I’ve noticed something interesting about my favorite book authors, such as Roald Dahl. They not only write narrative books, and narrative chapters; they write narrative paragraphs. Book paragraphs, with their wide columns, make this possible. But even for newspaper and magazine writers, the narrative paragraph can be an effective writing tool.
Here, for example, is a paragraph from Dahl’s second autobiography, titled “Going Solo,” which covers his time as a daring British air force pilot during World War II. It’s long, but stick with it:
I am writing this forty-five years afterwards, but I still retain an absolutely clear picture of Khalkis and how it looked from a few thousand feet up on a bright-blue early April morning. The little town with its sparkling white houses and red-tiled roofs stood on the edge of the waterway, and behind the town I could see the jagged grey-black mountains where I had chased the Ju 88s the day before. Inland, I could see a wide valley and there were green fields in the valley and among the fields there were splashes of the most brilliant yellow I had ever seen. The whole landscape looked as though it had been painted on to the surface of the earth by Vincent Van Gogh. On all sides and wherever I looked there was this dazzling panorama of beauty, and for a moment or two I was so overwhelmed by it all that I didn’t see the big Ju 88 screaming up at me from below until he was almost touching the underbelly of my plane. He was climbing right up at me with the tracer pouring like yellow fire out of his blunt Perspex nose and in that thousandth of a second I actually saw the German front-gunner crouching over his gun and gripping it with both hands as he squeezed the trigger. I saw his brown helmet and his pale face with no goggles over the eyes and he was wearing some sort of a black flying-suit. I yanked my stick back so hard the Hurricane shot vertically upwards like a rocket. The violent change of direction blacked me out completely, and when my sight returned my plane was at the top of a vertical climb and standing on its tail with almost no forward movement at all. My engine was spluttering and beginning to vibrate. I’ve been hit, I thought, I’ve been hit in the engine. I rammed the stick hard forward and prayed she would respond. By some miracle, the aircraft dropped its nose and the engine began to pick up and within a few seconds the marvelous machine was flying straight and level once again.
And here is his next paragraph:
But where was the German?
First of all, I must say how delighted I am by a 350-word paragraph followed by one of only five words.
But it is the long paragraph that takes my breath away — almost to the point of reader blackout. In a single stretch, Dahl gives us everything we might hope for in a story: a compelling narrator, a gorgeous setting, a shocking complication right in the middle, a split second description of character, an action-packed climax and dazzling resolution.
Even if it was necessary in the end to break up such a paragraph into smaller, digestible chunks, I might be tempted to write it first as a single paragraph so as to test and tighten its narrative unity.
