More interesting sentences/paragraphs

Hi And thanks for reading this post.
Are there any tips you know for writing spellbinding sentences/paragraphs that help to pull a reader into a story and create a more intresting scene.
When i write my stuff and i compare it against something similar written by pros, the pro version sounds so much better and compelling. My work sounds dull and flat in comparison. I only thing i know is to put the more active words at the beginning or end of a sentence as these two points are supposed to be where the reader's attention is naturally drawn to. Do you know of anything, or any tricks that pros use.
Many thanks

 

• Active, not passive, sentences.
• Careful choice of verbs.
• Economical use of words: every word should pull its weight.
  
• Careful choice of sentence structure. There's lots of them, more than I realized before I read The Art of Styling Sentences. I recommend that book: it's cheap and concise, and teaches something no other writing book I've read teaches.

 

In general, I agree with what @XRD_author says, if your problem is sentence construction. However, WHAT you are saying is just as important as how you say it, in my opinion. Perhaps what makes your writing feel flat isn't sentence construction, but simply that you're not being specific enough or haven't really envisioned the scene strongly enough yourself? Your presentation might be vague—'red,' instead of something more specific like 'cherry red.'

If all you're doing is moving the plot along, 'red' might be enough—if it's only important, for plot purposes, that the thing isn't blue. But if you want the reader to really see and experience what you're describing, you need to make the details as specific as possible.

That goes for descriptions of objects and people, but also for depictions of what is happening. This is where XRD's suggestion to use stronger (more specific) verbs can come in. Ditto for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. But most importantly, YOU, the author, have to see these scenes clearly in your own head, and watch them play out in real time. Then you'll be able to transmit what you see to your readers.

Don't be afraid to take the story time to do this. We're constantly told that brevity equals good writing, but that useful notion can be taken to extremes. Too much brevity, and the reader doesn't get much to work with. They can get whipped through the story too fast for it to make an impact.

 

More education, an English Lit degree and also family contacts in publishing. Otherwise it is a lifetime of dragon-chasing in the swamps of Plebia. Join us.

 

I'm actually worried that I might be doing this in my first book -- even though it's 182K words.

 

This is where beta readers come in handy, once you've finished. They'll let on if it dragged or went too fast. Especially if you ask them to pay attention to that, when they read.

 

I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on beta reading.

Just gotta stop polishing. I keep getting ideas for how to improve it. Little tweaks, like stretching out the two key events that form the climax (so the reader doesn't miss them, they were that brief), and restoring an old prologue as chapter one based on the feedback I got on it here.

 

I think that this is over-focusing at the sentence level--it's not as if a reader sits down, reads one sentence, and says, "Whew! It's great how that ended with an active word! Now I'm going to get a cup of tea before I read the next sentence."

A large part of pulling the reader into what you're writing is pulling them through many sentences, many paragraphs, many pages. The paragraph is generally the smallest unit that I analyze.

That said, I'll offer some opinions that I think are often--not always--true.

• Be wary of the irrelevant. There's often a tendency to shoehorn description or facts because you'll need them later. ("Jane pushed her waist-long shining black hair back, as she watched the massacre with widened watery-blue eyes.") But if they offer zero value now, or as in the sample sentence are even offensively irrelevant now, the reader is going to be stalled by them.
• Be wary of weakeners or intensifiers, and, no, I'm not sure that those are the right terms. I mean things like "slightly tired" and "a little grumpy" and "terribly angry". I let myself write these, and then I almost always cut them in the first or second editing pass.
• Accept that you will have editing passes. It's highly unlikely that your writing is going to be as engaging as you want on the first draft.
• One reason to avoid focusing purely on the sentence is that two great sentences in the same paragraph can make for a lousy paragraph, because the sentences are incompatible. Often, complexity needs to be followed by simplicity, one sentence structure followed by a quite different structure--though sometimes you repeat the same structure for a deliberate rhythm. This is why I'm saying that the paragraph is often the smallest unit worth analyzing. Though I sort of disagree with myself now--I analyze at the paragraph level and the phrase level. I just tend not to analyze at the sentence level.

 

Maybe not, but sentence structure makes a difference.

Compare:

1. Bob wore boots, jeans, a shirt, and a hat to the rodeo.
2. Boots, jeans, a shirt, and a hat: that's what Bob wore to the rodeo.
3. Bob wore four things to the rodeo: boots, jeans, a shirt, and a hat.

Not much difference perhaps, until you read the next line:

But what he should have worn was his cup.​

With that as the next line, I think option 3 produces the most impact.

 

Right--you're analyzing the interaction of two sentences, which to me is analysis at the paragraph level.

 

Yep. And it shows the importance of flow within a paragraph. Each sentence should relate to the next. Otherwise the paragraph reads like a grocery list instead of a story.
Flow between paragraphs is important too, but it's different. One reason to start a new paragraph is to start a new flow.

 

English Lit Degrees don't mean anything for getting you into the industry. You typically need a doctorate, but that's for if you want to go into editing. Otherwise, it's throwing manuscripts at whoever will take them. Most authors tend not to have Lit degrees either.

As for writing that doesn't feel flat, try not to use the same words multiple times within the short succession, unless purposefully doing it for repetition. Vary sentence structure. Don't use unnecessarily complex words, and make sure they fit the tone of what you're going for.

 

An awful lot of successful writers have law degrees.
This surprised me at first, but the most important skill you'll learn in law school is how to write, and in particular how to tell a story in a convincing fashion.

 

I find this is when beta readers come in handy. Sometimes what we write makes sense to us but not to another. My teacher said something once about writers using 'rose tinted glass' in writing. Making the words so colourful and flowery that you don't pay attention to what's going on behind it. Don't know why that stuck in my head but since then I decided to keep my sentences simple and just try to evoke plot, character and setting.

 

Hope this helped

 

Most writers tend to be passionate about something other than writing, that they then put in their stories. See Tom Clancy and his love of the military. With law I imagine they meet a lot of, interesting, personalities for them to base their characters off.

 

Oops. Mistaken post.

 

A lot of literary stuff is bound up in context nowadays. Law teaches you how people work in an environment when under constant scrutiny, which is admittedly more and more what the world is becoming.

 

I didn't learn much about how to write in law school. I'd say law school is just where people go when they're smart and good with words, and most successful authors are also smart and good with words, so... it's more of a correlation than a causation.

 

Emotion could be your missing ingredient.

 

What? No panties?

 

He's not that kind of cowboy. If he runs out of clean BVDs before laundry day, he goes commando.
Not that he wouldn't wear panties, but the last time he did it, he stretched them out of shape.
His wife nearly divorced him.

 

Something I didn't see anyone mention yet:

Not every paragraph in your story will have dramatic impact: and that's a good thing. As someone mentioned in a 'show-don't-tell' thread a while back, if every paragraph in your story was showing instead of telling, it'd be a long and droning book indeed! Similarly, if every paragraph in your novel was flowery and dramatic and impactful, none of them would be. The power is in the contrast, just like a good art piece.

Chose which section is most important to be impactful, or that you've decided really needs to be impactful, and set up for it. Write a few normal paragraphs leading up to it, then hit home with an explosion of well chosen, precise, weighty words. If you can manage to end on that, you'll have yourself not just an interesting paragraph, but perhaps a legendary one. Good luck!

 

Write some poetry? See if you can write a story with only 100, 50, 20 and 10 words? Take a random sentence and see how many different ways you can reiterate it? Basically, PLAY