Glorious Sentences Are Made—Not Born

Novelists compose scads of unsuccessful sentences, and many stay that way. Hardly surprising, given decades of bad habits like thinking aloud, writing the way you talk, trying to sound “fancy,” avoiding confrontation via vagueness, or inflicting academic jargon.

Without pointing the finger at particular best sellers or prize winners, I’ll admit that rip-roaring scenarios or political correctness let many weakly written novels do extremely well.  But. Would  you rather compensate for lame sentence structure, or fix them? This checklist might help.

~ How many sentences (particularly at paragraph beginnings) start with a noun or pronoun? 

Constant use of subject-verb-object (“Hortense bewitched him”) drags. Eyeball the page to check this. Does the left margin languish with repetition? Variety spices not only life, but prose. Seriously. Experiment with fragments. Combine sentences. Divide them. Possibilities abound, and perfecting sentences simultaneously thickens plot and deepens characters. Such a bonus..

~ What’s with the auxiliary verbs? 

Not much, Avoid clutter with weak verbs like “is” or “had.” Action verbs deliver best: “strike,” “kiss,” “shred,” “blink,” “jump.” Exploit the rich heritage of English: whale road meant “ocean”; fire-hammer meant “sword.”

Electrify with symbolic verbs: “illuminate,” “decimate,” “infiltrate.” But follow the metaphor you introduced. Casual or not, it’s still a metaphor. 

~ Do you write tight?

Why say “drew tighter” when you can simply “tighten”?

~ Are you descending into the many ways there are for passive voice to be used by you?

Characters can “buy” stuff or pass “by” train terminals, and “by” also describes time. Dangerously, though, “by” builds this structure: “The ball was hit by the cheerleader.” This is rarely a good way for “by” to be used by you! Why not perform a search for “by”? Innocuous as seems, passive voice enervates, while distancing readers from the characters they follow.

~ If it can be a verb, is it?  

You emasculate prose with “Heraldo experienced fear of seagulls—even the small  ones,” instead of  “Heraldo feared seagulls—even the small ones.”

~ Do you overload the sentence opening?

Avoid constructions like “The reason that Mary can never get enough of lilac fragrance is that these flowers evoke happy childhood summers with Grandma.”  Choose accessible openings, but without creating a new habit, like starting them all with a conjunction (“but,” “because,” etc.) or “ing” phrase.

Tip: While delighting readers, sleek sentences give writers what they never knew they lacked.

Talk to Us

Fiction should be special: eloquent, efficient, and edgy; suspenseful, silky, and slim. But as the above sentence demonstrates, too much of a good thing can feel like, well—eating four slices of chocolate mousse cheesecake washed down with a gigantic mug of chocolate malt. It no longer appeals. It’s too rich, too fattening—too much.

Sometimes a basic, serviceable sentence is just what you need, particularly in dialogue or the connections between sentences and scenes. Sometimes it’s better to just say it. Otherwise, you might generate a construction like this:

Where initially the tightly curled nubs of buds, then later on the big, green hands of leaves, and after that the red, juicy, fragrant clusters of fruit decorated the entire tree, now the branches stood bare.

Maybe you should just say “In winter”?

Instead of cleverly trying to insert model T’s, Chanel suits, Charles Lindbergh headlines, or Twitter, might it be reasonable to simply mention the date?

Direct expression beats florid, circuitous language. If every sentence is long and elaborate, if every fact is oblique, and every word resonant, multi-syllabic and striking, how can you emphasize what you need to? How can you be clear yet concise? How can you develop a close, warm relationship with your readers if you relentlessly disseminate imposing messages from a distant peak? To seem real you have to sound real. At least some of the time.

Tip: You don’t want you or your novel to sound like a grocery list. You don’t want to sound like a famous 19^th century writer, either.