The Dresden Files' Good Writing

I am late to the party here and I know it — the “Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher have been a mainstay in Urban Fantasy for a long time already. There are 17 books out as I write this, after all. Now, before I tell you what this post is about, let me tell you quickly what it is not about. This is not a blog post about character development or world building in the series. I am reading book 3 as I write this and, given that the video which pushed me to read the first book mentioned the series changes quite a bit after book 5, I do not want to write about Harry’s development or the interesting approach to the Masquerade that early. Instead, I want to write about pure craftsmanship — Jim Butcher’s word-craft that keeps you reading longer than you should. It kept me up much longer than I should have been up as well.

Jim Butcher’s books have been called pulp and, after finishing two and a half of them, I am more than happy to agree. They’re pulp in the best meaning of the word. They are good, fast reads that keep you interested and make you breeze through them with a hunger for more. That is, in essence, what pulp stories should be like — excellent entertainment that makes you come back for more because you enjoyed yourself so much.
A lot of people look down on pulp as a cheap type of book which doesn’t deserve any recognition. These people probably have never tried to write something which is as focused on readability as pulp is. Readability is not easily defined, because how difficult or easy something is to read depends very much on how well you read a language and how large your vocabulary is. This blends into the first part of what makes the “Dresden Files” so good. To keep people reading, though, you also need to make sure they engage with the characters and get interested in and curious about the story and its next turns and twists.

The first thing which Jim Butcher does absolutely right is his wording. He uses regular words, his sentences are fluent and easy to read, and he doesn’t make the readers stop in order to look up an unknown word or try to make sense of a complicated sentence.
A lot of authors try to show their power over words — something integral to writing, of course, you need to be good with words — by using a large vocabulary and by creating complicated sentences. While this is certainly something, it doesn’t help the average reader with understanding what you’ve written. As a writer, I understand the need to show you’ve mastered your tools. As a reader, I find it easier to stay engaged with a book when it’s making things easy for me and doesn’t challenge me to look up every tenth word and analyse every fifth sentence for its structure. This is something which Butcher never does.
While showing off one’s own vocabulary can be very satisfying, it’s not helpful for gaining a large readership. The more special and the larger the used vocabulary is, the less people will find it easy to follow the text. Therefore, the first lesson to learn from Jim Butcher’s writing is that you should keep your wording and your sentence structure simple and flowing.
Easy reading makes for quick consumption and quick consumption makes for an enjoyable time.

The second and the third part are connected closely to each other, but I’ll talk about each of them in time: ending the chapter on a curious or interesting note and keeping the chapters short.
Let’s look at the chapter ending first. In a pulp story, you as the author want for the readers to consume as much of your story as possible in one sitting. To achieve that, the reader must be motivated to continue after the end of each chapter. An old technique to achieve that, copied from the movie serials of the early twentieth century, is the cliffhanger.
A cliffhanger is created by putting the main character or their love interest in danger at the end of a chapter or episode — literally hanging from a cliff or otherwise in deathly peril. Yet, you can’t do that the whole time. A thirty-chapter story, for instance, can’t put twenty-nine cliffhangers in — that would tire the reader out and they’d probably give up worrying for your main character or love interest after a while. After all, every time they hang from a cliff, they’re saved in the next chapter.
There is a smaller sibling to the cliffhanger, though. You can end a chapter on an interesting note, on a comment or suggestion that interesting things are going to happen in the next chapter. If you end a chapter with ‘had I known what the day would bring, I would have stayed in bed,’ the readers are going to be interested in what happened on that day. They’ll turn the page and start the next chapter, hoping it will be all about that day.
Butcher is good at making the reader curious. Since he writes first-person and the readers are in Harry Dresden’s head, it’s easy to make Dresden think about something strange or curious that will be featured in the next chapter, to comment on what is to come. Like this, Butcher evokes the ‘one more chapter’ feeling in the audience and that is always a good thing in a pulp story. In addition, he delivers on the curious note, which makes it easy for him to get the reader curious again.

This curious note on the end of the chapter goes well with another thing which Butcher does right: the chapter length.
A lot of people read by chapter. They stop reading at the end of a chapter when they have other things to do as well. They’ll tell themselves ‘I’ll finish that chapter before I start cooking dinner’ or ‘I have time for that chapter before I need to take the laundry out of the dryer.’ Like this, they often justify taking time for their reading while they should be doing something else — especially given that pulp is not considered ‘proper literature’ by many.
The length of a chapter has a big influence on whether the reader will read on or not. If a chapter has two hours of reading time (I’m not joking, the first chapter of the second volume of “Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation” does), chances are that a more chapter-oriented reader will not tackle it lightly. They’ll have to think about when they will have the time to finish it. That is not how Butcher does his chapters, though. I haven’t met a chapter which took me longer than five to ten minutes so far. Five to ten minutes are easy to justify and to get in between chores or other tasks. They’re essentially a coffee break.
A short, bite-sized chapter can easily motivate the reader to ‘read on.’ As a writer, you want for the reader to ‘read on,’ so make it easy for them.

In Jim Butcher’s books all three of these aspects come together: the story is easily readable, due to a regular vocabulary and easy-to-read sentences. It’s not challenging, it’s something you can read on the way to work or while you’re waiting for the dryer to finish the laundry. The chapters end on a curious or interesting note, motivating you to read the next one as well. As the chapters are short and won’t take too much time, it’s easy to give in to that ‘one more chapter’ feeling and read that chapter and, perhaps, the one after it.