Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

by Ben Blatt

  Books run by the Stratemeyer Syndicate weren’t the only ones who used this tactic to make children keep reading. Enid Blyton is a prolific British children’s author who wrote 186 novels, starting in 1922, that would end up selling half a billion copies. The Famous Five, a Blyton series about five kids who go on adventures when back from boarding school, had chapters that ended with the “Obvious Cliffhanger Mark” 83 % of the time. A normal sentence in her book only ended in such excitement 25 %.

  In today’s popular children’s and young adult literature the trend is all but absent. Harry Potter ends with such obvious cliffhangers about 14 % of the time. The Goosebumps series clocks in at 18 %, the Hunger Games series at 4 %, and all 142 chapters of the Divergent trilogy end in a period.

  It’s impossible to come up with an objective measure of cliffhanger-ness, though. The Hunger Games may not use loud punctuation at the end of the chapters, but that doesn’t mean there are not cliffhangers. Ending chapter after chapter with a question mark or exclamation point may be too heavy-handed for modern sensibilities. But there is another style choice that almost all popular page-turner writers use to signal a cliffhanger ending.

  There are 82 chapters in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. Throughout the books, about 9 % of all paragraphs (not including dialogue) are one sentence long. However, when considering the final paragraph of each chapter, we find that 62 % are just one sentence long.

  For example, here are some of the last paragraphs a reader sees before deciding whether or not to flip to the next chapter.

  Then the ants bore into my eyes and I black out.

  In other words, I step out of line and we’re all dead.

  This is one of his death traps.

  And his blood as it splatters the tiles.

  Right before the explosions begin, I find a star.

  It’s hard to get the full effect of such a short chapter ender from the single sentences above. The average paragraph in the Hunger Games is ninety words. It fills more than one-third of a typical page. But for the ends of her chapters, Collins chooses to avoid anything that might look like a wall of text. She gives the reader a short, attention-grabbing plot point to keep them interested.

  Collins’s practice of ending chapters on a short, punchy paragraphs turns out to be near universal among thriller writers. Patterson’s 22 Alex Cross books all have shorter chapter-ending paragraphs than the paragraphs throughout. Stephen King is twice as likely to use a single-sentence paragraph when it’s the last paragraph of a chapter.

  Abrupt Chapter Endings of Popular Thriller, Suspense, and Mystery Writers

  AUTHOR

  BOOKS

  PERCENT OF ONE-SENTENCE CLOSING PARAGRAPHS

  OVERALL PERCENT OF ONE-SENTENCE PARAGRAPHS

  Suzanne Collins

  3 Hunger Games

  62%

  9%

  Dan Brown

  4 Robert Langdon Books

  53%

  39%

  James Patterson

  22 Alex Cross Books

  57%

  26%

  Clive Cussler

  23 Dirk Pitt Novels

  48%

  23%

  David Baldacci

  29 Novels

  56%

  37%

  Stephen King

  51 Novels

  50%

  26%

  Gillian Flynn

  3 Novels

  40%

  27%

  Michael Crichton

  24 Novels

  54%

  33%

  Tom Clancy

  13 Novels

  19%

  11%

  Veronica Roth

  3 Divergent Books

  52%

  25%

  Note: Some books have clearly titled chapters. Others have page breaks with no markings and some have no page breaks at all. For some books, judgment calls were required to decide what constituted a chapter.

  Of the last 40 New York Times number one bestsellers that were thrillers, mystery, or suspense, 36 books had chapter-ending paragraphs that were shorter than the paragraphs within the rest of the chapter. The typical thriller has 60 % more one-sentence paragraphs at the end of the chapter than in the middle.

  Not everyone is a fan of these abrupt paragraphs. In a review of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park Martin Amis criticized the novel for having “one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences.” Even if Amis was not talking about the last chunk of text in a chapter, it’s clear he considers Crichton’s use of short paragraphs a cliché of the thriller genre.

  But in The Information, Amis’s novel that came out the same year as his Jurassic Park review, he ends 30 % of his chapters with one-sentence paragraphs. That’s almost twice as often as he uses a one-sentence prose paragraph in the rest of the book. Even some literary writers like Amis find a certain usefulness in ending abruptly to get the reader to keep reading.

  The page-turner practice has not in general crept its way from thrillers to literary fiction. In 2013 and 2014, 41 different novels were given at least one of the following honors: New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year, Pulitzer Prize finalists, Man Booker Prize short list, National Book Award finalists, National Book Critics Circle finalists, and Time magazine’s best books of the year. Thirty-eight of these books had chapters. Of these books, just twenty had more one-sentence paragraphs at the end of chapters than in the middle of the chapter. That’s close to half, about what could be considered random.

  While there’s no sign that literary writers en masse will be using the device anytime soon, among popular thriller writers the one-sentence ender seems to be the natural evolution of the Hardy Boys’ or Enid Blyton’s Famous Five’s distinctive cliffhanger marks. There’s one very good reason why page-turners keep seeking out punchy endings, and it’s the same reason that the Hunger Games and Alex Cross series each have sold millions of copies. What is it?

  Cliffhangers work.

  * * *

  I. Book sales are often self-reported by publishers. A 2010 Canadian Broadcasting Company article stated 500 million copies of Steel’s books have been sold.

  II. The Hardy Boys books have been revised since their original publication. This chapter used the revised versions. The originals were standardized as well at 25 chapters each.

  Throughout this book, I’ve been looking for the blend of rules and rule-breaking that come together to make writing work—or rather to make writing excel. It’s an odd mix of consistency and the unexpected, of simple communication and whimsical delight, but it’s what we find driving our best fiction forward.

  I grew up on Roald Dahl books. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, and The Twits were some of the most popular books in my elementary school despite the fact that we were reading them forty years after they were penned. But as I was in the midst of researching and writing this book there was one forgotten Dahl short story that I found myself rereading over and over: “The Great Automatic Grammatizator.”

  An engineer named Adolph Knipe dreams of writing stories that people will read. Knipe looks at the beginning of his latest failed novel attempt, which begins, of course, “The night was dark and stormy.” Then he has a eureka moment.

  . . . he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged.

  He invents a machine he calls the Great Automatic Grammatizator. It takes in plots and can spit out a finished story. Knipe starts with short stories. Soon he dials up the complexity to the length of the novel and, getting more daring, he programs it to write a “high class intelligent book.” Knipe harnesses his machine to the point where “one half of all novels” published in English are written by the Great Automatic Grammatizator.
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  Now a tycoon due to the power of his bestseller machine, he forces other writers to the brink of starvation. The narrator of this story is not the engineer Knipe but an opposing author. Knipe offers the narrator a contract not to write. This would allow the narrator to eat, but the automated computer-generated stories would take over. Or, the narrator can decide not to sign the contract, which would allow him to write but leave him broke. The story ends with a plea from the narrator: “Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve.”

  Like “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” my book has been about the marriage of numbers and words. People often have polarizing reactions when objective analysis is applied to art. As I’ve discussed this book, I’ve encountered two opposite camps, which I’ve categorized in my head as the extreme skeptic and the doomsdayer.

  The extreme skeptic is uneasy every time they see a number next to a word. Writing is an art, not a science, so how can math provide any substance?

  If you’ve made it this far in the book I hope I have convinced you not to be that extreme skeptic. I’ve tried to tackle questions that are common to readers and writers. There’s a distinct benefit to being able to run through millions of words at once. You may lose a word’s impact on a particular page, but a new appreciation for an author can come to light. Patterns that are spread out over a corpus of literature, too large to be consumed by any one reader, can teach new trends, ideas, techniques, and wisdom that would otherwise be hidden.

  In contrast to the skeptic, there is the person yelling that the sky is falling whenever they see anything to do with numbers and texts. If numbers can help us predict what will be popular to read, when will an algorithm just start writing novels for us? This is “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” distilled.

  Even today, more than sixty years after “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” was published, the concept is far-fetched science fiction. The numbers I’ve looked at here, and the calculations I’ve used, can help us read and see patterns—but they can’t help us know when to break them. The questions I sought to answer in my book are primitive. Are there words worth avoiding? How do popular authors use certain words? What are the most substantial differences in the way people from different backgrounds write?

  These questions are only a starting point for writers or readers—not an attempt to “engineer” art as much as a way to understand it or describe it. If you were an aspiring painter in 1900 you might want to know the specific paints and techniques that Monet was starting to use. If you were a band in the 1960s you would want to know how the Beatles were recording their songs. In either case, you would want to understand the craft in detail and on a technical level before making your own masterpiece. Reading a book is the easiest way to understand how a novel is crafted. Examining the patterns of thousands of books is going to answer different questions, but it is likewise a useful way to understand how books are truly crafted.

  Somewhere between the skeptic and doomsdayer is where I hope you have landed after reading this book. Successful writers pen hundreds of thousands of words in their lifetime. In any other field with hundreds of thousands of data points it would be quite clear that the information could be mined to examine human behavior and psychology. I believe the same is true for examining words.

  When Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace used equations to determine the authorship of The Federalist Papers, they were solving one small question about writing. It was a question with a definite answer, which made it simpler, but it showed that information that may not be obvious on first read is right there, hiding in plain sight.

  The written word and the world of numbers should not be kept apart. It’s possible to be a lover of both. Through the union of writing and math there is so much to learn about the books we love and the writers we admire. And by looking at the patterns, we can appreciate that beautiful moment where the pattern breaks, and where a brilliant new idea bursts into the world.

  I am fortunate that Simon & Schuster gave me the chance to write this book, and I am fortunate for so many people who helped me during this long process.

  I want to thank my agent, Jackie Ko, who invested invaluable time and energy into all my creative pursuits from the beginning.

  I also want to thank my editor, Jonathan Cox, who made this project happen. I am beyond grateful for his input, which enhanced the book at every level.

  Eric Brewster was the first person to lay eyes on any of this material. I want to thank him for letting me know which of my stream-of-consciousness ideas should stay in my head and which should make it to the page.

  I want to thank my parents, Stephen Blatt and Faith Minard, for instilling in me the virtues needed to create this book. I’d also like to thank my older brother, Zach Blatt, who has influenced me since I was born.

  Tony Khan was beyond helpful, and I thank him for being a great friend.

  I want to thank everyone, living and dead, from the Harvard Lampoon. Without being a part of such a sharp community of writers, I never would have developed the mindset or skills required to complete this book.

  In addition, I want to thank all these amazing people, both for their generous input and for their hospitality. Thanks to Andy Spielvogel, Zack and Jody Wortman, Kurt Slawitschka, Katie Ryan, Ben Silva, Eric Arzoian, Florian Mayr, Daniel Claridge, Peter Manges, Sierra Katow, Daniel Bredar, Tyler Richard, Ethan Glasserman, E. J. Bensing, Meryl Natow, Ari Rubin, James Yoder, Jeffrey Hajdin, Nicole Levin, and J. J. Shpall.

  © SIERRA KATOW

  Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and The Harvard Lampoon who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, mapmaking, the Beatles, and Jeopardy! His previous book, co-written with Eric Brewster, is I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back, which follows the duo’s quest to go on the mathematically optimal baseball road trip, traveling 20,000 miles to a game in all thirty ballparks in thirty days, without planes. Blatt’s work has also been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Deadspin. You can find him online at his website, BBlatt.com, or on Twitter @BenBlatt.

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  ALSO BY BEN BLATT

  I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever (co-written with Eric Brewster)

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  This book has relied on a variety of samples and methods, the essentials of which I’ve tried to include within each chapter along the way. But several examples warrant further detail, as do the larger book lists themselves and the nature of the decisions I made throughout the writing process.

  In total, approximately 1,500 books (not including tens of thousands of full-length fan fiction or Literotica novels) were collected and converted into raw text files for this project. Dedications, copyrights, prefaces, acknowledgments, and so on at the beginning and end of the books were edited out of the files, but text within the books was not touched, even if not strictly part of the author’s prose (for example, a head like “Chapter 10: Mayhem at the Ministry” would remain). Running the same analysis on different editions of the same book could, for this reason, produce slightly different results. To combat this, I focused only on trends or patterns where the statistical difference was significant enough that book edition would have no meaningful impact on the results.

  Most of the text processing was completed in Python and with the help of NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit). With the exception of Chapter 3, most of the text processing relied on the straightforward procedure of counting words or punctuation. My hope is that these simple metho
ds prove to be the easiest, and most transparent, way to bridge the gap between traditional writing wisdom and analytics.

  A fair amount of the stats and graphs were compiled manually, such as measuring author names on book covers or determining the number of opening lines that include weather. If you duplicated these studies, the results might differ slightly based on where you draw a box or what you count as weather versus climate, but again the overall trends should remain consistent.

  All author bibliographies, unless otherwise noted, are complete through 2014. The bibliographies of authors include only novels, barring a few rare exceptions. I chose to omit authors’ writing in other genres (nonfiction, memoir, short stories, etc.) so as to give the main sample a central focus and consistency. Also, on a logistical level, while it was possible to collect all novels notable authors have written, some have bibliographies of short stories so large it would be difficult to be certain that all stories were included.

  There are a few exceptions, mentioned in the text, in which the set of texts used for an author is not their full novel bibliography. For some authors, like J. K. Rowling, I ignored smaller works if they are known mostly for one series. And for a handful of authors who are known primarily for their more stylized nonfiction, like Mitch Albom or Truman Capote, I also included their narrative works of nonfiction.

  I acknowledge that there were subjective judgments in assembling these bibliographies. There is no set definition of novel versus novella or a clean line between fiction and narrative nonfiction. Some books, for example Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, are structured in such a way that some would consider them short story collections, while others consider them episodic novels. Authors who write books with co-authors only make things more difficult. Many authors have had books published after their death. In some cases, these were finished books that happened to be released right after passing. In other cases, they are half-finished works.