Mixing up your sentence structure

What’s up, family? Today I want to talk about something that I see a lot with young or first-time writers. And that’s sentence structure. 

Sentence structure is one of the mechanisms that we use to keep the writing fresh and exciting for a reader. It’s a huge tool for us. And it works. It’s the kind of thing that, when done correctly, adds a vibrance to your writing that it always needs. I’m not saying it all needs to be Faulknerian by any sense of the imagination. 

What I mean is that, in each paragraph, you should have sentences of varying complexity and length. Some short; some long. And all types of complexity. That’s what each paragraph needs to have. 

Check out my second paragraph above. It does that, and that’s an example of what I’m referring to. 

As writers, sometimes we get locked into certain sentence structures and we repeat them throughout the work without paying much attention to having done it. But overusing the same one or two sentence structures in your writing will make your writing boring to a reader very quickly. 

If you like to start sentences with, “Thinking about the past, he did X.” That’s a fine structure. If you have someone speak and then move, such as, “‘I won’t,’ he said as he walked to the car.” That’s fine too.

But what you cannot do is use those structures repeatedly without changing them up. You work should have sentences of all length and complexity. 

Now, there are times when you want to alter your sentence structure to get your reader’s emotions to mimic a characters emotion. For example, if a character is nervous, then using a lot of short, choppy sentences will make your reader feel that urgency. 

But, like with every rule in writing, you only want to break it when you need to. 

Finally, there is really no need to ever say HOW your character said something. “I know,” he said emphatically is never necessary. You need to show how your character reacts, not tell us. 

So, as you go through your writing, keep an eye on your sentence structure and make sure it stays fresh. 

And, remember, this isn’t something to think about when you’re in writing mode; this is editing-mode thinking here.

Happy writing, y’all!