Tip 3: Consider the effects of sentence lengths.

Similar to how the lengths of chapters and paragraphs will change the way that your audience reads your story, sentence lengths will have a similar effect. The difference is that, unless you plan on writing constant run-on sentences (please don't) or are planning on writing literature for small children (elementary-school age) you don't need to worry about your sentences tiring people out. Instead you have to consider flow and pacing. As an example, we read short sentences quickly. If a sentence only has two or three words in it, we can even read them in a fraction of a second. When we are reading a story, this translates to us imagining events happening more quickly—which may or may not be desirable, simply depending on the scene you are writing. A long sentence, of course, has the opposite effect, and slows your reader down a notch so that they can have a little bit of time to pause and reflect. Depending on whether you are writing an action scene or a contemplative scene, you may want to purposefully alter your sentence lengths in order to get the perfect pacing.

Tip 4: Mix all of your sentence types together to form paragraphs that have a healthy flow.

Whether we are talking the types of words in a sentence, the parts of the sentence, or the length of a sentence, what we are ultimately doing is finding ways to fine-tune our paragraphs to be as artfully crafted as a song. And while there will be scenes where you use lots of fancy tricks and scenes where you make everything spartan, your highest goal should always be balance. You don't want your story to have the same quick or slow tone all the way through the novel any more than you want the same tone all the way through a single chapter; you want them both to be fluid and to change with the atmosphere set up by the plot and characters. To do that, you need to switch up your sentence types as much as possible—using a couple long sentences, a couple short sentences, a couple medium sentences, and as large a variety of your clause and phrase tricks as possible within any given paragraph. The end product, when you have this skill down to an art form, is that your paragraphs will feel organic to the reader—filled with life and diversity.

Tip 5: Write with variety but aim for simplicity.

After I spent my years in college learning all of the elements of writing, my head felt like it was overflowing with all the different things I had to consider in creating the perfect sentence. The result of that was something like Aesop's centipede—who was asked how he managed to walk and keep track of all those legs, and who then thought about it and was never able to walk again. All of the sentences I created came out sounding pretentious, weird, and like Yoda had written them. It took me a while to realize that while I had all of those many complex sentence types at my disposal, the best ones were usually the simplest. All that to say, keep your fancy sentences on your tool belt because you will eventually find a place where it takes all of your wit and crafty writer tools to craft a sentence that will sufficiently serve your scene; but form the core of your story out of good, strong, simple sentences that you alternate through by their lengths.

Tip 6: Take it slowly, and remember that finding the right sentences is a complex puzzle.

Remember that this is a tool for editing, not for writing your first draft; so don't get stuck on a scene because you can't find the perfect way of saying something; and don't feel bad if you are nine drafts in and your sentences and paragraphs still aren't perfect. I am working on the tenth draft of my first novel and I am just starting to get a few entire paragraphs per chapter that sound completely right. Formatting sentences like this is a tremendously tedious and challenging puzzle that you should take one step at a time. Take it easy; enjoy the process; don't burn out or get stuck. Then just improve when you are able and celebrate the small victories as your mastery over sentence-structure increases, your own personal writing style develops, and you begin to see sentences and even entire paragraphs that make you proud to be a writer.

Ending Note: Please remember that this is as much a learning exercise for me as I hope it will be for you. I'm still a few decades away from being a complete master of English grammar, and so my work may contain holes of missing information that I am not aware of (though please be aware that I will have a section on words and on punctuation in the near future, which may fill some of those). And it's also possible that there are some mistakes hiding within this large amount of text, and places where I'm not communicating as clearly as I think I am. If you find any such problems, I will be very grateful if you send me a private note so that I can fix them. Together, I hope we can make this work as helpful for writers as possible. Also, a special thanks goes out to all of the people who put the content I used for my research onto the internet free of charge; you are the ones making this world a better place.

Sincerely and theatrically,

Blake

Works Cited

(These extremely helpful resources were used for their content on grammar only. All colorful commentary and application to novel writing are original.)

Col, Jeananda. Enchanted Learning. Web. 1996. 19 July 2016.

My English Pages. "Direct and Indirect Object." N.p., n.d. Web. 19 July 2016.

Simmons, Robin L. "The Modifier." Grammar Bytes! ::. N.p., 1997. Web. 19 July 2016.

UVU Writing Center. "Types of Verbs." Types of Verbs (2016): n. pag. Web. 18 July 2016.

Weinhold, Kellee. "Prepositions vs Conjunctions." The Tongue Untied. School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, 28 July 2013. Web. 19 July 2016.

Your Dictionary "What Are the Different Parts of a Sentence? ." YourDictionary, n.d. Web. 18 July 2016.

Click here for Part 1 of the tutorial (file size was too large)

Write-a-Novel Exercise 7.3

Today's exercise is two-fold.

First, go through each of the tips above, look at the example sentences, and write an original sentence of your own which contains the emphasized elements in each example (e.g. if the example sentence is about how to use a transitive verb, create your own original sentence with a transitive verb.)

Second, choose a single chapter in Act I of your novel which best exemplifies the pace and tone of the rest of the story. Keep in mind when choosing this chapter, that it will be the one critiqued by the group, the one you will use in all of these exercises, as well as the one you will use to cross reference with the rest of your novel when you work on your next draft (in order to transfer the same types of edits to those chapters as you have done to this one). Once you have chosen a chapter, use the tips listed above to redraft it.

Please do not participate in this exercise until you have a complete first draft of your novel. Criticism, given before a first draft is completed, has a powerful discouraging effect for the writer. Also, please abstain from making other sorts of edits to your chapter, as we want to make our focus as specific and precise as possible with each exercise.

For those critiquing, please make you suggestions only relevant to the topic at hand. We will be going through a large variety of editing exercises, and your critiques will serve best when given at the appropriate time. As always, please make your critiques honest and hold nothing back, while remaining polite and uplifting. We want to encourage one another to succeed by telling them the truth about their flaws while uplifting their strengths and potential.

Writers, I advise you to always keep a copy of every draft you've ever written, no matter how bad. The contrast is important for seeing your own abilities grow, as well as for teaching others later down the road. Additionally, having a backup copy of the original file will make you subconsciously feel free to redraft, cut, and change the text, as the original will always be there if you decide you liked it or some element of it better. So keep a record of all of the many drafts you will create.

Click here to submit your chapter to the Greenbat Tutorials Gallery.

-O-

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-O-

A Personal Update: I announced in my journal that I am taking a year to travel around the country (the US). I'll still be posting tutorials, answering notes, and replying to comments, but it will be a bit more sporadic as my time and internet availability will be going down a bit.

This week I am in Virginia. It's my first time here and the state is absolutely beautiful. I saw a baby deer, a snapping turtle, and many woodchucks already. I read that there are bears and red wolves around here somewhere, so I'm pretty thrilled about the possibility of seeing even more wildlife. My cats, however, are not quite so thrilled. Ivysaur has been pouting the entire time and Totodile keeps coming into the room to make sure I haven't left … or to see if I'm napping and kill me in my sleep.