Monotony Must Die: How to Keep Your Sentences Surprising

No Flat Writing

A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing.

Ready?

A lot of the times your story seems flat because all your sentences are the same layout.

You want to vary your sentence structure.

Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t. Count the words in your sentences for two or three paragraphs.

Are they all five word sentences? Twelve? Twenty-seven?

That robotic sameness in sentence length is one of the main reasons that writing can feel flat.

It’s like those ancient Dick and Jane books.

• See Dick run.
• See Jane skip.
• See Dick wave.

The other big bugger is when all of your sentences are simple and declarative.

• I walk to the forest. The trees are gracious, tall. I inhale the pine scent.

There is actually a whole, entire world of different sentence styles that writers can use and when you use them? That’s when you make your writing shiny and sexy and all the good things.

The names for these structures are pretty boring, honestly, but we’ll try to look beyond that, right?

Simple – You have one main clause.

• Carrie is the best wife.

Compound – You have more than one independent clause. You probably use a conjunction.

• Carrie wants to get another dog, but Shaun keeps saying no.

Complex – Oh, the sentence that probably has to pay for a therapist or is reading Foucault obviously in the park. This sentence has an independent clause and a subordinate clause.

• When hell freezes over, we will allegedly get another dog.

Compound-Complex – It sounds like a place with a cult, right? But it’s just a sentence with at least two independent clauses and one subordinate clause.

• Carrie really needs a new dog to love, so Shaun said that they would get one when hell freezes over, so Carrie immediately purchased some dry ice at WalMart and sent some down to Lucifer.

So, to keep your writing from feeling flat, you want to vary those sentences. Why?

• It keeps the reader engaged.
• It helps highlight important details. It helps vary tone. It puts emphasis on things (especially when you use a short sentence for that).
• It sounds more real. People don’t speak in identical sentence patterns. When they do, just like in your writing, it feels unnatural and stilted.
• It can be easier to follow when you change your sentence structure up.

How do you vary the structure?

• Use different lengths, like we mentioned above
• Use different types of sentences like we also mentioned above. Throw in that complex sentence in the middle of all your simple sentences.
• Don’t start all your sentences the same (the way I did up there).

Refresher moments:

What’s a clause? A bunch of words chilling out together and one of those words in the group is a verb and another is a noun. Fancy people call the verb, the predicate, but we aren’t fancy here.

What’s an independent clause? It is a bunch of words that has a subject and a predicate. Got fancy! It is grammatically complete all by itself and doesn’t need anyone. Not any other words to stand alone! Darn it.

What’s a subordinate or dependent clause? A bunch of words that needs other words to be a sentence. This poor beautiful