Neither pithy nor witty

Now let's say you have three paragraphs, and you have three things you want to accomplish in them. You want to

A) give a sense for the character's physical sense of the space they're in

B) describe a philosophical problem that's troubling the character, and

C) hint at some interior secret you're unspooling throughout the story.

A good workmanlike approach would be to have three paragraphs and have each one accomplish one of the goals. Structurally you might represent it like this

A

B

C

But once you get comfortable you can start saucing up your prosaic structure by tying these threads together. Maybe you work on each thread simultaneously so that they play off each other and support what you're building towards. One example of how this might look is

Introduce A Introduce B Introduce C

Build on C Build on B Build on A

Finish thought on A Finish thought on B Finish thought on C

An alternate structure might be

Introduce A Introduce B Introduce C

Build on A Build on C Build on B

Finish thought on B Finish thought on C Finish thought on A

The order in which you move through the thoughts/subjects let's you do different thematic and pacing things. Like in this last example, perhaps the "A Thread" is a character doing something physical like balancing on their tiptoes as they reach for something high on the kitchen shelf. Perhaps the B thread is them trying to remember everything they need for their mother's favorite banana bread recipe. And perhaps the C thread is the character's pre-grief for their mother's metastatic cancer. In the third paragraph of this example maybe the character remembers the last ingredient needed (B thread), just as they remember their mother can't have banana bread b/c of medication complications (C thread), and then they fumble the bag of flour on the top shelf dropping it all over theirself (A thread) just as they reach the hard emotional conclusion that they can't help their mother in ways that feel real. Now the emotional is reflected in the physical.

Here you've seeded the physical reality at the start of the sequence. You did a soft reminder in paragraph 2. And then you brought it back in a big way that feels like an emotional resolution that amplifies the effect of the C thread.

Tù.úk'z v2

I commissioned @baldursghaik to draw Iona having a great time with several lucky partners.