An Exercise for Considering Sentence Variety

I teach creative writing at the college level. Though, I never liked the term “creative writing”… I think all writing (blog writing, essay writing, news writing, technical writing) is an act of creativity.

So, I teach fiction writing, and one thing I work on with my students is an awareness of their style.

One lesson I teach comes right out of the book What If? … a great book! It’s full of exercises for fiction writers. (I receive no $$ if you decide to purchase it).

What If? can be purchased: here

So, here’s the lesson. Take 10 sentences in a row from your writing. Ideally, these include no dialogue… so 10 narrative sentences in a row.

Now, number on a piece of paper like so.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Now count the number of words in each sentence and record it. You’ll get something that looks like this…

1.     14

2.     19

3.     6

4.     34

Etc.

Now, you have a snapshot of your writing style… especially a quick snapshot of any sentence length you tend to favor.

I tell my students that what they take from the snapshot is what they take. More than anything, I’m asking them if they see a variety of sentence lengths.

Problems might be… 1. 38

                                    2. 45

                                    3. 36

I would say that’s a lot of really long sentences for your reader to get through back to back. Maybe you favor an overly-long sentence and it’s making for a tedious style.

Same could be said of having too many short sentences back to back. Might make for an overly- simplistic style.

I also point out to them that this could be problematic.

1.     14

2.     16

3.     12

4.     16

5.     15

6.     10

I would say, even though the sentences aren’t particularly long or short, that this favoring of stacking medium length sentences back to back could make for a dull style.

What the numbers say to you are what the numbers say to you… but let them speak. Don’t immediately be satisfied by what you see. Ask yourself, “Is this telling me I should break up some of my longer sentences? Do I need more variety?”

Here is a random excerpt from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

1. 7

2. 4

3. 23

4. 51

5. 11

6. 12

7. 12

8. 7

9. 38

10. 10

I see a wide variety of sentence lengths in this (even with that 11, 12, 12) back to back. He has a sentence with as few as 4 words, but then that beast at 51 words. And do you see how after the 51 he ratchets back to an 11? It’s not until five sentences later that we see anything over 30. The reader can ingest the long sentences, but then gets that brief digestion time.

Now, is Bradbury counting his words as he writes (“Hmm, let’s get a 7, 18, 3, 22 combo”)?

Doubtful. But he is either aware or intuitively aware of sentence variety.

Now, of course, numbers alone don’t make for good style. There are some, like Hemingway, who can make multiple short sentences back to back work. And, like with Bradbury, some can weave a beautiful (but effortless for the reader) longer sentence. We can’t all do that, though.

But, this exercise can be an interesting beginning to looking at the sentence variety in your own style.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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A review of the book: here