 

Mr Swain uses the term motive to describe a character doing something. The character’s reaction is motive if it is active, particularly if it leads to more change. The reader expects that Katniss’s reaction of volunteering as tribute will change her life. 

A characteristic reaction is typical behavior of your focal character. It can be unexpected or stronger than usual, but it is in keeping with the character’s personality. It should be a reasonable response to the stimulus. In The Hunger Games, the reader knows Katniss is protective of her sister and accepts Katniss volunteering as characteristic. 

Why use MRUs in your Writing?

Consider a motivation-reaction unit where your mild-mannered character, a middle-aged woman, receives a blackmail note. Your character’s reaction is to confront her daughter and to demand if the photo is of her. Then your character shakes and cries and wrings her hands and you learn she’d received the blackmail note with a lewd picture of her daughter. She doesn’t have that much money. Maybe the photo isn’t of her daughter. But it won’t matter if once it’s on the internet everyone thinks it’s her daughter.

Confused? Yeah. When the writer reveals motivation and reaction randomly, it’s hard to follow.

Rewind that scene, this time we’ll use the motivation-reaction unit.

Motivating Stimulus:

Your middle-aged female character receives a blackmail note with a lewd photo of her college-age daughter. The note demands $100,000 or the pictures will go viral on the internet.

Reaction:

Feeling: She can’t believe it’s her daughter. She realizes even if it isn’t her daughter, once it’s on the internet, her daughter won’t be able to get a job. Your character puts her hand to her mouth. She doesn’t have that much money. She shakes and cries and wrings her hands. Then she decides to drive to her daughter’s college.

Action: She meets her daughter and shows her daughter the picture.

Speech. She asks her daughter, “Is this you?”

How Long is an MRU?

Make your MRUs paragraphs long, a single paragraph, or even shorter. Show your character’s reaction in a reflex: She ducks, avoiding being hit by the baseball bat. In the example above, you can use the same motivation stimulus and make it short.

Motivating Stimulus:

She receives a lewd photo and blackmail note. 

Reaction:

Feeling: She can’t believe it’s her daughter. 

Action: She puts her hand to her mouth. 

Speech: “It won’t matter if it isn’t her. Future employers will believe it is.” 

OR

An MRU can show a reflex.

Motivating Stimulus:

She receives a lewd photo and blackmail note. 

Reaction:

Feeling: Shock

Action: Recoil

Speech:Gasp

Create Compelling Scenes with the MRU

With a clear motivating stimulus, your character can react with as much feeling, action, and speech as is appropriate for that character and situation. Using the motivation-reaction unit follows the same pattern your brain does. That pattern helps you write a story that makes sense to the reader, that compels the reader to keep reading.

Once you understand it, you can create compelling scenes with the MRU. With practice, you will vary the shape, texture, and color of the MRUs within your story. And the scenes you write will have an energy that carries your reader to the next page and the next until they reach the end. 

Have you heard of the MRU before? What have you written (read, or watched) that uses the MRU?

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows loves hot coffee, reading physical books, and the crack of a 9mm pistol—not all at the same time, though they all appear in her books. She writes action-filled science fiction with characters who discover their inner strength and determination, and make courageous choices for themselves, their family, and their world.

In Book One of the Fellowship Dystopia, My Soul to Keep, Miranda Clarke lived a charmed life… until she breaks the rules. But it is 1961 and America’s a theocracy. Following the rules isn’t optional. In the recently released book two, If I Should Die, Miranda, the former “good daughter” of the Fellowship, has transformed into a hero of the rebellion but now she faces the question, what do you do when the other side doesn’t want to listen. Owned by two Yorkshire Terriers, Lynette lives in the land of Oz. When she’s not procrastinating by not doing housework and playing with her dogs, she’s blogging or writing or researching her next book. You can find Lynette online at https://lynettemburrows.com, Facebook.com/LynetteMBurrowsAuthor, or on Twitter @LynetteMBurrows. 

by Ellen Buikema

Character, voice, conflict, and some of the setting is a lot to get in upfront, but this is where to hook your readers with a compelling first line.

Recently, I attended a webinar where writers submitted their first lines for review by an editor. The editor was straightforward and no-nonsense. She gave several suggestions to help make the first lines better.

I reviewed the first lines I submitted after the webinar ended, keeping in mind all that was said. The more recent manuscript had a reasonably good first line. But the other one, written a few years ago and set aside...good grief. That first line is a sad wispy creature in need of beefing up.

Below are some of the suggestions I gleaned, all of which I plan to use.

3 Must-Have First Line Elements

Character

Great first lines weave an interesting character. An important rule of writing is to bring out your character and the situation right away. If your main characters are intriguing, the readers will keep turning those pages to find out what they do next.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

— One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

This next first line gives a lot of information. The narrator is likely an angsty teenager who is well read and somewhat cynical.  

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

— The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

Voice

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” –1984 George Orwell

George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1949, presents a dystopian setting with the use of clocks “striking thirteen,” showing the readers that the story happens in a world with different rules.

Think about the first line as a close up to the action. If you’re stuck for a first line, fast forward five minutes into the story and write the first sentence from that perspective. This first line feels like it’s starting smack in the middle of the action.

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” — The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

Tone

The tone of the first line gives the reader a sense of genre and the age group for which the book is meant. “The green cigarette smoke thwacked Ashley’s brain through the bandages of a broken nose.” A first line that mentions green cigarette smoke fits fantasy, perhaps science fiction, and hints at YA or older readers.

A short first line can be as good as a lengthy one. It may not include a lot of detail, but can pack a mighty punch. Here, the main character is already in a hot mess. “I’m pretty much fucked.”

― The Martian, Andy Weir

Further Reading: here are some great opening lines in literature.

Other suggestions from the editor

• Don’t have too many things happening in the sentence.
• Boring is bad.
  • Forget the mundane and make the first line interesting.
  • Instead of focusing on looking inside a refrigerator concentrate on what’s in it and why.
• Steer clear of passive construction and purple prose—overwritten.
• Be personal, specific.
• Get rid of parenthetical phrases.
• Include a character to connect with the reader otherwise it’s hard to get invested in the story.
• Beware of redundancies such as back-to-back prepositional phrases.
  • If it’s 4 AM and early morning, we already know that 4 AM is early.
  • Don’t wake up in the first line. Waking up isn’t interesting.
• Too many facial expressions as these are awkward.
• Avoid cliches and exclamation points.
• Don’t write a first line that gives the reader an excuse to put down your book such as, “If you are proper, strait-laced person, stop reading this book.” Even if you’re writing this line to be funny, it may not come off that way.

Instead of writing your opening line with reams of gorgeous sentences about the landscape and the character’s backstory, dig into a scene that starts with a bang, beginning with a compelling first line.

What are your favorite first lines? How do you like to start your stories? Please share your insights with us -- including your first line if you wish -- below in the comments!

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About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA paranormal fantasy.

Find her at https://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay