Week of the sentence: Vary you sentece structure

This week we are going to focus on the meat and bones of writing, the art of crafting engaging sentences.  For some, sentences are everything, they revel in the joy of word play, they dance with their structure, all in an attempt to make every work you read feel exciting.

Others however, are more inclined to focus on the broad strokes of writing, things like plot and ideas, characters and setting, without refining the legs their writing stands on.  Have you ever read a book and thought, "I love the story but I hate the authors style"?  Often this comes down to the authors disregard of the sentence.

The good news is, once you practice a few of the basic sentence crafting techniques the work of forging a solid writing style gets done almost all on its own, and the crafting of sentences quickly can become second nature.

Today's Creative Writing Prompt:  To begin, free write roughly one page on any topic of your choosing.  Once you have finished, look over what you have written.  You don't need to worry about content here, instead focus on the sentences themselves.  Do you notice any patters?  Do you often begin a sentence or a paragraph in the same way?  Or perhaps you tend to keep your sentences either very short or very long.

Once you have found a pattern or two in your writing, go through your free write and change every sentence that follows that pattern in some way.  For example, if you tend to write lots of sentences "He/she did.... He/she said... He/she went to..."  try adding some descriptors before the sentence such as, "Sullenly he said...."  Try experimenting with verb placement and the placement of modifiers.  If you write short sentences, change one or two in each paragraph and make them longer, or if you write long sentence, make some shorter.

What you will discover through this are your habitual patterns you follow while writing, things that were perhaps taught to you at a young age so your brain thinks of them as 'the only correct method', or what have you.  Once you identify these patterns, you can keep them in the back of your mind as you write, and you can work against them to create more meaningful, more artful, more masterful sentence structures.

Remember, writing is rewriting.  Learn to love to edit if you want to grow as a writer.

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