When describing a series of actions in a scene, be sure to mirror the order in which they actually occur.
This sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often writers become so caught up in the process of making their sentences pleasing and graceful that they unwittingly sacrifice meaning.
Consider this example. It may sound okay grammatically, but sequentially it’s absurd: “Finally her suffering was over; succombing to cancer, she had spent 3 weeks in intensive care.” What’s wrong? One doesn’t (as the sentence’s order implies) die, then spend 3 weeks in intensive care.
The fix, mercifully, is easy: just switch the order of the two actions. “After three weeks in intensive car, her suffering was finally over; she had succumbed to cancer.”
Perhaps the sentence is more graceful written the first way, but we’ve remove the distraction factor–and kept the reader reading rather than stopping to ponder.
