So, most of the time on this channel, we're discussing like really big picture ideas about how to change plot and characters and chapters, but today we're focusing on something a little bit smaller. We're focusing on the sentence and making sure you have amazing sentences throughout your book. And before we get started, I just want to say the last tip is really important because it changes how you view the first seven tips.
So, pay attention to that one. But let's start with number one, the danger of bad syntax. What is syntax?
The syntax is just the order of words in your sentence. And if you want to know why syntax is important, just listen to Yoda. Much to learn, you still have.
The reason why Yoda sounds so different than everyone else is simply because the order of words is mixed up. Take a look at this example. My dog bit my sister.
Change up the order of words a little bit. My sister bit my dog. Very different meaning, isn't it?
Now, it's very easy not to make a mistake like that, but we're going to be looking at a lot of mistakes that a lot of writers do make. Take a look at this sentence and see if you can figure out what's wrong with it. Rachel saw the fight as she was looking out the window.
Now, probably most of you are like, "Well, that's not a terrible sentence. It's a pretty serviceable sentence. I can tell what's going on.
" It doesn't seem like there's a huge mistake, but there is. That is actually a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible sentence. like embarrassingly bad cuz the sentence is not doing what the author wants it to be doing.
And all I'm going to do is I'm going to change the syntax. I'm going to change the order of words in the sentence, not change any words. And the sentence is going to be magnificently better.
As she was looking out the window, Rachel saw the fight. So, what is the most important word in the sentence? It's fight, right?
But the first example hides that word in the middle of the sentence as if it's not important at all and focuses the end of the sentence on, "Oh, she's just looking out the window. " which is the least important information in the whole sentence. For the revision, what it does is it sets up anticipation as she was looking out the window and the reader's like, "What?
What? I want to know what? " And then drops the bombshell at the end of the sentence.
Rachel saw the fight. So, the story ends on the most important information, which makes the reader anticipate the next sentence. So, in this case, the better syntax structure slowly builds the sentence and then ends in a climax, kind of like your whole plot in Miniature.
Now, I talk about this a lot more in my sentence course, including how to use the 231 principle for ordering your sentences. I'll put a link to that in the description below in case you want to check it out. For now, we're going to move on to number two, all out of proportion.
Take a look at these two examples of a man picking up kindling to start a fire. You always have two choices in your book. You have a choice to expand a section and give a lot of details and sort of a blowby-blow account of what happened or you have the choice to summarize everything, move through it really quickly, and just move on to the next part of the story.
Now, let me be very clear here. There is not a right answer. I'm not telling you always choose the shorter version.
I'm not telling you always choose the longer version. It really depends upon your style, like how do you normally write? And it also depends on where you are in the book.
But what I'd like to do is offer you three questions that will help you determine the proper proportion for different sections of your book. The first question you should ask yourself is, is it interesting? Now, I don't find a guy picking up a whole bunch of kindling for firewood particularly fascinating part of your story, but if there's something he notices out there or if there's some sort of tension or if there's some sort of metaphor, okay, like you could make it interesting theoretically.
But if there's not something super interesting, then maybe you just want to summarize it in a single sentence rather than wasting a whole paragraph on it. Second question you need to ask yourself is whether you need slower pacing or faster pacing. Say you just came from a scene with like tons and tons of action.
In that case, you actually need some contrast and you want to slow down the pace. So you'd want to include some details of him just walking around and getting some kindling. That's what you need at that point in the story.
On the other hand, what if the chapter before has been a little slow? You don't have a lot of action. In that case, you need to speed things up a little bit because we want to get to something that's going to hook the reader.
And the third question you want to ask when thinking about proportion is, if I don't spend time on these details, then where else in the book can I all lot that time? For instance, you might realize that if I don't spend a paragraph on this kindling scene, then I can spend a paragraph more on a fight scene or a chase scene or a scene where two characters are falling in love. Now, it's time for the next way to interrogate your sentences.
Let's look at number three. Overdosing on prepositional phrases. I see a lot of chatter online where it's like adverbs are the devil.
Never use adverbs. And I'm like, well, I mean, there's some truth to that. There's times you definitely want to use adverbs, but I'm going to pick on prepositional phrases because they don't get talked about as much, but I think they can weaken your pros to a huge degree.
And let's look at some examples. The cat slept under the table, beside the window, in the corner of the kitchen. That is a string of four prepositional phrases to close off the sentence.
And I think that is a hallmark of a weak sentence. Really, the most important part of the sentence is the cat slept. After that, I mean the location.
Is the location really important? If it is, can you use one prepositional phrase instead of four? Now, let's look at this next example, which is a little bit more complex.
In the heart of the city, beneath the glow of street lamps after midnight, James walked toward the bridge over the river with determination in his eyes despite the rain against his face. Like a drain that gets clogged with hair, this is a sentence which is clogged with prepositional phrases. Just look how many there are.
In, of, beneath, of, after, toward, over, with, in, despite, against. I think it's possible to read that sentence or to write that sentence and not realize like, "Wow, I have way too many prepositional phrases here, but as a general principle, prepositional phrases are some of the weakest parts of your sentence. You want to focus on fun verbs, active verbs.
You want to focus on great nouns. You want to focus on balancing out all the pieces of a sentence and not having 90% of your sentence be prepositional phrases. " Now, this next point is absolutely key when you're choosing how to write and also how to edit.
It is number four. Hit the right tempo with story beats. So, we're going to look at two examples.
A story section with too many beats and then a story section with no beats. And we'll add a few in. First of all, let's look at one with too many beats.
So, take a look at this section. What the author has done is realize like dialogue alone doesn't really cut it. I need character actions and character movement alongside that dialogue.
But, but but but but they went overboard. And you can pause the video if you want a little bit more time to read it. So, how would we revise this so the beats aren't sort of overwhelming the dialogue here?
Well, let's go through and cut out some beats. There doesn't need to be a beat for every single line of dialogue. Let's cut out the rubbing his fingers together.
We'll keep the next two beats, but then cut out the fourth one. I knocked on the body twice. Let's cut out the held out of hand for the keys.
Let's cut out dug in my pocket for the keys cuz that's superolous. Maybe he's handing the keys to him. Obviously, he dug in his pocket for the keys.
And then let's cut out the he turned the key in the ignition and the engine started up. This revised version has about half the beats, but what it does is it lets the reader breathe a little bit and also lets the dialogue be the star of this section. Now, you could make the entirely other mistake, like in this next example, and have no beats at all.
Here we have what an old writing teacher of mine used to call strip dialogue. It's just dialogue with no dialogue attribution, with no character actions. It's just dialogue alone.
And if you go ahead and add in a few story beats, we can actually see these characters were actually put into the scene a little bit more. And overall, it just feels like we're witnessing something rather than being on the outside and being like, I can't tell what's going on. You have to determine for yourself whether you tend to add too many story beats or whether you have too few story beats and whether you need to add some in or cut some out.
For this next point, I think most writers have only heard one side of the argument and I want to make sure I give the other side as well. So, it's you're balanced in your writing approach. Number five is specificity, more or less.
Now, let's look at an example where you don't have enough specificity, first of all. And this is what most writing teachers talk about, like make your story more specific. You're not specific enough, which is like good advice.
Let's let's take a look. She picked up something heavy and hit Saurin in the face. Okay, how can we make that a little bit more specific?
She snatched a tire iron and smashed it against Saurin's jaw. So, we get more specific with the verbs. Instead of picked up, we get snatched.
Instead of a vague term like something heavy, we get an actual tire iron. And then we also get specificity. We go from hit to smash.
We go from face in general to jaw. Now 97% of the time adding more specificity is going to improve your story. It's good for the story.
I will add one exception though. What if this story is from Saurin's point of view and you know he's a private eye or something and he sees this silhouette of a female form before he's knocked unconscious. Okay.
Well then he doesn't know what hit him. So it needs to be purposefully vague. But once again that's like 3% of the time.
97% of the time add more specificity. Now, let's look at an example where there is too much specificity. And I think not enough writing teachers focus on this.
Like, yes, you can have too much specificity, and it's bad. It's bad for your story. This is actually an example I took from David Michael Kaplan's book, Revision, which is a great book.
The author is trying to be specific, but just goes overboard. So, you can take a second and pause the video and actually read this for yourself, but I'm just going to start going through it. I don't think you need that phrase, silent rays.
We could probably cut that out. Fields tend to be open, so I don't think you need the word open. The forested woods, well, woods are naturally forested, so I don't think we need that.
A gray rock, well, unless it's a color other than gray, you probably don't need to mention it. The Cordura nylon, I don't think adds anything. I think, you know, you could just say backpack.
You don't need sticky and velcro. I think fastener probably communicates that perfectly well. You don't need plastic.
You don't really need the colors green and gold. And if you have the word sticky, then you don't really need against her sweaty skin. and we just assume the skin is sweaty.
So, you can cut all those out and the paragraph would probably work better. There was too much specificity shoved into that paragraph. But I also think you have two other options.
Sometimes when you throw a lot of specificity into a scene, it's because there's not much going on and you're trying to make it seem more exciting. In that case, why not just skip to the next part of the scene? If there's something special about this handkerchief, for example, like start the scene with her already dealing with it instead of all the leadup.
Another thing that you can do is to revise the scene so there's some sort of story tension or plot tension in it. For instance, if someone has followed her there, that adds some story tension. If she hears a rustling in the woods, this next point has been unfairly hammered by English teachers worldwide, and I want to rescue it in your mind.
It is number six, sloppy versus beautiful repetition. How many writing teachers have you heard say like, "Oh, don't use that word again. Find a synonym.
" Why? Because repetition is bad. Don't do it.
Consult with thesaurus. Well, I mean, no, that's not true. Repetition can be fantastic.
All you got to do is use repetition well, and you got to use repetition purposefully. So, we're going to look at an example where repetition is used badly and then how to improve it so the repetition is beautiful. For this, we're actually going to look at a book called Rainbow by DH Lawrence and we have a copy of his early draft and we also have a copy of his revised draft.
We're going to see what he did to make the repetition work better. Here's the section. It is about a kiss and he repeats the phrase wanted her three times.
But you know what? That's kind of ugly repetition. The sentences don't work.
There's no musicality to them. There is no rhythm to them. And so the repetition falls flat.
It almost seems accidental repetition. So what did good old DH Lawrence do? Why, he revised it.
And what he did is instead of taking out the repetition, which is the instinct of a lot of writers, he actually doubled down. He's like, I'm going to add a lot more repetition. In this version, he repeats the word kiss.
And he actually repeats it four times inside three sentences. And then soon after that, he repeats the phrase wanted her twice. If you read these two sections out loud, the first one is clearly inferior.
And this one, oh, it's just music to the soul. It trips off the tongue. It's beautiful on the page, and it's beautiful when you speak it out loud.
If you have repetition in your sentences, your first impulse should not be, "Oh, let's cut it out. Let's get some synonyms. Always look for how you can double down, how you can repeat it even more to make it seem to the reader like, "Oh, this is definitely on purpose and you know what?
It sounds good. " Now, this next point happens so often to writers, but it's a really difficult thing to eradicate. It is number seven, unnecessary body language.
Take a look at a phrase like, "She nodded her head. " Right? What other body part is she going to nod?
You could just cut off the her head. Off with her head. I feel like I'm the queen in Alice in Wonderland.
or he blinked his eyes. What other body part do you blink again? H yeah, let's cut those eyes.
She clapped her hands. I mean, if you're clapping with your feet, that would truly be remarkable. But most of the time, most of the time clappings with hands.
Let's cut those hands. He shrugged his shoulders. I mean, there's no other body parts you shrug.
It's just shoulders. So, let's cut those shoulders out. I do think there are some other categories as well that you can apply this to.
I'm just sort of picking on the body parts one. But stuff like she whispered quietly. I mean, that is that is what a whisper is.
We don't need that quietly. Or this one. This one's really tricky and I see it really often is she thought to herself.
I mean, if you're thinking, unless it's some sort of weird sci-fi story where other people can hear your thoughts, you're most of the time thinking to yourself. But hey, don't get too down on yourself for making these kind of mistakes. Like even the best writers out them slip in and like write these in a first draft.
That's okay. That's okay. Don't stress out about that.
Just remember like, oh, when I go through, when I'm revising, pay close attention. Keep an eye out for these type of things where you can cut them. Now, I told you at the beginning of the video that this number eighth point will change how you view the previous seven we just talked about, and I wasn't lying.
It really is a philosophy of how to edit and revise. So, let's look at point number eight. Pair it down.
I had an old writing teacher. He used to have a phrase and his phrase was, "You can't polish sandstone. " Sandstone is a very gritty stone.
So, if you try to polish it, it's not going to get smooth. All the little bits are just going to roll off and you're just going to keep on going down and down and down and it's still going to be gritty. You can't polish it.
What he meant by that is that it's useless to revise what you should just cut. In a lot of the examples above, you have to make a decision whether you want to just cut out some of the extra specificity or whether you just need to delete that whole paragraph. A lot of times you have a sentence like she walked to the door.
Well, some of the time you can skip that and just start with her already in the next room where the action's actually going to happen. Or you have something like they drove to Scranton. Okay.
Is there anything special about the journey? If there's not, then hey, just delete that whole paragraph and start with them already in Scranton doing whatever it is they're doing, like selling paper or something. I remember a Stephen King novel called The Outsetter where one chapter started with a lawyer shouting at cops.
That is the very first line of the chapter, dialogue. And I thought, what would a beginning writer might have done in a scene like this? They might have shown a lawyer driving to the police station.
They might have shown him walking in. They might have shown him doing some chitchat with the police officers outside. And then and then they would get to the inciting incident of that sharp dialogue between the two of them.
Stephen King either cuts all that boring stuff or he just doesn't write in the first place and just jumps right to the furthest place where he could possibly start that scene. The real work of editing is deciding what belongs in the story and what doesn't. Not only on a wordbyword basis, but on a sentence by sentence basis and on a paragraph by paragraph basis and even and even on a chapter by chapter basis.
After you make the big decisions about what belongs in the book and what doesn't, then you can start making the more micro decisions on a sentence by sentence level, figuring out how to improve sentences word by word, phrase by phrase. Hey, check out that sentence course or subscribe to all my courses with BookFox Academy. And if you need some copy editing or if you need some publicity for your book, check out the links below.
