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This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Welcome to Finish Your Book, Week 10: Sentences.
Once the large issues have been worked and reworked—the structure, the character arcs, the functioning beginning, middle and end, scenes with their own arcs—now you turn to the sentences, you get close to the texture of your book.
You know how it’s said that, “writing is rewriting?” You know how all through the drafting process I remind you and you remind yourself that this is only a first draft? It’s the sentence-and-scene level editing where all of that pays off and comes true.
You can take any ordinary sentence and make it marvelous and powerful. How? Verbs.
Verbs flip sentences like karate masters.
When we write quickly, we often resort to that old stand by “to be.” He is or was; they are or were. To be or not to be may be the question—but your characters are not zen rocks. They are active—that’s what creates your story. So get those verbs to do some work for you. Sometimes this means taking the description out of an adverb and putting it into the verb:
The bus is slow.
The bus moves slowly.
The bus lumbers.
See the progression? We chucked “to be” in the first revison, and in the second we moved the adverb right into the verb. A much stronger sentence.
Sometimes this means shifting the subject of the sentence:
I was too hot in my sweater.
The sweater trapped the heat around me.
The sweater suffocated me.
Play with your sentences and see what works best.
Another thing to pay close attention to in your writing is the unintentional repetition of words. In early drafting, we often make use of what is already in mind, and that is usually a word we just used. Train yourself to notice when a word occurs more than once in a paragraph. Is the repetition serving a purpose? Does it emphasize the word appropriately, giving it extra strength? Or might the work be better served by swapping in a synonym in place of one of the repetitions?
Example:
The rocks fell sideways down the canyon. Below, Sarah wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth, oblivious to the cascade of rocks above her.
Here I might substitute “pebbles” or “boulders” (depending on which was accurate) in the first line. However, both these words are two syllables to one for “rocks,” so I might keep hunting for a word that wouldn’t disrupt the rhythm of the sentence. Or I might look at alternatives to the verb “rocked,” such as “swayed” or maybe “listed.” I would change two of the three instances where some form of “rock” appears to freshen up the passage.
The rocks fell down the sides of the canyon. Below, Sarah wrapped her arms around her legs and listed left and then right, never turning toward the crashing sounds above.
Learning to edit your own sentences truly frees you up in the early drafting stages to get the raw materials down on the page. And it is fun to watch your words transform into the magic and muscley sentences you love when you read.