How to make people love every sentence you wrote. A practical theory on creative writing: The valence of a sentence.

4.How to make people love every sentence you wrote. A practical theory on creative writing: The valence of a sentence.

In order to maximise the benefits of using the following tutorial it is best to begin with the tutorial on how to work with the subconscious mind to obtain ingeniously innovative ideas applicable to every form of artistic and scientific endeavour, as well as to general problem solving. The tutorial in the form of a deviation has received 45 favs and 43 favs in the form of a news article. Hereby I sincerely thank everyone who contributed to its success. I would also like to ask everyone who might find any of these tutorials useful or interesting to continue their support by commenting on them, promoting them by adding them to their favourites, placing links to them in their journals, sending links to their friends or even visualising with genuine positive emotions their success... that's how I received a replacement scanner months after the old one got broken, anyway.

I would also like to thank my friend and employer, owner of the advertising, marketing, graphic and web-design firm sarka.pl and sarkamedia.pl. He is an unbelievably friendly, industrious, polite and honest man and has helped me to survive a financially very difficult time. Although I don't expect this of you, it would be very kind of you if you would like to take a look at his portfolio. Tutorials are the expression of our shared interest in sharing knowledge and helping others grow mentally and spiritually. That is why we intend to create a blog dedicated to achieving ambitious goals, enhancing creativity, awakening ingenuity, etc.
Warning! The latter part of the following text contains occasional, mild sexual references and might not be suitable for minors. For this reason user discretion is advised.

Alright, without straining your patience any further... shall we begin?

I borrowed the term "valence" from chemistry, not only because the Polish word for "valence" ("wartościowość") is derived from the word "value", but also because it means "worthwhileness" in Polish.

"In chemistry, valence, also known as valency or valency number, is a measure of the number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element", according to a Wikipedia article on this subject, and similarly the valence of a sentence measures the number of "valuable elements" of a particular sentence that evoke strong physical("disgust")/ethereal("shivers")/emotional("suspense")/mental("curiosity")/causal("inspiration")/budhial("validation")/atmanic("enlightenment") responses in the reader, ensures that these "valuable elements" are not only coherent with other "valuable elements" within the boundaries of a sentence, but also are tightly interrelated with the "valuable elements" constituting the remaining sentences of the written work, and lastly serves as a means to arrange the "valuable elements" into an aesthetically, economically and functionally perfect structure that resembles an atom.

The simplest way to define a "valuable element" is to say that it's "anything that increases the value of a sentence", alternatively "anything that increases the worthwhileness of perceiving a sentence sensually (reading/listening/touch-reading)". The "valuable elements" can be categorised into "solid elements" and "subtle elements". A "valuable element" can be anything from a sophisticated allegory, a thought-provoking description ("solid elements") to an elegiac atmosphere and numerological vibration ("subtle elements"). The specific "valuable elements" are listed on a comprehensive, yet far from being complete (and thus open-ended), list enclosed at the bottom of the article.

The purpose of this practical theory is to enable writers to convey as many physical (the pleasure of reading produces endorfins), ethereal (the reader feels relaxed), astral (the reader sympathizes with the characters), mental (the content provokes thoughts), causal (the reader decides to change something in his life), budhial (the reader reinforces his system of spiritual values), and atmanic (the reader feels he is one step closer to the discovery of his purpose in life) "impulses", and contain as many "valuable elements" within one multiple complex sentence, as possible. However, if a writer feels uncomfortable with forming multiple complex sentences, he can incorporate "valuable elements" into shorter sentences and expect equally satisfying results.

Of course, the theory of literary valence wasn't created as a justification for my relentless antipathy towards short sentences, but as an expression of a firm belief that different lenghts of sentences serve different purposes, and shouldn't be misused - it's as unadvisable to write lenghty punchlines as it is to force the content of an encyclopedia into the form of a poem. Although this may sound surprising, I treat the length of the sentence like canvas... and while Ernest Hemingway was, among writers, the one who was praised for covering canvasses that can be compared only to painting the portrait of every American president on a single hair strand, my canvasses have to be, compared to the canvasses of other writers, of oceanic dimensions. I firmly believe that depth will eventually follow length...

Theoretically every "valuable element" increases the valence of a sentence by one point (regardless if it's a "subtle element" or "solid element"), and the more "valuable elements" a sentence contains, the greater the value of a sentence. In reality, however, determining the real valence of a particular sentence might prove much more difficult, because the ability to notice every "valuable element" that the author intended to incorporate into the sentence (let's call it "intended valency") depends on the evolutionary level of a human being. According to the interpretation of kabbalistic astrology by the acknowledged Russian scientist/esotericist/lecturer/writer Awiessałom Podwodnyj (unfortunately, transcribing his full name from Polish into English is beyond my capabilities, because even entering his first name, transcribed into Russian, into the search engine box returned no results...) the human being possesses seven "subtle" bodies, among which the physical body is the lowest and most solid, and the atmanic - the highest, and most elusive.

There are people who are oriented physcially, and there are people who are oriented atmanically. It's not that physically-oriented people are inferior to the atmanically-oriented, because Awiessałom Podwodnyj distinguished four evolutionary levels of every single body (to be exact, he mentioned the fifth in the case of the ethereal body), and there can be a philanthropic sports champion (fourth evolutionary level of the physical body; other bodies are harmoniously developed) as well as a hypocritic religious fanatic (first evolutionary level of the atmanic body; other bodies are severly damaged). Although there's much to be said about Awiessałom Podwodnyj's brilliant tetralogy (actually, pentology... the bibliography of Vaidotas Peczkys's book mentions Podwodnyj's book called "Aspects", but, for some uncomprehensible reason, it was never translated into Polish), there's little need to write about it here, because the concept of the "point of assembly", which we'll discuss in a while, is all you'll need to understand the following passages.

The "point of assembly" is the part of the particular subtle body that is the most active during the process of solving a problem/handling a task and, depending on the nature of the given problem/task, the "point of assembly" can move from one body to another... in other words, the higher body can outsource the task to the subtle bodies located below or overburden them with the problem it was incapable of solving. For example, if you are trying to solve a mathematical equation, the "point of assembly" is located in your mental body, but if you're reading a breathtaking book, the "point of assembly" moves into the astral/emotional body.

Or... imagine that one day you suddenly experience the irresistible urge to transform mankind and the world it inhabits (the atmanic body governs man's mission on earth), but since transforming everything isn't within your power, you begin to inspect your values to understand which ones have suffered most from the traumas of everyday life, and you may be surprised to find out that you actually empathise more with countries struck by famine than with the survivors of an earthquake, but you don't have to feel alienated in your guilt, because apathy burdens the conscience of everyone of us in one way or the other, especially when we are expected to emphasize with people we haven't even seen on television.

The reorganization of your values forces you to reinforce the ones that help you take another step towards your goal of transforming the world (volunteering to cook for the homeless) and to sacrifice the ones that hinder you in the pursuit of your dream (playing video games instead of participating in charity acts), but... the budhial body, which governs man's values, won't be satisfied with "occasional" performances, and quite soon you'll discover that values aren't something that you can depart from in a simple "see you on monday" manner - either you devote yourself completely to their cause or find alternative ways of expressing them. In other words, everything you have ever cherished, as well as everything you have ever sacrificed/abandoned/rejected, roughly outlines what is meant to become the blueprint of your future life, simply because the life a chef leads is completely different from the life a writer leads, and both have to face different challenges/opportunites in their lives (the causal body governs events).

If we assume that you deemed serving the misfortunate something worthwhile, then your mental body (obviously, it governs thoughts) proceeds to thoroughly critique the outline of your future biography and, in order to establish the most essential details of the outlined plan, pose an enormous amount of questions that are, more often than not, quite uncomfortable for the vulnerable astral body (the astral body governs emotions), which may in turn drive the hornets of uncontrollable emotions ranging from paralyzing fear ("What will you do if you suddenly feel overwhelmed by your task, but find yourself unable to abandon the people dependent on you when they need you the most?") to uncontainable enthusiasm ("I wish the bus driver would step on the gas pedal, because I can forget the content of the brilliant cover letter that I wrote in my mind just before writing it down on paper...!") out of the depths of their cardial/mental hives.

It has been said that every single thought and feeling seeks to manifest itself in the physical world (some even claim that we sigh every time we don't know how to express a particular feeling), but it would be foolish to think that these mental or emotional impulses become physical actions right away... they have to become ethereal sensations first. Ethereal sensations are feelings that create an illusion of being physical sensations even though plausible physical sources aren't present... it happens every time you look over your shoulder, because you could swear that somebody is watching you; every time you have an uneasy feeling when walking around a house that is supposedly haunted; every time you feel that someone's mere presence drains your energy; every time patients with amputated limbs suffer from phantom pain (Kirlian photography is used to photograph the aura and photographs of amputated limbs have revealed the existance of aural contours of these once present members). The ethereal body (the ethereal body governs energy) creates inner tension that either forces you to overcome your shyness/insecurity and call the director of the charity foundation to ask for an interview, or presents you with such sudden apathy that makes you inexcusably miss the deadline that was supposed to be a quantum leap towards paying your mortgage.

The atmanic impulse of inspiration has come a long way and now you're either able to shave every morning with the same enthusiasm that allows you to prepare meals for the misfortunate for hours without getting tired, or you continue abusing your sleep schedule with an "I'll show them all what genius they just fired!" expression on your face and proceed to write the opening line of the novel that will earn you at least two Nobel Prizes at the same time - one in Literature and the other in Physics.
"It was a dark and stormy night..."

The "point of assembly" makes it possible for everyone to change their "subtle orientation" for a while and that's why sometimes even the Pope does things that we tend to justify by saying "he's only human", or why seemingly heartless tyrants fell into tears in moments of physical and spiritual solitude.

Because people are oriented differently, some "think" only with their physical body, while others only with their atmanic body. An average physically-oriented person (highly evolved physically-oriented people, also called sports champions, constitute only a low percentage of the population) would value the so called, forgive me the expression, c**k jokes (and please, don't click the space between the asterisks if you're viewing this in the wondow of a word processor - you don't want me to go to jail for demoralisation, do you?) much more than brilliant philosophical questions, while the spiritually-oriented people would praise life-transforming introspective insights, and "emotionally vomit" while reading strictly pornographic passages (Knut Ahlund left the Swedish Academy in protest against awarding Elfriede Jelinek the Nobel Prize for her pornographic, perverse, vulgar novel "The Piano Teacher"). Statistical physically-oriented people could be the source of unbearable dissappointment for the highly spiritually-oriented author who carefully estimated the average "intended valency" of the sentences for as high as 11, because the physically-oriented person probably wouldn't either understand, or even notice the "valuable elements", especially when the "valuable elements" were mostly of the "subtle" kind.

As mentioned before, the author named as an example was highly spiritually-oriented, and provided that he attempted writing anything that reflects his evolutionary level (as you know there are writers who lower their standards just to please the reading public), his writing might interest a budhially, if not an atmanically-oriented person who would not only notice, grasp, and value the most, if not all, of the intended "valuable elements", but would also more or less consciously increase the valence of a particular sentence - through inspiring discussion, sophisticated interpretation of the subtle meanings, and unbosoming himself about "how it changed his entire life and made him a better person" - which is a simplified way of analyzing the benevolent effect of the writing on each of his subtle bodies.

Because the process of writing is always a process of self-discovery and cleansing the subtle bodies (the highest subtle body ALWAYS throws the problems it cannot solve into the lower subtle body, and so does every subtle body on the way to the physical body), you might discover previously hidden layers of meaning in your writing as time passes, because writing down thoughts, that might otherwise vanish into oblivion after several seconds, allows you to analyze them mentally. A thought resembles a quickly passing vehicle, and it's practically impossible to memorize the details of its construction while trying to read the licence plate. Only by having a photograph of the thought, which happens to be the manuscript, you are able to study the details which will allow you to recognize the same car on the same busy highway when it passes again, and then take a photograph of it from a different perspective.

Although you might think that I'm exaggerating here, it often happened that my subconcious mind revealed new depths of meaning in seemingly simple sentences, and despite the fact that I have been working with the subconcious mind for several years now, it never ceases to amaze me, not only because it knows more than I do, but also because it knows things it isn't supposed to know. Besides revealing hidden meanings the subconcious mind can help you to increase the valence by prompting ways of modifying a sentence without disrupting its flow (too many interrupted, and rather redundant, sentences), rhytm (the adjective you disposed of makes the sentence sound too laconic), logic (needless digressions like "Suddenly enormous fangs pierced into his forearm, straight through the sweater he got from his beloved grandmother that died two years earlier of cancer in the nearby hospital that... etc."), or anything that would make the sentence sound clumsy/awkward.

Just to name an example, when I was working on my current novel called "Inquilibrium: Behind the Curtain of Life...", I tried to come up with mocking misspellings of popular car brandnames, what resulted in "Gorsche" (it's pronounced like the Polish word meaning "worse") and "Sopel" (what means "icicle" in the previously named language), and eventually attempted to find a proper name for the MP5 player that was a major "character" in the novel. Aside from the fact that "Pencil-drive" was an obvious choice, since it resembled the word "Pen-drive", the name was too long, and definitely unmelodic. Having no better choice, I decided to stay with "Cil-drive" what was an abbreviated version of the previous name, and although I already knew that this device will serve the fictional devil as a means of manipulating the protagonist, it turned out that I unintentionally created a seemingly meaningless word that had just enough letters to form the anagram "devil"... moreover, the number of letters the word "Cil-drive" consists of represents the planet Pluto in numerology, and as you know, the planet was named after the pre-christian "incarnation" of the mightiest of all devils.

Another time I was trying to invent a name for a major female character that would not only be unique, but also quite melodic, and at some point I decided to name her Kovenanta, after one of my favourite bands called "The Kovenant", but then came to the conclusion that the name sounds a little too harsh, thus it had to be abbreviated. Even though "Venanta" sounded melodic enough, I decided to replace the letter "v" with the local counterpart, the letter "w", convinced that it won't make much of a difference... Well, you have no idea how surprised I was to see the created name in the results of a Google search that suggested that it was the name of an existing person. Honestly, I swear by all what's holy that I don't remember hearing this name before - and my memory regarding names really rarely fails me... usually not for long anyway. I am absolutely sure that I haven't heard, or even read, about it anywhere, because in times when the human memory fails most, that is during the childhood, I rarely traveled and I also couldn't remember it after seeing it on the Internet, because I gained access to the Internet just a couple of years ago. Searching for this name in a local calendar would be simply in vain, because it's not a popular name. God... uh, I mean the subconcious mind only knows how this particular name got into my mind.

There is no doubt that the valence of a sentence largely depends on the evolutionary level and "subtle orientation" of the reader, but an exceptionally low, or even negative, valence doesn't have to be the result of a subjective evalution - which means that a sentence could be evaluated equally by a physically-oriented and an atmanically-oriented person. Imagine that your potential employer has a surname that differs from a popular vulgarism only by one letter, but you unintentionally vulgarized his/her surname (swearing often becomes a subconcious habit, and there's even a separate term for unintentional replacing neutral words with sex-related terms called "Freudian slip") and have mailed it to him/her without prior proofreading the document. I seriously doubt that the responses of differently oriented employers would significantly differ from each other... a physically-oriented person would call you a genital, euphemistically speaking, while a mentally-oriented individual would mutter a remark about your mental retardation. That's because a severly injured ego hurts quite much the same, regardless of the evolutionary level and the subtle orientation of the individual.

Personally, I haven't heard about a case where the surname of the employer would be so brutally misspelled as in the example above, but there were cases where employers complained about candidates who not only misspelled their surnames, but also couldn't recall what position they were applying for... Believe me, you can stumble upon interesting anecdotes when searching the web for professional advice on the preparation for your first interview.

Should the example given above seem unconvincing to you, imagine paying for an expensive notarial document (causal level), technical/legal translation (mental level), or a highly anticipated video game (astral level), and getting in return something that contains grammar so brutalized and spelling so strikingly erroneous that even an average child of ceiling cat could be considered an expert on linguistics when compared to the retard whom you paid for his incompetence. If you were an underqualified laborer, you'd be equally enraged about the equivalent of putting your money through the paper shredder as a lecturer with a PhD in Sociology would.

Some of you might have grown impatient by the time you are reading this paragraph, convinced that what follows is an neverending digression leading nowhere, but before your eyes start to wander off in the search for another interesting link to click, please consider reading the following paragraph regarding the influence of syntactic, grammatical, logical errors, etc. on the altered state of conciousness, in which the reader forgets about the world around him and immerses himself in the book, called "suspension of disbelief".

The "suspension of disbelief" is an emotional state, and in order to maintain this state throughout the whole process of reading fiction, you'll have to disable your intellect... or at least force your locical and reasonable left hemisphere to blindly believe everything that the emotional and creative right hemisphere "tells" her. The language of the logical left hemisphere consists of letters/digits, while the language of the creative right hemisphere consists of images/associations(symbols). Usually when the hemisphere excelling in feeling speaks it's own language, the hemisphere excelling in reasoning passively listens, ane when the hemisphere excelling in reasoning speaks it's own language, the hemisphere excelling in feeling remains silent. The hemisphere excelling in reasoning interrupts and questions the authority of the hemmisphere excelling in feelings when there are illogical incongruencies between the visualisations produced by the latter hemisphere (for example: a machinegun wielding nazi, standing behind a closed window on the third floor, exchanges fire with the machinegun wielding protagonist, but eventually gets mortally shot and falls out of the window crashing the glass, which practically shouldn't be there by the time the first couple of bullets came through it [movie: "The Dirty Dozen"]), while the hemisphere excelling in feeling interrupts and questions the authority of the hemisphere excelling in reasoning when the argumentation/conclusions drawn by the latter hemisphere evoke ambivalent feelings (for example:"Feed the homeless to the hungry and you'll solve two problems at once!").

The reasoning hemisphere corrects the illogical inconsistencies by rationalisation ("Perhaps in the year 1967, when the movie "The Dirty Dozen" was made, it was impossible to imitate the bullets piercing through glass with small explosives, because it might have injured the actor, and it was much harder to create special effects, because computer graphics were developed much later.") and the emotional hemisphere challenges the flawed argumentation/conclusions by delivering the reasoning hemisphere visualisations of possible negative consequances that would only multiply like amoebas if the reasoning mind would attempt to struggle with them ("Alright, so you have fed the homeless to the hungry. Imagine that people around you found your solution of the problem simply cruel and someone threw a brick that injured your body so badly that you've become disabled. You aren't able to work effectively anymore, and your employer, who also didn't like your idea, finds an excuse to fire you. Because of your disability you aren't able to find another job, and are soon unable to pay the mortgage. Your house is taken away from you by your creditors and you become homeless AND hungry. It would be unwise to come near garbage containers, because they might be located in the territory of homeless people who were force fed the flesh of those whom they might have known earlier. Of course, you could disguise yourself as a beggar, and head towards someone whom you suspected of having a golden heart, but unfortunately there is a chance that this empathising Samaritan would simply notify the authorities and you would either taste "your own medicine", or experience a close contact with someone's digestive fluids, depending on whether you have managed to convince the authorities that you possess an appropriate habitat, or not. You might consider stealing an option, but the rewards given out for turning in homeless people make it quite hard to remain unnoticed, especially when you look and smell as if you shared the bed with a pig. After exhausting all the possibilities, you might eventually admit that there are no other ways to obtain food. Maybe there aren't - but at least you have yourself! Bon appetit!").

You might think that the logical hemisphere should protest everytime the creative hemisphere presents her either a single visualisation or an animated sequence of visualisations that counter "common sense", but in my humble opinion, the reasonable hemisphere considers something "logical" when it applies to rules determined by particular conditions, even when these conditions are theoretical. Just to deliver an example: if someone asked you if it was possible for an averagely skilled person to levitate, your response would be most probably negative, because the abilities attributed to magicians/Tibethan monks are far beyond the capabilities of average people, but... if you had a little more time to think about the answer, you would probably realize that it's absolutely possible to levitate... in outer space. I seriously doubt that this answer surprised you, and equally surprising should be the conclusion that the statement: "An averagely skilled person can levitate" is true/logical and false/illogical at the same time.

If the logical hemisphere would rely solely on "common sense", instead of basing logical conclusions on the rules determined by given conditions, humans wouldn't be able to solve theoretical/abstract problems. If the protagonist, just like in the movie "Waterworld", inherited branchiae located behind his ears from his ascendants (who evolutionarily adopted to the world swallowed by the water that was freed from melting ice caps), the reasonable hemisphere wouldn't object if the protagonist would talk underwater, but... if a peasant suddenly began speaking sophisticated English, the reasonable hemisphere would definitely feel alarmed and would interrupt the dreamy state of "suspension of disbelief" to analyze it mentally and possibly rationalize the illogicality ("Maybe the peasant was earlier a student that escaped from a city occupied by the adversary's army and having nowhere else to go, offered the peasants his services in return for food and shelter, and eventually adapted to the new circumstances." But yes, I agree that most often the "simplest explanation is the most probable one", which in this case would be: "Idiot!").

Although I mentioned earlier that the inapt usage of language would alarm the linguistic left hemisphere, she wouldn't react at all if the usage of fractured language was justified; it's because we EXPECT peasants to speak a distinctive dialect, and/or in a way that will reflect their apparent lack of formal education. Of course, if the logical hemisphere occassionally encounters a typograhic error, she usually doesn't bother to find out how the additional letter got in there or associates the unnecessary letter with the writer's additional chromosome (if the symbolism of the additional chromosome is unfamiliar to you, try to encipher the medical term behind "Twilight/(Breaking)Dawn Syndrome"), but if various errors keep reappearing in short periods of time, she makes you seriously wonder if it's worth reading further and think that if the writer had to struggle with something as simple as "common sense", how can he ever succeed in something as complex as constructing an interesting plot?

Oh, and one more thing should be always kept in mind - while the logical hemisphere doesn't protest vehemently when she encounters real-life coincidences, because she became used to them, and thus accepted them as "rules" determined by the conditions present in this world, she'll definitely object to the coincidences that the plot is build upon.

You can surely recall at least one "yeeeah, riiight!" moment in your life when the plot failed miserably at suspending your disbelief. If not, then let me traumatize you with the following summary of a fragment from "Lord Foul's Venom" in which the protagonist, called Covenant, being constantly told by the inhabitants of the magical world he found himself in after falling in coma that his wedding ring, according to the legend, possesses magical powers, but ones that not even one of them could specify, let alone invoke them, suddenly leaves, during a festive night, his place at the table for reasons apparently incomprehensible even for himself, and hurries outside (soon followed by other participants of the feast) only to raise the ring high into the sky for what soon proves to be the only way to summon nearly untameable, magical horses ("Yeeeah, riiight!") he heard tales of before, in amounts that no one has ever seen at once... and when the enchanted horses willingly row up in front of him, he commands one of the beasts, in his mother language (!), to dismiss and seek out the young virgin he raped for some epicly emo reason at the beginning of his journey (the disbelief in the fantastical world, which cured him from his leprosy and the impotence resulting from it, "drived him into a frenzy") and return to her yearly, because she confessed to him once that she always dreamt of riding one of the intelligent, wild horses. That said, Covenant quickly returns inside without a single word of explanation, and the world shall never learn how he was able to discover the ingenious way to summon these creatures without being given even a single clue... the answer just popped into his mind absolutely unprovoked.

There isn't much I could write about the subject of "suspension of disbelief" that wouldn't echo what has already been written in numerous books on the craft of writing fiction. The state of "suspension of disbelief" can be summarized as "a dreamlike state where a typo is a nudge that makes you turn around mumbling in your sleep; where the train-long description of the contents of the closet, that could be easily left out without making the story even a bit less comprehensible, is like waking up in the middle of a dream to never reexperience it again; and where noticing one logical clumsiness after another is like waking up multiple times to scare away dating cats that keep coming back despite the fact that you already ran out of shoes you can throw at them."

During the dream the logical hemisphere remains a rather passive listener... as if encouraging the creative hemisphere to continue the presentation, claiming that "She's [the logical hemisphere speaking about herself] not an expert on images", but she violently objects when she notices illogical inconsistencies between those images, anthills of blatant factual errors, or unjustified deviations from commonly accepted linguistic standards. Despite the fact that the dream that proves the aforementioned theory appeared several years ago, I can still remember it clearly... not because of the content, which was rather boring, but because of its form. The dream was about my crush from elementary school that moved from a house that was close to mine, into a house that I saw everyday through the window of the bus on my way to a distant highschool. You could call the dream "realistic", because nearly every single of its elements existed in reality, in an unchanged form, but the sole fact that she moved into this house blew the illusion... the rational hemisphere woke up during the dream and made me consciously say: "It's impossible that she moved into this house!" That said, I woke up, and asked my mother if this girl really moved there... she confirmed. And then I woke up again... this time for real. Before you could spell "evanescence" the rational hemisphere realized what has happened, and, as you can guess, she wasn't too happy about being conned by the irrational hemisphere. The dreaming hemisphere cheated the logical hemisphere by creating an illusion of waking up in reality, asking an entrusted person to confirm the message received during the dream and making the illusion of an entrusted person say exactly what she wants her to say.

It's the way con(fidence) artists operate: when they notice that you hesitate while they're trying to sell you castles in the sky, they "randomly" pick a person from the crowd, which happens to be the cheaters accomplice, and ask them if it's true what the cheater says... and suddenly the sucker sees the castles in the sky as something tangible. One would think that confidence artists belong to the past, but there are reasons to suspect that the same happened to someone I know, who wanted to buy a car. When a car painted in red (I happen to know an auto mechanic who says that painting cars red is a way used by dishonest car dealers to influence emotions of men AND hide the fact that the car was assembled/restored after road accidents) arrested his attention, suddenly another potential buyer appeared (what a coincidence that the car dealer didn't manage to sell the car before this person arrived), and the presence of another "genuinely" eager customer not only assured my acquaintance that the car is worth the price, because someone else wants it, short-fused the time he had available to make up his mind, but also fueled his emotions with adrenalin, which is never a good advisor is cases that are far from matters of life and death (unless you want to buy a car that you can kill yourself, or someone else with. My acquaintance wanted neither). But I digress a little...

Our dreams evoke emotions, because we truly believe that the things happening in our dream are happening for real, and the deactivated reasonable hemisphere does almost nothing to ease our fears, let alone shred our idealised illusions. If we wake up from our dreams, and then try to resume the "movie" to find out what happens next, it's very hard to reexperience the same emotions we had during our dream, simply because the reasonable hemisphere doesn't allow us to believe in it. The process of waking up from a dream doesn't differ from the process of reading a work of fiction: every time a syntactic, grammatical, or spelling error comes to the attention of the reasonable hemisphere, we wake up from our "dream", and have to get into the mood again from the beginning. I find it very hard to immerse myself in the fictional story, or write, unless those irritating "nag-thoughts" like "chop firewood... chop firewood... chop firewood..." or "go to the grocery store... go to the grocery store... go to the grocery store..." are gone. The best way to ruin my day is to give me a "quest" in the morning that has to be completed in the evening. I'll have "nag-thoughts" every couple of seconds until the given task isn't completed.

Although it may seem that syntactic, grammatical, or spelling errors always decrease the valence of a sentence, it's not entirely true. I've already mentioned that linguistic errors in dialogue lines of fictional peasants or immigrants could make them sound more natural, and thus more believable, but... such linguistic awkwardnesses can increase the valence of a sentence even if they have no apparent purpose, when they are unintended and accompanied by a lofty writing style or when pronounced with a straight face.

There were multiple cases where "undermining elements" (it's the opposite of "valuable elements") not only increased the valence of a sentence, but also, more often than not, immortalized them. If an invisible doubting Thomas whispers into your ear with disbelief at the moment, you can look up the word "meme" or "internet phenomenon" using a popular search engine. Chances are you'll stumble upon some of the most popular ones like "Shoop da whoop (Ima chargin'/firin' mah lazor!)", "So i herd u liek mudkipz", "A winner is you", "Do not want" (an unintentionally inapt translation of Darth Vader's yell: "Noooooo!") or the legendary All your base are belong to us!.

An honorable mention goes out to the video featuring Krzysztof Kononowicz, a "simple-minded" man somewhere around his fifties who ran for the position of the mayor of the Polish city of Bialystok in Podlachia. Although the video has been downloaded three million times within a week on Youtube and watched by people all around the world (even if they couldn't say a single word in Polish), it's a shame, actually, that they'll never be able to appreciate the video's hilariousness, because it's so heavily language-based and, for the most part, tightly related to the Polish language and the contemporary culture of the country.

I cannot say for sure if Krzysztof invented the unbelievably catchy double-reflexive pronoun phrases, but undoubtely it is he who introduced them to the majority of his countrymen. If imagining phrases in foreign languages containing reflexive pronouns doesn't belong to your strengths, let me provide you with a brief explanation. Reflexive pronouns like "myself" in "I wash myself" can be placed either in front of the verb, or behind the verb, but Krzysztof's ingenuity prompted him to place the reflexive verb on both sides of the verb, creating the instantly recognizable "I ja się nie dziwię się" ("And I am myself not surprised myself"). Undoubtely, his imaginative interpretation of the Polish language made people pay attention to the political program of the candidate, who wanted to: "open employing establishments for teenagers and for people/humans (sic!); "the police to penalize drivers for alcohol, cigarettes, and for everything (sic!); "improve in the whole Podlachia, so that there would be no 'bandicitism', so that there would be no thievery, so that there would be no nothing". He "knows how to everything" (!), and "how to liquidate everything" (!).

Although the following guidelines cannot serve as a compendium for creating virally spreading language-based memes, there are particular qualities that the majority of these Internet phenomena have in common. It seems that an almost foolproof method to create a successful "linguistic" meme is to record oneself/someone (or... appear in places where people are likely to have cameras) while speaking a language that you/he/she/it speak(s) poorly (the success of TV shows like "Orzeł czy reszta"/"Europa da się lubić" [where Polish-speaking foreigners discuss, for example, their experiences concerning their life in Poland] proves that I'm not the only one who's greatly amused by foreign native speakers trying to speak Polish) in an authentic way ("authentic" quite often means "unintentional", but since it's very challenging to achieve "unintentionality" through conscious efforts, it's perfectly all right to strive for being only "convincing". Authenticity can be achieved by speaking under the influence of strong emotions... so strong that you lose control over yourself, and start speaking to the subject [person/camera/audience] in your mind, absolutely ignoring the less than receptive audience around you. If you search for examples of hilarious "unintentionality", just look at the hilarious Engrish translations like "A winner is you", or "All your base are belong to us!" originating from antique japanese video games. These phrases were created, because the translators were absolutely sure that they are correct translations. Authenticity usually withers, and eventually dies, in the confines of acting, thus trying to hard to be funny is not only immediately detected, but also evokes hostility among the audience) about a silly/irrelevant/misunderstood subject (to be honest, this criterion remains only an option, because even if the subject is as "fascinating" as the sexual life of amoebas, it still can be brought to life by the emotions/appearance/dialect/mentality/gestures/intellectual capabilities/facial expressions/voice tone/inappropriate behaviour, etc. of the speaking person. Unusual combinations of the aforementioned qualities can be identified in many videos featuring people of rural origin, or with a low intelligence quotient, because these people couldn't care less about sophisticated language usage, political correctness, or the risk of public embarassment, but if someone would like to adopt their speaking manner and isn't quite able to fake being mentally challenged, then he should try speaking with an authoritarian voice about a subject that he has only a vague idea about. That's exactly what many dangerously retarded people do - speak with a nearly fanatical conviction about subjects they couldn't care less about... care to research, that is).

Having established common denominators of language-based internet phenomena, it seems rational to search for them in Krzysztof Kononowicz's video, which possesses at least five vital marks of a viral meme: 1. Krzysztof is definitely authentic in his approach. He shows qualities that the archetypal politician lacks, like honesty, sincerity, courage, goodheartedness, and is, as one commenter on Youtube put it, "too stupid to deceive and steal". 2. His manner of speaking contains amusing ellipses, colloquaialisms, digressions, grammatical errors, redundancies, etc. 3. Because Krzysztof is a crusader on his quest for the betterment of his homeland, he is deadly serious about his mission, even though the whole country ridicules his political program and laughs at his expense. 4. One would think that Kononowicz was driven by the need to feed his ego by recording himself on video, but it was the creator of the party [Podlachia of the 21st Century] that talked him into running for the position of the mayor of Białystok. Besides, he strives to achieve goals we can all identify with (for example, eliminating teenage criminality by creating working establishments, or forcing the police and municipal police to patrol the streets more frequently to make their respective districts more safe to live in). His naivety and idealism make him much more trustworthy than the majority of Polish politicians... which becomes apparent when you consider the fact that people actually voted for him, and although he didn't gather more than 2% of votes (1676 votes), he gathered more votes than a candidate representing a nationally known, established party... and inspired sociologists to perform an extensive study to answer the question: "who [and why] voted for Krzysztof Kononowicz". 5. Krzysztof unbossomed himself in front of the camera by telling the audience that his father died fighting for his country/it's capitol, that he still lives with his mother, etc. This was a very hazardous method to prove his sincerity, because every other person running for a high administrative position would rather feed her tumorous ego by publicly bragging about their virtues/successes/wealth than make herself vulnerable by unearthing unpleasant/embarassing facts from their personal history. 6. Krzysztof Kononowicz's political spot was unique in various aspects, but the most striking feature of the video is the primitively designed sweater he was wearing. If you consider the fact that employers disqualify applicants for showing up for the appointed interview dressed in bermudas and/or sandals, then comparing appealing to one's potential voters while being dressed in an embarrassingly misdesigned sweater to holding a speech during a funeral without having any clothes on won't seem even a slight exaggeration.
As a fine example of a sentence of low valence that litteraly immortalized its author can serve the infamous opening line of the novel "Paul Clifford" by the victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, considered the worst opening line ever: "It was a dark and stormy night". The initial valence of this sentence should be decreased by one point, not only because it states an "obviously obvious" fact that a night is dark, but also because it consists of words that contradict eachother. For hours I've tried to come up with a rational explanation for the irrationality of this sentence, but the quote from the website devoted to the contest named after the aforementioned author puts it best: "It was a dark and stormy night, except when the lightning flashed, because then it wasn't dark".
I'd gladly reduce the valence of this sentence by a further point for "telling instead of showing", or at least the unbearable lack of originality, but the problem is that the sentences following the opening sentence (the sentence ends with a semicolon, and not a period, so the adjacent sentences still count as one closely related sentence) are written in such a vivid way that my criticism on the opening line seems unreasonable. I think that there is nothing more about this sentence what would deserve a further reduction of the valence, but there are still positive aspects of the sentence that need to be examined.

The valence of the sentence increases because of the brevity of the sentence - aside from one adjective that makes the sentence sound contradictory and should either go (however, leaving only one adjective would probably disrupt the rhytm of the sentence, so the other option would probably be a better choice), or be replaced with another, more appropriate adjective. As for the remaining part of the sentence - there is nothing to leave out, because every word is closely connected to the content of the following sentences. The importance of brevity becomes apparent when you consider the fact that there are writers who clog the opening lines with lengthy descriptions of a town or sunset - even though they are so irrelevant that the reader could perfectly understand the plot despite the lenghty fragment being completely left out. I'd say that the relevance of the information given by a brief sentence also increases the valence of a sentence, because it is possible to write a lengthy, multiple complex sentences about practically nothing... I can imagine that there are cynics who'll claim that the whole article you are currently reading is a perfect example of this...

The valence of the sentence increases due to the fact that this sentence immortalized the author. This very opening line was excessively plagiarized by Snoopy from the popular "Peanuts" cartoon, and thus became a part of the popculture. It has not only inspired an annual contest where participants can submit the worst opening lines for imaginary novels, but the contest was also named after the author of the aforementioned phrase. So far the valence of this legendary sentence totals 2, and most probably it won't be much higher, unless of course someone is able to evaluate objectively subtle elements such as rhytm, numerological vibration, or the potential for memorable pronounciation (I think that the legendary line "War. War never changes..." from the Fallout series would gain much less attention from the gaming community if not the fantastic voice acting of Ron Perlman and the way this, trivial in itself, phrase was pronounced).

Although some might argue that such an important aspect like immortalization should raise the valence by more than one point, you have to remember that the valence measures the number of valuable elements in a sentence, and not the superiority of a particular element over another (for example, if a humourous dialogue line is more valuable than a unique writing style). It is possible to create "subvalence", the value of each valuable element in a sentence, and then sum these values up (linguistic correctness = 1 point of subvalence, proper use of rare words = 2 points of subvalence, use of multiple complex sentences = 3 points of subvalence, etc.) to evaluate the worth of the elements that a sentence consists of, but there is a danger that the author of such a scale will value some elements more than the others depending on his evolutionary level.

The subjectivity of estimating the "subvalence" of a sentence explains why passionate readers purchase and even fall in love with books that infuriate literary critics, and why they tend to leave the books that literary critics rave about on the shelves to gather dust. The truth is that the largest part of the reading public is astrally (emotionally) oriented, because they want to empathize with the characters and forget about the world around them, while literary critics are mentally-oriented and are fascinated by the mechanics of writing as opposed to the best writers who are buddhially (it's the sphere of values), or even atmanically-oriented (it's the sphere of the mission/life's purpose). This explains why writers hate literary critics for translating the spiritual into the mental language and why unsuccessful and frustrated writers decide to become literary critics (they can't understand the rules governing the atmanic and budhial sphere, so they lower their standards and use their mental energy to bend the spiritual rules to fit their own mentality).

Despite the fact that atmanically-oriented people are only a small percent of the population, and sentences with a high valency might never be understood fully by the simpler people, I believe that it's worth the effort to strive for a high valency of every sentence, even if only a part of the valuable elements will be discovered. Moreover, even if one person on this planet will be able to understand and appreciate a sophisticated element of the sentence, I think it's still worth to include it. Naturally, a writer can attempt to clarify and simplify the initial thought if he/she feels that the meaning of the simplification is true to the original, and include both the original and the simplified version in one book. Intentional misinterpretation/censorship of the messages given by the muse/daimonion living in the sphere of the subconcious mind can result in an abrupt disconnection between the author and the inspiring force. When a writer resists to misinterpret or censor the messages of his higher consciousness, there will surely be a literary critic who'll do this for him.

If you're convinced that the above-mentioned opening line, describing a tempest seen from the perspective of an apparently blind person, possesses a valence that is too high to make the opinion about the sentence of being an epic failure seem justified, allow me to demonstrate the following passage, originating from my earliest attempt to write the perfect fantasy novel, that is probably one of the most brutally butchered piece of writing that this world has ever seen. Of course, I could sift through the whole manuscript just to find the sentence that reeks of traumatizing amateurism the most, but it would probably consume too much time to be worth the effort. I believe that there's nothing left that requires elaborate explanations, so please read the following fragment carefully...

"Dante apparently was a teenager like thousands of souls closed in a body that's similar to him, but with the difference that from the moment of seeing the first ray of daylight, like it happened in the case of legions of newlyborn children, that came to this world, however there was not enough of the gift, which was the ability to speak, for him."

Oh, my God... you should have killed Dante off... or at least let me strangle him with the closest object within reach of the hand (which happened to be the fetter of sausages). Forgive me that I've put you through the torture of being exposed to such intellectual vomit, but unfortunately it isn't over yet. In order to learn the most from the dissection of the above quoted literary equivalent of a cadaver you'll have to experience the same once again, but this time... in slow motion.

To be honest, there was so much wrong with this passage that I didn't even know where to begin the analysis, which forced me to take an approach of dividing the sentences into partially repetetive segments. Thanks to this appraoach I could analyze the fragment whenever the following words modified its meaning. Please bear in mind that the original passage was written in my mother language and the translation required of me that I stay true to the original manuscript, even if it meant translating mistakes characteristic for my native language, without making it less understandable for you than it was for my countrymen. Alright, pay attention as I perform the first incision...

"Dante apparently was a teenager" (:devpedobearplz:). "Dante apparently was a teenager like thousands of souls" - To be honest, I can't tell exactly if it was supposed to mean that he developed anorexia so severe that he weighted as much as holographic projections of deceased people, or that he somehow managed to copyright souls and now every human being will look like him after death. "Dante apparently was a teenager like thousands of souls closed..." - hmm, if you can have an open mind, then you can have a closed soul too... Just remember that he possesses a closed soul, and not an open one... you should know the difference by now. "Dante apparently was a teenager like thousands of souls closed in a body" - Oh, my God, did you hear that? Thousands of souls in a single body! He's the modern-day incarnation of the soul-devouring, shapeshifting Shang Tsung from the Mortal Kombat series! I have absolutely no idea how it happened, but in some way the reality managed to merge with the magical Netherrealm and now it's possible to trap the spirit inside something else than flesh! Epic fa(il)tality! "Dante apparently was a teenager like thousands of souls closed in a body that's similar to him" - Oh, it makes perfect sense... Dante as a person was even more similar to the body than his own body! No, wait... maybe it was his clone that possessed a soul that somehow learned to multiply by thousands just like bacteria? "in a body that's similar to him, but with the difference..." - if it's SIMILAR, then it's obvious that there's a lot more differences than the one mentioned. "but with the difference that from the moment of seeing the first ray..." - it doesn't matter if he came to this world in a hospital or in the same bedroom in which he was conceived, because the curtains could be pulled together and the thing that he saw coming through the window didn't have to look like a ray, and besides... the first thing he saw could be the ugly face of the nurse that made him want to go back and restart the life game, because it made him believe that his mother could never look that abominable. "ray of daylight" - oh, the logic behind my reasoning was unquestionable... getting born in the middle of the night was constitutionally prohibited, just like dying in one of American cities, where there was no vacancy in the local cemeteries quite a few years back. That's why thousands of children, one after another and without a single exception, were born during the time when Vampires were afraid to stuck their noses out of their coffins. "like it happened in the case of legions of newlyborn children" - I guess that means that not only boys are from Mars. Even girls can form legions before they can even roundhouse kick the midwife for slapping their lowly armored buttocks! "newlyborn children, that came to this world" - of course, some newlyborn children come to this world quickly by foot, and "oldlyborn" children take so much time to deliver as if they tried to get their limousine past the narrow gates of life. "but with the difference that from the moment of seeing the first ray of daylight, (...)however there was not enough of the gift" - ...which was the ability to connect subordinated sentences in the correct manner. These are the dire consequences of constructing complex sentences, allowing the meaning of the sentence to get lost among countless interruptions and then annexing an (in)subordinate sentence as if the previous one didn't exist. "there was not enough of the gift" - remember, folks, the gift is like wool - your parents can't give you gifts just like they can't give you wools. In the case of this sentence it was impossible to write "enough of the gifts" because why would he need two abilities to speak?

You don't have to possess the talent of clairvoyance to know that the estimation of the valence will end for this passage very badly. Its valence sinks below zero for the first time, because it containes definitely too many redundant words ("like thousands of souls closed in a body that's similar to him").

The valence submerges by a further league into the ocean of absurdity due to the abuse of the thesaurus ("legions of newly born children") and sinks deeper beneath the surface of mediocrity because of its improper punctuation ("children, that").

The valence passes the mark of the fourth league drowning... the closer we study the meaning of this fragment, the more layers of absurdity we discover ("FROM the moment of seeing the first ray of daylight (...), there was not enough of the gift, which was the ability to speak, for him" - one would think that the sight of the daylight has deprived him of his ability to speak, and that the problem didn't exist until he exited his mother's womb).

The tentacles of grammatical abberrations pull the valence even deeper into the depths of failure ("there was not enough of the gift (...), for him [left]).

The reason why it descends deeper into the abyss of failure is that the passage "weights" too much (sixty-four words were needed to convey the information that he was mute, which bore significance for the plot until the moment when he became comatose due to a preposterous accident that occured several verses later) and it fails miserably at compensating for its dullness, because there are no creative symbolism, no humorous expressions, no philosophic insightfullness, etc.

The valence decreses for the eighth time for the reason that the passage is unable to fulfil the role of captivating the attention of the reader and encouraging him to read further, which may result in the book being put back into the bookshelf by the potential reader at the bookstore.

The passage is penalized for the ninth time due to the fact that it's quite misleading. The fragment about "being unlike other newlyborn children" suggests that the protagonist was a newlyborn child himself when the events described in the book occured, but in fact he was sixteen years old... just like me at the time of writing this passage.

Perhaps this excerpt contains "undermining elements" that escaped my attention, despite the fact that I've already spent far too much time analyzing its content, and I'll probably won't be able to find anything else that's worth putting on the list of elements that ruin the quoted passage. However, if you were entertained by the dissection, or found it informative, you should be happy to hear that there's already an article in the making that will contain a detailed analysis of the remaining sentences originating from the aformentioned fantasy novel. Its purpose is to teach readers, who are willing to learn the skills needed to become a professional writer, how NOT to write, WHY not to write the way I did and HOW to write BETTER... in a, hopefully, humorous manner.

If the thought of reading a whole article containing sentences that may be even more traumatizing than the passage you read before exceeds the amount of absurdity that your sanity can ever bear, then I'll just proceed to the analysis of the passage from my newest novel, which was meant to possess the highest valence possible.

Of course, I don't expect that everyone will consider it the best passage ever written, but since the sentences from my novel are the only ones, at least so far, written in accordance with the practical theory presented in this article, there is little I can do to avoid being accused of boasting that they're worth more than any of the classic lines written in the past... which isn't true, because I would have absolutely no trouble recalling countless quotes that I wish I had written myself.

Besides, don't forget that "the valence of a sentence" and "the subvalence of a sentence" aren't the same thing. Even if I was able to produce a passage that possessed the valence equaling my current age (24), it doesn't mean that the subvalence would be equally high. I could consider ordering the words, constituting a complex sentence, by their length, which in turn depends on their placement in the expression, a valid achievement, because it hasn't been done before and thus poses a great challenge for the writer, but... I doubt that it would make the readers run to the nearest bookstore early in the morning in their bathrobes/pyjamas just to see how the writer accomplished this seemingly impossible task, because it's not exactly what they're looking for in D.Koontz's or J.K. Rowling's books.

It seems that valence is something that we, the writers, value more (for example, Ernest Vincent Wright purposefully didn't use the letter "e" in any word when writing "Gadsby: Champion of Youth") than subvalence, which urges you, the readers, to put everything into drawers labeled "I like" and "I dislike" and is the reason why some of you argue about subjective subjects like tastes and opinions on plot and characters. I'm aware that you might consider the "intended valence" of the passage that I'm about to demonstrate unjustified, but I hope you'll refrain from forming an opinion before reading the interpretation of the passage included below, particularly because it's difficult to avoid interpretations in cases where the words conveying additional meanings cannot be translated properly... which might lead to the discreptancy between the way the justifiedness of the estimation of the fragment's valence is perceived by those who are able to read in my mother language and those who aren't.

Although it's futile to try to prevent you from making assumptions about my writing skills based on my imperfect translation skills, bear in mind that the sentence given as an example below doesn't possess the highest valence possible, because determining which of the sentences possesses the most "valuable elements" would require arduous calculations... which would only stretch the publication date of this article way beyond my estimated lifespan. Oh... and I concluded that the only way to convey most of the meanings embedded in the original passage is to include not only both language versions, but the in-depth Polish-to-English analysis as well.

Convinced that an imperfectly translated multiple complex sentence might intimidate or bias you towards applying this technique, allow me to remind you that using one of my writing styles, presented below, isn't a requirement to use thie technique successfully and you can easily use these principles to write conscise prose or poetry as well. You can simply construct a longer sentence and then decide which parts of it sound satisfying enough for you to keep on the page.

Although you might not agree with me, minimalistic prose (I mean situations when a writer didn't try "abundant prose" long enough) seems to be an expression of setting oneself writing standards that are too low.

It also urges to dismiss possibilities that following one's chain of logical conclusions create. In the case of short sentences the period comes too soon, while multiple complex sentences don't allow you to stop that quickly. When writing a short sentence you could easily end your sentence with "fixated his eyes upon the embarassingly colourful umbrella", but since multiple complex sentences urge you to use grammatical structures like "while doing this he did that" or "after doing this he did that". For example: "not paying any attention to the traffic on the street he was about to cross he fixated his eyes upon the embarassingly colourful umbrella. Well, the example may be lame, but it suffices to illustrate my point. Multiple complex sentences urge the writer to go beyond the period following "umbrella" and to ask various questions ("why did he look at it so intensely?") or provide information about the umbrella that speaks about the character, his relationships, life experiences, etc. We can expand this sentence by adding "...fixated his eyes upon the embarassingly colourful umbrella that was the last thing that he had in his hands when he failed to save his daughter from the incoming car by being merely a fraction of a second too late". Of course, it's possible to strenghten the dramatic conflict by providing a reason why he was to late. We can write "...by being merely a fraction of a second too late, because he was too busy contemplating leaving his wife for his mistress (or committing suicide)". For instance... "If he only wasn't arguing with his daughter at the roadside about the text messages from his lover and wouldn't try to block her attacks with the embarrassingly colourful umbrella by holding it firmly, that truck out of nowhere would never have run her over". Should it still be too wordy, you can remove "by holding it firmly" or disclose the reason for their argument in another sentence.

If you understood my point, you probably thought about providing a reason for his suicidal thoughts or the unbearability of living with his wife. I believe that the mere fact of following the chains of logical conclusions can direct your thoughts in a way that will prove beneficial for the plot of your novel or short story.

Should it happen that the final conclusion occurs to you as ingenious, but the sentences that led to this conclusion aren't even worth reading, it may mean that you need to trim the multiple complex sentence or find a different way to introduce the ingenious conclusion.

Alright... I believe that there is nothing left that requires further clarification. Shall we begin...?

Polish version.
The subject of the analysis is the sentence/sentences (depending on whether you consider sentences divided by a semicolon separate expressions or not) highlighted in boldface. The preceding fragment prevents confusion resulting from reading passages out of context.

".Bóg jeden wie, ile czasu stracił, zataczając kółka w kierunku przeciwnym do ruchu wskazówek zegara, przy oknie swego mieszkania w oczekiwaniu nadejścia kogoś, kto choć powinien był, miał się najprawdopodobniej już nie zjawić.

W pewnym sensie czas zatrzymał się dla niego w chwili, gdy wszystkie wskazówki przystanęły na cyfrze sześć, bowiem w tym oto symbolicznym momencie zapalił świecę w kształcie rajskiej pary obejmującej się pod drzewem zakazanego owocu, będąc przekonanym, że trójkąt cyfr tradycyjnie kojarzonych z planetą ochrzczoną wdzięczniejszym imieniem rzymskiej bogini miłości, przyniesie więcej szczęścia niż małżeństwo zawarte w miesiącu zawierającym w swej nazwie pewną warczącą literę, niefortunnie rozpoczynającą większość słów bliskoznacznych jego rozwiązaniu; dzieląc uważne spojrzenie pomiędzy dogorywającą o włos nad dziewiczym knotem zapałkę a tarczę zegara podzieloną przez falliczne wskazówki na modłę kobiecego łona, wprawił swe serce w drżenie, które narastającym echem odbrzmiewało wewnątrz jego umysłu niczym wspomnienie inicjującego pocałunku."

".God only knows how much time he has wasted by walking anti-clockwise in circles next to the window of his flat, awaiting the arrival of someone who should be here already, but most probably wasn't to come.

In a certain sense, time stopped for him the moment when all the hands of the clock halted having reached the cipher six, because it was in this symbolic moment that he lit the candle shaped like the paradisical couple embracing each other under the tree of the forbidden fruit, being convinced that a triangle of ciphers traditionally attributed to the planet christened with the more graceful name of the Roman goddess of love, will bring more luck than a marriage sealed in a month containing a particular "growling" letter in its name, which unfortunately also initiates most of the words meaning its dissolution [this fragment requires clarification: there is a traditional belief in Poland saying that marriage must be sealed during a month that contains the letter "r" in its name if it is to be harmonious and prosperous. The origin of this belief isn't widely known, but it's obvious that the letter "r" initiates the Polish equivalent of "divorce" and most of its synonyms like "rozwiązanie małżeństwa" or "rozpad małżeństwa"]; dividing his attention between the withering flame of the match, held by a hair's distance above the virgin candle-wick, and the face of the clock, intersected by phallic indicators into the shape of a female womb, he made his heart tremble so immensely that it began to echo inside his mind like the memory of an initiating kiss."

To be honest with you, the translation is significantly less melodic than the original fragment, which is the more upsetting that melody was the paramount criteria by which I judged whether "valuable elements" should remain on the page or not.
They say that "Translations are like women - beautiful aren't true and true aren't beautiful". As you can very well see for yourselves, staying true to the original, despite being absolutely necessary, doesn't do my writing skills any justice. Oh, well...

The valence of the sentence increases, because...
1)In order to imbue the passage with additional, deeper meanings I chose words that formed anagrams that are related to the content of the chapter, and particularly those that foreshadow what is going to happen to the protagonist's fiancee... which brings us to the next point...

2)Every sentence throughout the first five pages (so far) has been constructed in such a way that there are no words that don't contain relevant anagrams. If the words were too short to form an anagram, I made sure that the neighbouring short words (or one longer word) formed an anagram, but that was rather an emergency solution, used in cases where other words couldn't be used or didn't exist (for example, a valid synonym for "minute" doesn't exist in Polish). If you happen to know Polish and have more time on your hands, you can resort to this free online anagram search tool to study it for yourself. Since I don't use swearwords, not even sexual profanities, I must admit that I'm not quite happy with the fact that the words used in the novel unintentionally formed most of the short vulgarisms found in the Polish vocabulary... although it does fit the theme if we consider the antagonist's point of view and how the readers are supposed to react to his abhorrent behaviour.

3)Of course, if it happened that a particular word didn't form relevant anagrams, but could be transformed into a relevant word with as little as a misspelling (for example, "hieratic" can be turned into "hi-erOtic"), I used these words instead of words that formed anagrams, since they're easier to notice. However, my main focus was to place innocent, commonly used expressions with the potential for an innuendo (like "vigrin woods", "virgin snow", etc. used to describe something untouched by man) in the vicinity of similar expressions or into a context that distorts their meaning (for instance, "by a [short] hair's distance" is a commonly used equivalent of "it was a close shave". The word "hair" is unremarkable by itself, but it promptly loses its innocence when coupled with the adjective "virgin [snow, woods]" and with the description of a long, thin object that happens to be the match, they can evoke vivid imagery). Naturally, it wasn't meant to be a crude joke, but rather a foreshadowing technique... as well as a clever method to avoid describing sexual violence directly, in minute detail. The technique of transforming innocent words and phrases into innuendos ensures that underage readers will understand the text only superficially and not the allusions with which I attempt to describe the scene that is too painful and too traumatic even for myself to write about it.

4)Instead of resorting to separate descriptions of the environment and separate descriptions of action, I merged these two. Additionally, the actions related with the described items are relevant to the plot. Instead of allowing the protagonist to sip tea just to justify describing the design of the cup, I decided to let him light a candle shaped like the biblical couple during an intimate moment, which speaks volumes about his relationship with the absent fiancee (the theme of repressed sexuality deemed sinful or indecent, for instance...). The items speak indirectly about the personalities of the protagonists like the calendar marked in a symmetric, artistic way suggesting perfectionism and respect for material possessions.

5)It takes as little as looking up "Justinian Reincarnation" in a search engine to see that reincarnation was once an integral part of the Bible, or that astrology was respected and practiced even by popes. Of course, there were incidents that might undermine its credibility like the prediction of the death of the Pope Urban VIII (which is nearly impossible even today) done by a hack astrologer which led to the condemnation of this discipline; the tendency of universities to remove this subject from their curricula and the fact that it was built around the imperfect Ptolemaic cosmology, abolished with the discovery of the telescope... but it doesn't mean that the reformed astrology hasn't proven its worth since then. As far as I know, it's an academic discipline in the United States and Russia right now.
Don't get me wrong - I consider myself an open-minded christian, but the tendency to label every form of spiritual development as paganism or satanism is not only injust but also insulting. This is the reason why I decided to play with religious symbols and uncover their pagan origins (the tradition of burrying deceased in coffins is as old as the ancient Egypt, if not older). Very well known is the tendency to see the faces of biblical characters in random stains and thus I decided to make people see sexual and controversial things in oridinary, innocent objects, like the bikini area created by indicators dividing the face of the clock into three triangular parts to make them understand that by directing thoughts I can make them see whatever their brains want to see... I also played with symbols by juxtapositioning "christening" with "names of pagan gods" (that's why I wrote about it. If I didn't point it out, my countrymen probably wouldn't see anything wrong with "they christened her Venus". For the same reason it didn't occur to them that the head attire of the christian priests called in Polish "mitra" has the same name as the hindu, zaratushtrian and mithraic god named Mithra. Moreover, if you look it up, you'll find that the day of birth of Mithra has been established the day of birth of Jesus Christ). I also managed to integrate astrological terminology and thematics with religion. My purpose is to glamorize it just like "The Matrix" did it with action scenes.

6)Instead of using descriptions that are as boring as shopping lists, I attempted to find something unique about every subject to make the neccessary descriptions of the environment more interesting to read. I could just content myself with writing "in march" instead of writing about "months with an 'r' in their name" but that would deprive me of an opportunity to include not only educational elements, but also an oxymoron (a month that is supposed to be good for marriage, yet contains a letter that initiates the Polish word for divorce ["rozwód"]) and also a word that means dissolution [for example, of marriage] and delivery [child birth] at the same time. The motif of delivery/childbirth wasn't planned at first, but since I have a tendency to give every word additional meanings, I included this theme and it turned out to have interesting effects on the plot.

7)As mentioned above, I also intended to include educational elements on various subjects. Of course, I made sure that these educational elements won't hinder the development of the plot. They were turned into an integral part of the metaphors, descriptions and comparisons.

8)The passage is still comprehensible despite its length. Although I admit that it might require of you to read it twice. I see an advantage in this...

9)I aspired to write a novel that would develop not only the mind, but the brain itself. I took advantage of the discovery that reading difficult books created a characteristic, mild "brainache" and sleepiness (or rather a kind of mental overload, because it wasn't exactly physical exhaustment) that passed after taking a nap. I figured that this is the symptom of new neuronal connections being created. My suspicions were confirmed when I read about the results of a scientific experiment. The experiment involved mice that had to make it past the maze. When the scientists examined their brain activity during their sleep, they discovered strong electrical discharges that transported information from one part of the brain to another. Following this trail they discovered that blocking this process caused the mice to forget the way through the maze and they had to learn the way through the maze anew. The conclusion is simple: reading through difficult books with informative content (as opposed to James Joyce's books which are difficult only because they are written in the "stream of consciousness" style, but don't contain educational values) actually makes the reader smarter. My ambition was to combine entertainment with practicality.

10)Some of the inconspicious verbs indicate not only what happened the subject of the action [item], but also what happened to the characters... for instance, the word "dogorywająca" means "[something of feminine gender] that is becoming extuinguished" and is commonly used as a synonym of death-agony - a life that is burning out. Similarly, "odbrzmiewająca", when you leave out the first "d", means "[something of feminine gender is] swelling". And since "część ciała" [part of the body] has the grammatical feminine gender, it can also suggest the swelling of genitals... which is related with the plot, obviously.

11)Since the sentences originated in my subconscious mind and seemed appealing enough to write them down, I didn't give them much thought, but once in a while I discover that they hold hidden meanings that occur surprising even to myself. Just to name an example: I just discovered that I used the word "warczącej" which means "growling [like an animal, specifically a canine]" in this chapter. It is common in my country to consider "r" a growling letter, so I didn't even question why I chose this word and not another, but now it turns out that my subconscious mind knew very well what it was doing, because it reflects the concept of giving each chapter the personality of consecutive tarot cards, which I thought of much earlier. This chapter was intended to be the dominion of the "The Fool" card, depicting a wanderer looking away in amazement when he's about to take a step into the gaping void beneath him that is saved by his dog that attempts to pull him back by biting into his leggings. The words and meanings weaved together perfectly without me even noticing it.

12)I chose words carefully enough to make sure that the letters are tightly packed into each verse and only the space for 1 - 3 additional letters remains. Although it plays rather an aesthetical role, it forced me to balance the beauty of symmetric verses with the melody of the sentence. Moreover, quite often I had to use different words, because the ones I intended to use were too long (I could split them into two parts, but sometimes the syllables are too long and unused space remains). It also forced me to look at words (like adjectives) that I could remove to make the intended long word fit into the verse without distorting my original message.

13)I managed to create a sentence that serves multiple important purposes, some of which are listed above, at once.

14)This sentence was written after a two-digit number of attempts and revisions. Although it could be shorter, it's a version that I'm finally content with... and know that I'm rarely satisfied with something that is even slightly below my possibilities.

These are all "valuable elements" that I can identify for now.
The list of every universal "valuable element" that I can think of is included below. I think it will serve your needs better than the list of identified "valuable elements" presented above, since every sentence is different and this was simply an analysis of one of them.
This list features "valuable elements" that I didn't incorporate into this sentence for various reasons. If we consider the "valuable element" that is humour, we're soon to discover that its incorporation would require the choice of different words and phrasing, at the expense of already established "valuable elements", of course. That doesn't mean, however, that it can't be incorporated into other sentences.

Alright, here is the list...
When I write sentences, I want them to have and/or be...
1)Funny
2)Informative
3)Wise
4)Creative
5)Experimental
6)Surprising
7)Thought-provoking
8)Unforgettable
9)Useful
10)Motivating
11)Emotional
12)Inspiring
13)Interesting
14)Truth-revealing
15)Influential
16)Inspiring social reforms
17)Contain wordplay
18)Incorporate innovative writing techniques
19)Convey something known in a fresh way
20)Abolish a hurtful myth
21)Broaden the reader's vocabulary
22)Help the reader grow mentally
23)Help the reader grow spiritually
24)Make people who committed wrong lose feel uneasy
25)Create a suggestive atmosphere
26)Motivate the reader to study a particular kind of art or science
27)Motivate the reader to read further
28)Save space by combining short sentences into multiple complex sentences
29)Shock and stirr controversy when an important problem is swept under the rug
30)Teach the reader a valuable ability
31)Convey life experience to the reader
32)Broaden human consciousness by combining emotions that never appeared together
33)Create vivid imagery and inspire imagination
34)Involve all of the senses: hearing, smell, taste...
35)Contribute to combining multiple disciplines of art or literary genres into one
36)To be quotable - at least their fragments
37)Include as many of these "valuable elements" as possible
38)Promote valuable artworks, songs, projects...
39)Attempt synesthesia, combine sensual stimuli and help create a language for something undescribed before
40)Contain allusions to similar books, music, culture...
41)Promote worthy causes despite of political danger
42)Intrigue with creative symbolics
43)Describe abstract concepts in the most understandable and accessible way
44)Contain interesting conflicts of interests, moral conflicts...

There are many possibilities. I'm just unable to recall them right now. If you happen to have further ideas which could help expand this list, please share them with me in the comments.

We are nearing the end of this tutorial, but before you go, I would like to share with you some general thoughts about this tutorial and creative writing.

Although you might think that the list of "valuable elements" is something obvious and thus unneccessary, you need to know that humans can think effectively only about three things simultaneously. For this reason, regardless of the effort you put into visualising every element on this list while rewriting sentences inside your mind, the results will never be satisfactory. I was unaware of it before and wondered why is it that my revision process is much more effective when I have the sentence that I'm trying to rewrite before my eyes than when I attempt to look at the imperfect sentence with my mind's eye while studying possible alternatives in my thoughts. I began to write all of the alternatives down, so I wouldn't have to clog my thoughts with thinking about the failed ones, which in turn made room for new, better alternatives.

If you combine the information of thinking effectively about three things at the same time with the fact that our thought processes are based on comparison, you will understand that you need to see all the alternatives in front of your eyes to compare the best with each of them. Attempting to remember every alternative and compare the best with the others is an arduous task. Normally only the "neighbouring" alternatives are compared and the previous estimations are overriden and soon forgotten.

It may sound bizarre, but it also happens that the great sentence that suddenly popped into your mind, suddenly loses all its appeal when you write it down. It may be because people tend to fail to see the "big picture" when they visualise pictures or sentences. Not mentioning that when we are focused on the "brilliant" alternative, we tend to see only the two remaining alternatives that our mind limits us to, which doesn't make a sufficient comparison possible.

I think that the value of this tutorial is reinforced by the fact that the same problem applies to drawing. Artists tend to focus on several aspects, but they neglect others. For example, they put enormous effort into designing a creative weapon or armor, but they forget to include "valuable elements" like an action pose, unique perspective, elements of a story or dramatic conflict. You can also make a list of popular things like celebrities, female game characters, etc. and identify which things on the list appeal to you personally. Then you can take a base idea, for example: "a knight kills a dragon" and transform it by gradually replacing each of the elements of the basic concepts with elements on the list with popular subjects. For example... try to imagine that the knight has the face of a celebrity that you and many others like. Does that work? Does it feel right? If yes, then proceed. Imagine that the dragon is a zombie-dragon, since many people like zombies. Does that work? Does it feel consistent with your vision? Do you still feel it appeals to you? If not, choose a different element to replace until you achieve an effect that you are satisfied with and which gives you a feeling that there is nothing more you can do to make the drawing better. Basically that's how it works. In writing you can do the same - distill sentences until you achieve the perfect outcome.

If you decide to incorporate "valuable elements" into your writing, keep in mind that you shouldn't try to increase the valence of a sentence at any cost, especially if the ingeretion in the structure of the sentence makes it look clumsy, or otherwise awkward.

Every element should play an important role, preferably multiple roles.

Don't try to disrupt the flow of the sentence just for the sake of being funny.

Try to determine the main themes of your novel. In the case of my novel it's, among many others, love, death, afterlife, invisible powers, sex... and I chose a symbol of a candle in the shape of the first biblical couple hugging, lit on the fourth anniversary (four is a symbol of death in Japanese culture) of their first date, that melt and took the shape of genital areas drowning in a large pile of excrements (symbol of the sexual assault and violent death of the protagonist's fiancee' on the night of their anniversary. The excrements are a symbol for treating someone's dignity and feelings like something worthless). I also chose related symbols like the hands/indicators of the clock in positions that made the clock resemble female genital area. The protagonist lit the candle when all three indicators pointed the digit six, because in numerology the digit six is associated with the godess of love, Venus, and he wanted this moment to bring him luck in his relationship.

I hope that you understand the principle of related and purposeful "valuable elements". In other words, don't write about the grandmother of the protagonist if her presence, or the memory about her doesn't influence the course of the plot even a bit, or if anything about this grandmother doesn't match the themes of your book.

Avoid unrelated digressions in the form of interruptions if they make the sentence sound unnatural or incoprehensible. If you can't handle multiple complex sentences, then go for shorter ones, but make sure that every one of them has at least some "valuable elements".

Also don't try to make the sentence sound perfect at the first attempt. It took me more than two dozens of revisions to come up with the symbols of the candle and clock. Add "valuable elements" one after another and ask yourself if the modified sentence still sounds understandable and natural.

Personally, I let my subconcious mind guide me. If I feel that something is wrong with a particular element, then it most probably is.

Sometimes you can increase the valence of the sentence by combining to shorter sentences into one, especially if they are connected by theme, but parted by another passage. It's possible to connect separate sentences by "clustering". You simply insert words that share a theme into subordinated or separate sentences. The theme can be "weather"... For example: "He STORMED into the room and punched him LIGHTNING fast in the face, so forcefully that it CLOUDED his mind and for a longer moment he didn't know where he was. An uproar like THUNDER echoed across the hall. If he didn't start to run, he could WIND up badly hurt by the crowd." Coming up with creative and plausible "clusters" is quite entertaining. Although I invented "clustering" independently around 2007, I discovered that Tomasz Olbratowski, working for the popular Polish RMF FM radio creates his "column" this way.

I have been taught by "how to write" books that conscise prose is an ideal that every writer should strive for. It nearly forced me to lower my standards, but then I came across a "how to write" book that said it's perfectly alright to write lengthy sentences as long as I stick to the concept of "singularity of ideas". It means that sentences have to concern one and the same subject at a time. The author even provided an example of an established writer who wrote lengthy sentences that were perfectly comprehensible. In other words... the reader has to understand what the sentence is about all the time and for this reason the number of digressions and interruptions should be minimized. To create an anti-example we can turn the sentence "The gardner saw her coming home with a suitcase in her hand" into...
"The gardner, who was hired by the family three years ago out of pity because he had no means to live, saw her, although he was almost blind and couldn't notice her easily because he was deaf, coming home, which brought back so many of her painful memories that she would never call it "home" herself, with a suitcase, that she must have during the time when she ran away from home and which must have gone through a lot judging by the severe damages even stickers couldn't conceal anymore, in her injured hand that she desperately tried to hide in her sleeve."
Well, certainly you would be able to come up with more interesting anti-examples. Sadly, I don't have all day to revise it until it reaches its ultimate state of abominability.

You may also find the technique of "idiotisation" useful. It is helpful when determining whether particular words make the sentence sound intelligent or not. For instance: I might be tempted to cram another information about the protagonist into the sentence. The original sentence might sound: "he blocked the strike of the axe with his cane". I might be tempted to add an adjective before "cane" to say something about the character. Although it might make a difference if the attack was blocked with a wooden or (more durable) metal cane, but adding that it was a red cane (because the character likes red or is hot headed) might make the reader question "why a red cane? Why not a blue cane? Did he pick colours when he chose the cane to block the attack with?". I might as well add that the protagonist waited in his flat on the thirteenth floor, but the reader might ask "what difference does it make on which floor he waited? Why did you mention waiting in the flat on the thirteenth floor? Would it be different if he waited in a flat on the fourteenth floor?" This is the technique that I use when deciding which parts of the sentence to remove when making the words in a verse use as much space as possible.



I wish you all what's best and much, much more.

Jakub "Antypaladyn Pedigri / Antipaladin Pedigri" Luberda
finished: 9 VI 2010, 12:24, Rabka-Zdrój.

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