Pepper your story with pearls.
Readers love pearls. Reviewers love them more. And book jacket blurb writers go absolutely apoplectic about them.
A pearl is part wisdom, part wit, and a large part timing and placement. It is a short statement of truth and wisdom, put in ways that smacks the reader right between the lenses of their reading glasses at the precise moment they need to hear it.
A pearl can be a statement of the obvious, made artful by the moment it appears.
A pearl can be an insight into something that broadens and illuminates. Something that makes the complex simple and memorable.
A pearl, in this context, is usually a narrative gift to the reader, rather than an exchange between characters. Or not, there are no rules.
An example: “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” From Love Story by Erich Segal.
Another: “love hurts,” from the song by the J. Geils Band.
Pearls are poetry. Pearls are perfect literary moments.
They make great chapter sign-offs or even the final line of a story.
Perfectly placed pearls can separate an ordinary manuscript from a great – and publishable – one.
The art of the pearl is indefinable, so I’ll stop here. But you know them when you read them… the trick now is to write them.
Tokyo Screenplay Contest 