Get Your Motivations in Order
Hi, Jill Elizabeth Nelson again, your first Tuesday of the month blogger. And no, this isn’t a blog about searching your soul. It’s about searching your manuscript to get those tricky MRUs lined up and save your reader potential confusion. (Also, no, this isn’t a medical blog. I said MRU, not MRI. 😉 )
The letters stand for Motivation-Reaction Unit. It’s a label used by a number of prominent teachers of write-craft for maintaining the logical sequence of events on the most basic level—sentence by sentence by sentence. Let’s look at a few examples to help clarify this definition.
She laughed at the scowl on her friend’s face.
What’s wrong with this statement? We see this type of sentence construction all the time. Most readers will pass right over it, and yet as they do, a good share of them may feel a tiny hitch in the pace but not know why. The problem is that the writer has shown the reaction before she’s conveyed the motivation for it. The proverbial cart before the horse.
Here’s the simple fix: Her friend shot her a scowl, and she laughed.
Now we have motivation followed by reaction. Notice, I didn’t say, “Her friend’s scowl made her laugh.” That’s a “telling” sentence construction, but show/don’t tell is another topic for another day.
Let’s go to a slightly more complex example.
Mary kissed her daughter’s cheek as she turned to walk away. “Have a good day, dear.”
The problems here are a bit more obvious. She’s kissing and turning away at the same time. Quite the contortion! Plus we’ve got dialogue thrown in there in an awkward sequence. How to fix it?
Mary bent and kissed her daughter’s cheek. “Have a good day, dear.” Then she hurried out to her car.
There is a lot that can be done with this example to add emotional resonance to the situation, but I restrained my natural authorly impulses in order to keep it simple for our purposes today.
Now, we have events in proper chronological order with no ungainly physical contortions. Also, I took out an unnecessary action—the turning part. If she kissed her daughter, and then went away, of course she turned. What else? I doubt she walked backward! Sometimes we insult our reader’s intelligence by stating the obvious, and that habit inserts speed bumps into our prose, though again, the reader may not consciously understand why. Another topic to explore more deeply another day.
In finding and correcting your MRUs, watch for prepositional phrases that begin with the word “as.” Not all such phrases signal MRU problems, but many do.
One final example for this day’s blog.
He stuffed the note into his pocket when he saw the teacher coming.
We’ve just told the reader what he did before we gave him the motivation to do it! Let’s fix it.
The teacher stalked toward him. His eyes widened, and he stuffed the note into his pocket.
“When, “before,” and other time prepositions are also red flags for MRU problems. Also, I took out the “telling” phrase “saw the teacher coming.” When you’re in a character’s POV, you rarely ever need to say they “saw” such and such. Just say what it was they saw without saying they saw it!
More fodder for a future blog, because this one’s gotten quite long enough. Until next month, Jill Elizabeth Nelson waving from the snow-covered tundra of Minnesota.
