Loving your Sentences

I thought I’d take a little break from STORY work this week, to zoom in on close-up details. The process of creating beautifully strong sentences is never-ending but also extremely satisfying once you have some idea of basic principles. Below are a few tips to help with creating perfect entry points into your imagination. 

Love your full stops.

Think of the full stop as the finish line that your reader is longing to reach. It’s a break, a chance to catch a breath. It brings a thought to rest, and gathers the words preceding the full stop into their own independent unit whose purpose is clear because it has been fulfilled. A full stop should feel satisfying – like the end of a song before the next track begins, or the click of a hand on a clock moving to the next minute. Full stops are your friends, and your readers’ too. 

Vary the rhythm.

A good editing trick, probably most useful when on your final draft, is to press ENTER after every sentence – as if you were writing your entire novel in single-sentence paragraphs (please don’t do that). This process instantly demonstrates the varied (or unvaried) lengths of your sentences, because you can clearly see them on the page. If there is a lot of variety, hooray! You have this sussed. However, if most of your sentences look about the same, start re-writing to vary them. This will have two effects: your wordings will become conscious choices rather than default as you attempt to lengthen or shorten sentences, and your writing will fill up with that magical thing called voice, because in varying the lengths between full stops readers will begin to hear a speaker’s natural cadences - the fall in the pitch of a voice at the end of a sentence – happening in an irregular rhythmic pattern as they would in real life. Instead of in a repetitive rhythm that is artificial and quickly becomes monotonous, without the reader necessarily knowing this is why they are losing interest in what is being said. 

Verbs and Nouns are what we see.

Think of verbs and nouns as the joint-supporting beams of your sentences. Verbs and nouns carry the weight of what you want to say; all the rest, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, are extras, like cornicing or pleasing architraves. In most cases you want the main news of the sentence, the subject and verb, at the start of any sentence. The main VERB is a sentence’s beating heart, because everything a writer can describe moves. Verbs bring a sentence to life in whatever form they take, and you don’t want those verbs to be buried within long verb-noun phrases (puts emphasis on: emphasises, gives the impression: suggests, draws attention to: notes).  Let single-word verbs speak for themselves, like strikers on a football pitch. Similarly, untangle long noun strings (website content delivery platform or supply chain resource issues), restoring the proper links between the nouns by adding verbs and prepositions, creating space around them even if this means using more words. Turn the ‘extra' parts of speech into more specific nouns and verbs. Verbs born of adjectives – we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose – can be especially vivid. Verbs and nouns give the readers the story, the basics of what we imagine. Rely on them to tell your story.

Save the Best for the End.

Whatever you most want a reader to remember in a sentence needs to go at the end. For example, can you hear the effect of these different arrangements?

A parrot stood on the edge of the picnic table.

On the edge of the picnic table stood a parrot.

In which one do you ‘see’ the parrot more strongly?

Whenever you can, end your sentences with a strong concrete noun. Modifying phrases (on the patio, to her, at him, across the road)  always create a kind of fade out in the reader’s mind, additional, often not absolutely essential information, and this is why sentences that end this way are weaker. This is why a speech writer would choose Sentence A of the following two sentences, instead of Sentence B. Because the souls are what we care about.

These are the times that try men’s souls.

Men’s souls are tried in times like these. 

Write ALL your sentences as if you’re trying to get elected. 

Loading up the Train Carriages 

(This tip comes from John Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction, a book my English teacher father gave me and the first book I read on writing that really helped me to understand the tools of storytelling.)

Here are the 3 basic sentence types: 

SIMPLE SENTENCE: A sentence with one statement in it. Examples: The sun set behind the roof of the barn. There was a lot of horsing around, fake fighting, and laughter – lots of laughter. There might be more than one subject or more than one object (as in this second example), but the sentence is still only saying one thing. 

LOOSE SENTENCE: A loose sentence makes its basic point early on and then adds details, strung out like freight cars behind the locomotive. Example: The sun set behind the roof of the barn, lighting up the yard where the chickens were circling their scattered feed, and Henry was searching the ground for the switchblade that had fallen from his pocket sometime after his return from school. The majority of English sentences are like this, but your paragraphs should be relieved and made rhythmical by adding some other forms, such as periodic and simple.

PERIODIC SENTENCE: The periodic sentence interrupts its basic point to add in details, before ending the original statement.  Example: The sun, which had been hiding for the last two days behind thick clouds of rain, set behind the roof of the barn. Because of the delay between our reading of the beginning of a sentence’s basic point, and its completion at the end of the sentence – while we hold it our memory and receive the additional information – there is an element of suspense in these sentences. Everyone likes a little suspense, and even more, they like the relief of the closure of the sentence. The delay holds our attention and keeps us reading. But don’t follow a suspenseful sentence with suspenseful sentence, ad infinitum.

Gardner’s rule from The Art Of Fiction, is this:  If a sentence has three syntactic slots, as  in

1 2 3

The man walked down the road

(subject) (verb) (object)

then a writer can load one or two of these slots with modifiers, but not all three! 

Examples: (I’ve marked the loaded syntactic slot in bold.) 

The old man, stooped, bent almost double under his load of tin pans, yet smiling with a sort of maniacal good cheer and chattering to himself in what seemed to be Slavonian, walked slowly down the road.

Or:

The old man walked slowly, lifting his feet carefully, sometimes kicking one shoe forward in what looked like a dance, then slamming down the foot before the sole could flop loose again, grinning when it worked, muttering to himself, making no real progress down the road.

Or: 

The old man walked down the long straight road, the gaps between its muddied bricks clogged with weeds and stinging nettles so that every step was a danger to the fearful traveller. 

So let your imagination run free, embellish to your heart’s content, but give your readers the space to take in all these delicious details by keeping at least two other parts of the sentence simple.