First Line Frenzy™ No.524

Adult scifi

The splintering of glass sent Haku scrambling blindly for a weapon.

Something about the syntax of this sentence seems to contradict the turbulence of its meaning. And that something is called a gerund. Gerunds are like three raccoons in a trench coat, trying to buy alcohol at a gas station quick-mart. Allow me to explain…

Splintering glass! Scrambling for a weapon! These verbs are verb-ing beautifully. Vivid and powerful, full of urgency, these word choices are absolute perfection. But! That first verb, splintering, isn't functioning as a verb at all. Instead, it's a gerund — a verb ending in "ing" occupying the subject-place in a sentence. Gerunds aren't inherently bad, but they disrupt the noun-verb structure around which most sentences are built.

Using a gerund in line 1 of your novel saps energy and action out of the moment. "The splintering of glass" is not the same as "Glass splintered" or even "The sound of splintering glass" — both of which bring immediacy to the noun by allowing the verb to verb verbily. In the original sentence, "The splintering" is a subject, "of glass" its object/modifier, "sent" is our verb (what the subject does), and the rest is an object. Nothing is where we expect it to be!

Let's back out of the grammar a bit and consider Line 524 more broadly. I struggle to understand the choice of "splintering" at all. Splintering is a somewhat quiet verb for breaking glass; it's not the kind of sound that sends one "scrambling blindly for a weapon." What causes the glass to splinter? The sound of a heavy object meeting glass might send a person into fight-or-flight mode (and in this case, we know it's fight). There's another way splintering glass might have greater narrative impact, and I'm going to demonstrate what I mean in my edit.

EDIT: Haku scrambled blindly for a weapon, his heart racing in anticipation of the moment the splintering glass of his bedroom window would shatter.

In my edit, splintering glass is like a ticking clock, counting down the seconds to breakage. It's the creeping fissure in the earth that portends a gaping chasm. It's the ominous foreboding of something awful coming down the pike. Accentuating this quality of "splintering"—and allowing the word to function as a verb, rather than a subject—brings tension and urgency to the moment. We join Haku in heart-pounding anticipation—which is a great way to start your novel. This was a case of "right idea, wrong execution." Author, trust your instincts, then refine!

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