'The frog hopped onto the stone and it flicked its tongue out and snatched a fly out of the air.'

I'm having big problems with this type of construction in my novel. I keep having two nouns in the first part of a sentence, immediately followed by an 'it' that I want to refer to the first noun. Even though it's clear from context that the 'it' refers to the first noun, it seems wrong to me - I think I read something ages ago that said that such an 'it' is assumed to relate to the most recent noun.

Help... help...

Part of the issue is that you are implying concurrency for two actions that are not simultaneous. It flicked its tongue out _after_ landing on the stone, not whilst jumping (I imagine) where you have written it as if tongue-flipping in the air.
G

'The frog hopped onto the stone, flicked its tongue out and snatched a fly out of the air.'

What's wrong with that?

Hi Gaius - it's a more general problem I've got than that (I should have given some more examples).

Such as:

'The window was there, high on the wall, the bottom just level with the top of his head.'

Here, 'the bottom' refers to the window, not the wall. It's similar to the 'it' issue - referring to the first noun but immediately following the second.

I find I'm writing a lot of these kind of sentences and then thinking, ooh err... but I'm not sure how to fix them except very clumsily and not sounding like unnatural.

'The window was there, high on the wall, the bottom just level with the top of his head.'

Toast, I don't think there's any chance that the reader could confuse what you're referring to in either of your sentences.

I would change the word order in the above slightly though.

How about :-

High on the wall was the window - the bottom just level with the top of his head.

I'm a terrible one for dashes - I think they're very common in womag writing. I once heard that readers find long sentences easier to take in if they're broken up by dashes rather than commas. (Though that sounds a bit patronising, doesn't it!)

Or even just break it into two sentences:

'The frog hopped onto the stone. It flicked its tongue out and snatched a fly out of the air.'

'High on the wall was the window' 'The frog hopped onto the stone. It flicked its tongue out and snatched a fly out of the air.'

Thanks, Jem and Astrea, this is really helping me think!

What I'm trying to do with my writing is pretty much write as I would speak, to produce something that doesn't sound like 'telling a story' if read out loud. Both of the above are unambiguous and grammatical but I wouldn't say either of them - they both sound 'story' to me.

Not sure I'm expressing the problem very well. I will look for some more examples.

This has become such a thing for me that I'm thinking of doing a search for 'it' throughout my document once I've finished to make sure I haven't stuffed up!

'The window was there, high on the wall, the bottom just level with the top of his head.'

This is fine, because of the parenthetical commas which tuck "high on the wall" away as a separate element, just adding a bit to the description of the window.

So "the bottom" refers perfectly clearly to "the window": it's essentially:

The window was there, the bottom just level...

If it WAS the wall that was the subject of the last bit you'd do it quite differently:

The window was there, high on the wall, which was made of red brick

'The frog hopped onto the stone and it flicked its tongue out and snatched a fly out of the air.'

My solution would be Jem's - comma after 'stone' and leave out the first 'it'. That way I see that you could read it as the "its" belonging to the stone, but I really don't think many people would read it like this in the normal flow of hoovering up the story, if you see what I mean.

If this is a bit too formal/story-telly/literary

The frog hopped onto the stone, flicked out its tongue, and snatched a fly out of the air.

how about:

The frog hopped onto the stone and flicked its tongue out to snatch a fly out of the air.

Thanks, Emma - it's reassuring as well to know that the 'rule' isn't as rigid as I'd thought. As you say, if people are reading forward through the story in the way they'd listen as you were speaking, they're probably not stopping to nitpick for ambiguity in the way that I am!

A general point. Sometimes, cutting any surplus word can point the way to the right construction of a sentence.

For example, do you really need 'there'? Could you say instead, 'The window was high on the wall, the bottom just level with the top of his head'. You could perhaps go further: 'The window was high on the wall, the bottom level with his forehead.' Or even further: 'The window was high, the bottom level with his forehead.' Further still: 'The bottom of the window was level with his forehead.'

The balance, perhaps, here is between the clarity of fewer words versus the impact of effective extra words. For instance 'just' implies effort to get there, which you may want in this context. And while 'On the wall' is obvious (where else would a window be?), it emphasises a certain imagery.

So, very interesting; this has caused me to focus on something I try to balance all the time - sparseness/clarity with telling and effective imagery.

The balance, perhaps, here is between the clarity of fewer words versus the impact of effective extra words.

Although, as you discover on Twitter, clarity is often about more words - making the connections plainer - not fewer. I'm always putting "that" back into my students work, because they haven't realised that without it, the two halves of their sentence have an ambiguous relationshp and the meaning is blurred and loses force.

Poems are the most dense of all, and may well be the hardest to read - either for straightforward sense, or to get the full impact.

I take longer to say things on the blog than I would in the equivalent discussion in an academic paper, because on the blog I'm always trying to leave enough air in the sentences for the meaning to get over to the reader before they reach the next chunk of meaning, if that makes any sense. In academic prose I can assume readers are going more slowly and able and willing to work harder.

Thanks, Terry & Emma - some more stuff to think about there! I'm going to keep all this in mind when I got through and edit.