Toe the Crack: Tips for Structuring Sequential Action

Without creating grammar errors!

Have you ever climbed a rock? Even if you haven’t, I’ll bet you can imagine what it’s like. Harness. Rope. Helmet. Rock. That’s me in the picture below, a novice taking on some of the best climbs in Joshua Tree National Park.

Rock climbing is one of those absolute experiences. You’ve gotta be all in. There’s no popping onto social media, checking makeup, or restlessly programming a playlist.

All in.

Total concentration.

One action at a time.

And of course, there are lots of moving parts: your body, the wind, the rope, the sun, your partner. (The spider you realized you touched when you dug your fingers into a dark crevice…)

When you pick up a foot and toe into a crack, all your concentration must be right there. Every movement is distinct, every action intentional and in the proper sequence.

That tension, squinting against the glare, pushing ahead despite the obstacles, is not unlike writing. Words are the writer’s tools—like the rope, the harness, or the helmet are the means of climbing the rocks. Misusing the tools of our craft means we slip and we stumble. Hopefully we never take a life-or-death fall… but a critical writing fail? Perhaps.

This is always a hard message to share with authors. But sometimes something that sounds lovely is simply not possible or not correct. Why does that matter? Why isn’t it okay to just write stuff? The reader will get what you mean, right?

Not necessarily. Take a look at these examples:

I put the brownie in my mouth, licking my fingers.

He picked up the knife in his hands, slicing the bag open.

Standing in the doorway of the room, she whipped the bedding from the mattress.

The way these sentences are worded, there should be actions that are sequential (one before the next), but in fact they are written as concurrent or simultaneous actions.

If you write an action and then toss a descriptive clause on the back end, that clause will frequently create an impossible or improbable concurrent action. (If you’re a grammar geek, you’ll recognize the dangling modifiers as well! A separate but very real technical concern.)

Read the example sentences a little more closely now.

The first sentence strictly states that I was licking my fingers AS I put the brownie in my mouth. Well, unless my fingers were already in my mouth and I somehow jammed the brownie in around them… You see the problem. How should we fix this impossible simultaneous action? Here are two possibilities:

I put the brownie in my mouth and licked my fingers.

After putting the brownie in my mouth, I licked my fingers.

There are many other ways to revise this, but as long as you make it clear that one thing happened, and then another, you’ll have a sentence that matches real human behavior and you won’t have wonky adjective clauses stuck to the wrong object.

Now, the guy in the example above who picks up the knife has a serious problem… He’s been slicing the bag AS he picks up his knife. I hope that doesn’t mean he was IN the bag… How should we fix this?

Possible revisions:

He picked up the knife in his hands, then sliced the bag open.

And I would argue we can omit in his hands… Unless the context suggests otherwise, a reasonable reader can easily infer that he would pick the knife up with his hands!

I’ll bet you’re getting the hang of it.

How about the woman? If she is standing in the doorway of a room, how is she going to reach the bed to yank off the bedding?

Don’t be confused by this example. This does NOT mean you have to spell out every single step your character makes. Not at all. If you show a character waking up in the morning, we can safely assume that character went to bed at some point prior to the scene we are being shown. We can safely assume that character will get out of bed, even if you never actually show us the covers being pulled back, the stretch and yawn, and so on.

But if you’re going to show two or even three or more actions in one sentence, make sure they follow a realistic, logical sequence. Think about the rock climber, whether that’s me, or you, or anyone else. One action at a time. Find your balance. Lift your foot. Find a fingerhold. Test it for stick. Toe the crack. And up you go! One action logically following the last.

You can combine those actions into one lovely sentence, but make sure you’re not toeing and finding and lifting all at one time. You’ll just end up giving that safety harness—and your editor—a workout.

If you need an editor, a manuscript evaluation, or other services, feel free to comment below or reach out through our website. We’re like a tour guide through the rocks but for writers! We’re holding tight to the harness, and we won’t let you fall!

*Thanks so much to my dear friend Julie Burgener for taking these pics and for introducing me to the joys of bruised knees and sticky shoes.