Hey folks, this week's copywork is The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi. I've heard of Scalzi before, and I've been enjoying his posts in Twitter. Finally got to read The Collapsing Empire, and I really enjoyed it.
The prologue set up an amazing universe, and it also hooks you on the overarching story. One thing I noticed on the first few pages was the description--there aren't any (at least a sentence or independent clause dedicated for describing characters or environment). The author is relying heavily on the reader to provide the scenery.
There's a lot of telling in this, but the telling is handled masterfully. I believe the key to telling is a humorous (or sardonic) tone.
As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Green for Descriptions
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
A double highlight means that a sentence is functioning with more than one mode.
Below is a graph of the narrative modes of the copied scene. This shows the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to +3 with the following sequence respectively: Exposition (as -3), Intrusion, Thought, Transition (as 0.5), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).
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