A question for the language enthusiasts. When writing in English, I am heavily conscious about always starting sentences with their subject. You likely noticed the previous sentence was a counter-example; in reality it's just a chunk of a greater sentence mashed before a comma to spice up the usual Subject-Verb-Object order. See: When writing in English, I [subject] am heavily conscious about always starting sentences with their subject. I can't really think of any other way to get around this issue (another way to not start an English sentence with the subject). Though I also do not know whether this is an issue at all, since my native language has multiple word orders that can be varied around. Maybe it completely eludes a native speaker's ear (or eyes)? So the questions for you: Are you conscious about this sentence-structure quirk? Do you mix in other word orders for a bit of variety when writing? Do you know more alternatives (structures, tenses, etc) to avoid this? An example in spoiler with subjects in bold. Spoiler "The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables." (Huxley's BNW, first paragraph).
English has Subject-Verb-Object word order. That's just how it is. I don't know what your native language is, but I assume that it inflects for case and thereby allows a more fluid word order. English does not have this quality anymore, and so the main way that you can even tell that a word is a subject in English is by its position in a sentence. It's not really something to be avoided. Edit: What is your native tongue?
It's SVO word order, as mentioned. That's the English default, and if you avoid it, you avoid English. So you have to bend SVO to your will without breaking it. Push the subject deeper in the sentence by putting modifiers in front of it. Use structures that don't seem to be nouns. (gerunds and weird noun phrases) Use different articles (A, an, the). SVO repetition with the same article really sounds like something out of a kid's book. Soften the subject's impact with abstract nouns instead of concrete nouns. (Technically, nothing moves. It changes the feel slightly.) Switch to passive to put the implied subject at the end. Use OVS structures by using questions. Use OVS/OSV structures by using dialog. Fragments. Imperatives. (with implied subject of "you") Introductory phrases (The dreaded -ing phrase, prepositions, opening adverbs. Be careful of the -ing phrase! Amateurs love that one to death.) Complex sentences that begin with the dependent clause. Roll neighboring sentences into compounds, absorbing matching structures. Use pronouns to call back to the last sentence. Yes, it's SVO, but its feel is different because it's looking back at the last line. It's like you're changing the touch (cohesion) of neighboring sentences, and that hides SVO a bit. Dead last would be anastrophe. <--- This sentence is a fairly soft example of anastrophe. It's OVS. It wants to be a simpler SVO form ("Anastrophe would be dead last."), but it's not. You have to be careful with anastrophe or you'll start sounding like a Calvinist or Yoda or something. It always sounds like it's from the Old Testament. It claims a stylistic stature that draws attention to itself. Anastrophe needs a deliberate reason for being. It finds itself in literal poems: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree . . . And you can fit that in fiction and it can hit hard, but if you rely on it, it becomes the equivalent of a prose jump-scare. (BLAT! Cat jumps out.) Each attempt has a weaker effect on the reader, and eventually they get mad at you.
Seven Crowns pretty much covered the options. Another way to break up monotony is to vary the length, style and mood of sentences, interspersing explanatory and descriptive ones with the action, or breaking up the action with dialogue or monologue. Maybe even use sentence fragments. Sparingly, mind!
Exactly the kind of list / options I was looking for, thank you! Now I should try and practice each of these and see whether I can get used to them. Hungarian & German. For the former, word order is "freeform" as it can be used to highlight the meaning of a sentence. EG, "The dog barked all day long" to emphasize "The dog", "All day long the dog barked" to emphasize time, and "Barked the dog all day long" to emphasize action. For German, you can fluently switch between SVO and OVS. There's also some special cases. EG, zu-structures with SaVR-OV (Subject auxuliary-Verb Reflexive, Object Verb) or reverse structures CSOV (Conjunction Subject Object Verb), which in spoken can pretty much be discounted to normal structures. There's also a quirk in German that I really like when it comes to action/surprise sentences. There's a method with which you can build a sentence in a way that it "reserves" the main action to the very end (using the above CSOV). Eg, "As the soldiers turned to glare towards the horizon they found themselves by a storm of arrows rained upon".
There is no reason you can't use that in English. "As the soldiers turned to glare towards the horizon a storm of arrows rained down upon them". The best thing about English construction is its ability to convey information clearly and precisely. The particular he/she/it pronouns are very good for distinguishing third person agents and objects, and their use certainly provides relief from the repetition of names, but you have to be very careful to keep track of whom/what they each refer to. (ugh!) Convolute the sentence all you want with clauses and phrases and modifiers, just so you don't lose sight of: Who ---- does ---- what ---- to whom?
You could write "Down came the rain" rather than "The rain came down." That's permissible in English. But careful you must be, lest accused you will be of attending the Yoda School of Elocution.
