12 Ways to Write Better Sentences for Creative Writers

Hey guys, it's Ellen Brock, Novel Editor. I hope you're all doing really, really well. Today, we're going to talk about 12 ways to write better sentences as a creative writer. So, I'm also working on a video of ways to write better paragraphs that will probably come out in the new year. So, stay tuned for that if you think that would help you. Today, my goal with this video is to really help your writing to sound more professional, more like a published author. There are some tips and tricks that can really help to give your writing that extra edge, that extra sense of professionalism, which will be really helpful when you go to query publishers or agents or wherever you're trying to get your story seen. There may always be reasons why, for you in particular, you might want to ignore a tip that I give in this video, and that's completely fine. There are a wide variety of writing styles, and sometimes you might go against a certain tip because you want to create a certain effect, and that's totally fine. But for the most part, my tips in this video should apply no matter what point of view or style or genre you're writing in. These are really just ways to give your writing a little bit of a professional polish. So, with that said, let's go ahead and get right into the tips. Number one is avoid confusingly complex sentences. Longer, more complicated sentences might be something that you do choose to do for a stylistic effect. It might also be something that you want to use to break up monotony, so you want to make your sentences have different lengths and structure so that it doesn't become repetitive or monotonous in sound. However, when you use overly complicated sentences unnecessarily or too often, it actually slows down the reading process because the reader has to try a lot harder to understand the meaning of that sentence, what you're trying to say, how it's relevant, and that can make the writing itself feel too slow, and it can also make the actions feel more distant because you start to layer concepts and cram concepts into the same sentence. I'm going to give an example to hopefully clarify what I mean. Because Jessica was hungry due to missing breakfast, which happened because Jake, her brother, had taken too long to get ready in their shared bedroom, she was forced to once again circle around the large block looking for the food truck that always seemed to be in a different place each day. So this sentence is grammatically correct. It's pretty understandable. In isolation, it doesn't really pose any particular problem, but if you were to take a sentence like this and combine it with several other lengthy, complicated sentences, either right up against each other or even just many times on a page or in a chapter, it will really slow down the process of reading. The reader will have to spend longer understanding what you're saying, it may bury the point you're trying to make, and it may also create distance from the action. So normally complicated sentences like this are better off broken up into smaller sentences. For example, we could rewrite this sentence, Jessica's stomach rumbled. If Jake hadn't taken so long to get ready in their shared bathroom, she would have had time to eat breakfast. Her heels clacked against the sidewalk as she walked around the block looking for the food truck. Why did they park the thing in a different place every day? Notice how breaking up this sentence as a bonus also gives us more room for sensory details, for some personality and introspection, and it really helps you create a more immersive experience for the reader. If you have trouble identifying when sentences are getting kind of complicated or lengthy, someone on my discord recommended the Hemingway editor. And if you put this sentence into the Hemingway editor, it has no problem identifying that the original version is very hard to read and that the edited version is easy to read. So that's something that you could use if you do struggle to tell when a sentence is getting too complicated. And the Hemingway editor actually can help with several of the things that we're going to talk about in this video. So that's just a little tip that might help you. Number two, set the tone with word choices. Often when we're writing, we can choose from a variety of words that mean basically the same thing as what we're trying to say, but different words have very different connotations, evoke different kinds of moods, and by choosing the right word, you can really improve the overall tone and vibe of your writing. For example, the boat sliced through the water feels aggressive or strong. The boat bobbed across the water feels lazy or slow. The boat floated over the water might feel hopeful or even uplifting. This also goes for similes. If you're writing a romantic scene, you don't want to describe the roses like blood spots on the bed. And if you're writing a horror, you don't want to describe the long hallway as a giraffe's neck because it just doesn't set the right mood and tone. So be thoughtful about the words that you're choosing and the impact that's having on the vibe that you're writing is creating. Let's look at an example from the novel The Ritual by Adam Neville. This is of course a horror novel, and pay attention to the words that he chooses. He was interrupted by a crash. Out there, somewhere in the length and breadth of the countless trees in the ocean of invisible ruin and tangle, a great bow or strong limb had been snapped in half. The sounds of its breaking seemed to shoot in so many directions, it became impossible to guess where the sound originated. Notice how the word choices emphasize the largeness of the woods with the ocean of invisible ruin and tangle. Also notice the emphasis on more aggressive sounding words like snapped in half rather than broke, and the sound shoots in so many directions rather than bounces or echoes. Try to create the mood or the vibe that you want the reader to experience with your word choices, and this will really go a long way towards improving your writing. Number three, avoid passive voice. You've probably heard a million times that you should avoid passive voice. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to understand what that means, but to make it as simple as possible, passive voice is when the subject of a sentence or the clause of a sentence receives the action instead of performs the action. So if you're struggling to tell is this passive voice, is it not passive voice, just try to ask yourself, is the subject doing the action? Are they performing the action? For example, the door was held by Henry is passive because the door is not doing the action, whereas Henry held the door is active. Henry is the one doing the action of holding the door. Often in fiction, this can be a problem because it results in de-emphasizing the character doing the action. Here's another example, Megan was chased by Elizabeth is weak compared to Elizabeth chased Megan. In the first sentence, Megan is receiving the action, and in the second sentence, Elizabeth is doing the action. Even if Megan is the protagonist, so the character we generally want to emphasize more, the writing will feel stronger if we focus on the person doing the action. If we do want to put more emphasis on Megan, another option might be Megan ran from Elizabeth, which puts the emphasis on Megan and allows Megan to still be the one who's actually doing the action, so we're still not using passive voice. There may of course be situations where we want to use passive voice on purpose to create a distance. A character might do this for some reason, such as not wanting to take responsibility or maybe feeling guilty, so in deep third POV or in first person POV, it's possible that passive voice might help to convey that intentional distancing from the action, but I would say that that type of situation is relatively rare. If you do need help identifying passive voice, again, the Hemingway editor can really help with that. It does a pretty good job of identifying passive voice. Number four, remove filtering. So filtering is when the experience of the story is filtered through the POV character, so that character's experience is emphasized as separate from the reader. That's not really what the intention is, that's what the effect of filtering is. Filtering typically involves using words like thought, new, felt, saw, smell, tasted, things that create a separation from the sensory experience and the reader. I'm going to give examples because I think that makes this a lot easier to understand. A common filtering word in amateur fiction is saw, so for example, Rebecca saw the tail of a fox sticking out from the brush. It's more distancing than the tail of a fox stuck out from the brush. Of course, there are sensory words where there isn't really any way to work around them. For example, smelled and tasted. It's not really easy or feasible to try to write a sentence where you describe that without using the word smelled or tasted, but we can still create a slightly more immersive effect by, again, eliminating filtering that through the POV character. For example, inside the house, Jake smelled green tea and baked bread. It could be easily made stronger by rewriting it as the house smelled of green tea and baked bread, which eliminates that distance between the sensory experience and the reader. Introspection can also be less impactful and more distancing when we use filtering like new, wondered, thought, things along those lines. So whenever we're using a deep point of view or first person point of view, we can assume that it's the character, the POV character, thinking the thought or having the realization. So those words just add a little bit extra and unnecessary separation between the reader and that thought, realization, etc. For example, James thought it was impossible, but Katie didn't know that already. It's a lot weaker than, it was impossible for Katie not to know that already. We don't need to say that James thought it was impossible because James is the POV character, so we can simply say it was impossible and it doesn't make the writing feel quite as distant. Of course, there are times where filtering might help with clarity, such as an omniscient point of view where there's a difference between what the character knows and experiences versus what the characters know and experience. So in that case, filtering might help with clarity, but for most writers today, the majority are writing in deep third limited or first person and in neither of those cases is filtering really beneficial. Let's look at an example from The Ritual. At the beginning of this excerpt, it's pointed out that a character is watching something, which is a form of filtering. However, in this case, the character is exhausted and inactive, so it may be intended to put emphasis on this inaction by saying that he watched what's occurring. But note how the rest of the paragraph has no filtering and a lot of sensory details. Luke watched Hutch push the last leg of the stool through the door of the iron stove they were huddled around. A shower of sparks erupted inside as he rooted the ancient wooden spoke around the hearth. They coughed in the acrid smoke that belched out. The chimney was almost totally closed. Smoldering remnants of the seat formed the base to the red ashes inside the little oven that only heated part of the ground floor before the drafts from the door in between the floorboards took over with a night chill, a tang of damp earth, and the ferment of rotten wood. In that excerpt, we get a even a little bit of taste maybe of the smoke, and we did not need to use filtering words to bring that across, so it's a much more immersive experience for the reader. So if possible, eliminating filtering is a great way to make the reading experience feel a lot more immediate, a lot more connected to the reader. Number five, set the pace with sentence length. It's not only word choices that can help with setting the tone or the mood, the sentence length can also go a long way towards setting the tone or mood of a scene. For example, in most cases, if the character is being thoughtful or maybe they're distant from something that occurred, longer sentences tend to work better. They give a more introspective, thoughtful mood, whereas if the character is involved in an intense or immediate emotional situation, action, urgency, all of that is better conveyed by shorter, choppier sentences. This is a really great way to control the pace that the reader reads, so when we have shorter, choppier sentences, we tend to read faster, and that can help to give a sense of tension and urgency, whereas when you want to give that more creative, thoughtful, introspective type vibe, maybe the character is observing things, they're thinking about the way things look, the descriptions, visual descriptions, sensory descriptions, those things tend to work better in longer form with longer sentences, slower reading time, more of a experiential vibe. Let's look at two examples from the same book. So we're going to look at We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Notice in this intense scene where the protagonist comes home to a concerningly quiet house how short the sentences are. As I advanced down the hall, I paused at Celia's bedroom and had to force myself to walk in. It was dark, her bed was empty, the same in the master bedroom, the bathrooms, out on the deck, nothing, nobody. Where were you? Had you gone looking for me? I had a mobile, you knew the number, and why wouldn't you have taken the truck? Was this a game? You were hiding, giggling in a closet with Celia. This, of all nights, you chose to play a game. The shortness conveys her sense of panic and urgency. We can compare this to another point in the book that Before you condemn me utterly, I beg you to understand just how hard I'd been trying to be a good mother, but trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one. Distrusting my every impulse from the instant he was laid on my breast, I'd followed a devout regime of hugging my little boy an average of three times a day, admiring something he did or said at least twice, and reciting I love you kiddo or you know your daddy and I love you very much with the predictable uniformity of liturgical professions of faith. The longer sentences here convey a sense of thoughtfulness as well as emotional distance from the material being discussed. She's explaining here and wants to be understood, but there isn't an urgency and the emotions of the situation feel at least partly passed, but if the sentences were shorter or choppier, it would instead come across as more desperate or panicked or maybe that she has immense stake in being understood in this moment. Sentence length can vary a lot throughout the novel, even throughout individual scenes. It's a great way to control the pacing and it can really give your writing that extra edge. Number six, avoid body parts taking action. This is a very common habit that amateur writers can get into, but it's very easy to fix. So once you're aware of it, you can easily cut it out of your writing. So sometimes the way sentences are written, the body part of a character is given the action rather than the character themselves doing the action. For example, his foot kicked the ball gives the action to the foot, while he kicked the ball gives the action to the person. Her hand grabbed the pen gives the action to her hand, while she grabbed the pen gives the action to the person. This again creates unnecessary distance from the action, but it's very simple and easy to take out of your writing, but it's definitely something I recommend to give your writing a little more strength. Number seven, reduce was-ing construction. So this is another super easy one once you're aware of it, you can easily remove it from your writing. And that is just that the was-ing construction, so was running, was dancing, was jumping, feels more distant from the reader and also just feels weaker. For example, he was running down the street could be easily made stronger by rewriting it as he ran down the street. She was jumping up and down is better as she jumped up and down. He was sitting on the couch thinking about what he would do is not as strong as he sat on the couch and thought about what he would do. Of course there might be situations where the was-ing construction just sounds more natural or does convey a slightly different meaning, and in that case it's completely fine. We should always go with what sounds best and most natural. For example, in dialogue if a character asks another character where were you at 3 p.m. yesterday they will most likely respond with I was driving home from work rather than at 3 p.m. yesterday I drove home from work. With all of these tips the point is to make the writing feel stronger, so if one of these tips ever makes your writing feel more unnatural or awkward of course don't follow it. Number eight, keep the wording natural. Often writers might go for more unnatural phrasing in an attempt to sound more sophisticated, old-fashioned, writerly, but normally this doesn't enhance the writing. It can feel a little bit awkward or even maybe stiff. For example, he placed the book upon the dresser rather than he sat the book on the dresser. The second sentence is a lot more natural, a lot more how modern people would talk or explain something. The more sophisticated old-fashioned he placed the book upon the dresser sounds kind of awkward to modern readers. Sometimes this could also take the form of avoiding contractions such as writing he did not know what he should do rather than he didn't know what to do. There might of course be situations where it makes sense for the personality of your character, that maybe the narrator, the style of writing. There may be reasons why going for a more old-fashioned or sophisticated sound makes sense or works for you, but for the majority of writers this is just going to seem odd, unnatural, and it's going to create distance because of that unnatural sound. So that's going to make it seem less immediate, less close to the reader. So for most people it's better to just use the more natural sounding sentence rather than trying to sound sophisticated or writerly. Sometimes this can happen because writers read older books more often and so that's what books sound like to them. It might also happen if you come from an academic writing background or a scientific writing So similes or comparisons using like or as do have a place in writing. I don't want to suggest that you cannot use them at all. They actually can be used very effectively, but often in amateur writing or in new writers they might use similes excessively or in situations where a simile just doesn't add anything or doesn't make sense. So normally similes for common or well-understood concepts, descriptions, things like that just don't really serve any purpose. For example, he stomped the snow off his shoes like a drummer beating a drum. This doesn't really offer any meaningful additional information because we all know what it sounds like and looks like to stomp snow from our shoes. Additionally, similes don't work well when the comparison is too similar to the original thing. So with a simile we're trying to add to or enhance the reader's understanding of the description. For example, he ran across the yard like a soccer player running for the ball. This doesn't really add new information because it's just a different way to say that the character is running. We're not looking to just say the same thing in a different way. Similes should seek to enhance the reader's understanding of something that might be unfamiliar or something difficult to grasp or it should try to set the mood or the tone in a way that might not be obvious inherently with just a simple description. For example, let's look at this simile from Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there. This creates a clearly dark tone whereas just describing the tulips on their own as darker red at the stem doesn't have any particular connotation when it comes to mood or tone or vibe. Here's another example. Without his uniform he looks smaller, older, like something being dried. This makes the character being described feel clearly unappealing which adds a layer of additional meaning. Let's look at one last example from The Ritual. Then he realized he could feel nothing, nothing at all, as if every nerve had been stripped from out of his body like wiring torn from a wall cavity. The simile emphasizes the horror element and makes the character's experience more evocative and more visceral. Similes can be a great way to enhance the mood or tone or to help the reader to grasp something that's difficult to understand. Just make sure that you're not including similes just for the heck of it when they're not really contributing anything to the novel. Number 10. Use vocabulary level strategically. So vocabulary level can be a great way to convey characterization, values, education level, all sorts of different things. But that's not really what I want to talk about in this video. So what I want you to focus on with vocabulary level is the effect that it has on reading speed. So when you use more advanced vocabulary, bigger words, even if you use bigger words that are fairly common, not super obscure, it really slows down the reader. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just something to be aware of. Some books are meant to be read more slowly, some genres, some target reader groups like to read things slowly, whereas other groups prefer something faster paced. Other genres do better with a faster, more clipped pacing, which can be better achieved with a lower vocabulary level. So pay attention to how your word choices in terms of complexity of the words, advancedness of the words, can impact how slowly or quickly the reader gets through the text. Let's look at an example from We Need to Talk About Kevin. This is a good example of more advanced vocabulary being used to convey character in a novel, but also in my opinion, this book is best read slowly and the more advanced vocabulary helps to slow the reader down and really experience the story alongside the protagonist. So in this excerpt, the protagonist is describing the difference between her troubled son Kevin and her daughter Celia's infancies. We can compare this to a book that, again in my opinion, is a bit of a quicker read, yet with no less personality or characterization in the writing. This is an excerpt from Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. From this example, we can really tell that a simpler vocabulary level doesn't mean that you can't make interesting points or have a unique style. Next to the speakerphone is a fat daily planner book they keep full of things for me to get done. They want me to account for the next 10 years task by task. Their way everything in your life turns into an item on a list, something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out. The shortest distance between two points is a timeline, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list. So that excerpt from Survivor is written on a third grade level and the excerpt from We Need to Talk About Kevin is written on a ninth grade level. This is a really big difference in reading level, but both books feel mature. They both feel interesting. They both have a lot of characterization, so there's not any sense that it's less sophisticated to write at a lower reading level. What it does do is it makes the book read a lot faster. I think for me, I read Survivor in probably two or three days, whereas I read We Need to Talk About Kevin over probably a month, a month and a half. It just was a book that, in my opinion, felt like it needed to be read more slowly. Think about the vocabulary words you're choosing and how it's impacting the pacing of your book. Think about the story and what it calls for, how quickly you want it to be read, how quickly it should be read. The vocabulary level will guide the reader on how long to spend reading the book. Number 11, avoid starting actions. This is another super, super easy one. Having characters start or begin actions reduces the immediacy of the action and almost never enhances understanding. For example, Elizabeth started to laugh and Elizabeth laughed will convey the same meaning in the vast majority of circumstances, but Elizabeth laughed feels much stronger and more immediate. For the same reasons, Mark lunged forward and punched John is stronger than Mark lunged forward and began to punch John. Again, if you have a situation where it does change the meaning to start or began, then by all means do so, but in the majority of cases, this can just be a bad habit that writers get into and cutting out start and began from your writing will make it stronger. Number 12, cut out unnecessary words. Wordiness can of course be a stylistic choice, but I'm not really talking about wordiness as a style choice here, but rather just using an excessive amount of words that don't add or enhance meaning. So this can create unnecessary distance from the action and it can also bury the point that you're trying to make or just create a sort of cluttered sense to your writing where it just doesn't feel crisp and clean. Let's look at this example, which depicts very clearly a common reason for overwriting, which is constantly describing something as being of something else. Charles picked up the axe off the stump of the tree, squeezed the handle of the axe, and dug the heel of his shoe into the ground beneath him. This could easily be cut down to Charles picked up the axe from the stump, squeezed the handle, and dug his heel into the ground. We don't need stump of the tree because we know the stump is from a tree. We don't need heel of his shoe because we can assume Charles is wearing shoes. We don't need handle of the axe because we know this is talking about the axe. Besides of being a common indicator of extra words, the ground beneath him is also unnecessary. We already know the ground is beneath him. Unnecessary directional or location-based descriptions can also really bloat writing. For example, if we were to write something like Charles looked into the sky above him, we already know the sky is above him so it's an unnecessary amount of extra words. This might not sound like a huge deal and in isolation it really isn't a big deal, but over the course of an entire novel this can add up to tons and tons of extra words that just create a lot of distance and clutteredness in the writing. Keep in mind though that sometimes you might use extra words either to control the flow or pacing of a sentence to make it sound better or we might add extra words when there's a detail that we want to include. For example, we might want to describe Charles shoe in this excerpt. In that case, we might say he dug the heel of his boot into the ground because we want to make sure that the reader knows that he's wearing boots rather than just regular shoes. There may be reasons why you want to do this, but often these are good signs that there's just a lot of unnecessary words that could be cut down. So that is all I have for you guys today. I really hope you found this video helpful. If you have any tips that have helped you to write better sentences, please leave them in the comments. If you want to help support the channel, I do have a Patreon. We now have a Discord server available at the $2 tier and at the $5 and up tier there is some supplemental things to go along with the videos. So for example, a cheat sheet will go up for this video and also there are some Q&A videos on there that are exclusive to Patreon. So check that out if you want to help support the channel. Happy holidays to all of you guys. I will be back in the new year with a new video and in the meantime, happy writing.