Hello, friends! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Once I’m out of school, my plan is to keep this blog more regularly updated, but for the time being, it’s been crazy!
I recently finished up an internship with a small publishing firm, Future House Publishing. They’re a super cool house, and they publish a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, as well as children’s and some clean romance. You should definitely check them out!
Anyway, I worked as a copy editor for about four months, looking over everything from newsletters to web pages to the manuscripts themselves and I wanted to share the main thing I learned that I think can benefit anybody as a writer or editor.
You can simplify it.
Have you got super long, complex sentences in your action scenes? Are you taking a moment in your narrative flow to explain a mechanic or a character’s background to the reader? It’s possible that you can simplify it. And there are five easy ways you can tackle it, too. Here, we’ll use an example that I just made up:
“Natalie certainly didn’t know that the secret to being the most powerful wizard in the whole world and maybe even the whole universe was to simply be loving herself and her friends, so when she found that out she was definitely shocked.”
Cheesy, I know, but bear with me.
Even just glancing at this, you already know it’s going to be a long one. From a visual standpoint, a long, solid wall of text can be off-putting to many readers (and of course it also depends on the genre — Fantasy readers are much more used to long lines than, say, Contemporary Fiction readers).
From a reading flow standpoint, it’s possible your reader will get lost in your words, and lose track of the meaning of the sentence. This could also result in your reader getting bored and losing interest in your story.
The brain has to take breaths, too!
So let’s take a look at this behemoth, and see if we can find ways to simplify it.
1. Adverbs
There are a few ways that I as an editor might suggest to simplify this sentence. For instance, those pesky -ly adverbs can sometimes get in the way of your image. Now don’t get me wrong — I love -ly adverbs. And one or two sprinkled here and there can be super useful. But as with anything in this world, too much of a good thing can turn sour pretty fast. If you ask many of the writers and editors out there today, they’ll tell you to avoid adverbs in general wherever possible. So, if you find that your sentence has a lot of adverbs (and a lot of the -ly kind to boot), cut them, or think of stronger verbs you could use in place of your “adverb-verb” combo:
“Natalie didn’t know that the secret to being the most powerful wizard in the whole world and maybe the whole universe was to be loving herself and her friends, so when she found that out she was shocked.”
2. Passive Voice
The next thing I might suggest for a sentence like this is to remove any unnecessary “to be” verbs, as they often create a passive voice. For those who may not know what passive voice is, look at it this way: either I could “be throwing a ball while I was talking,” or I could just “throw a ball while I talked.” I see this one a lot in the things I workshop, and probably about half the time you can just cut it. Other times you might try rewording or rearranging your sentence. Either way, you can simplify it.
“Natalie didn’t know that the secret to becoming the most powerful wizard in the whole world and maybe the whole universe was to love herself and her friends, so when she found out she was shocked.”
3. Just Cut It Out
Another thing I would suggest is removing unnecessary extra words. I think this one comes down to reading through it a couple times, and maybe trying to pick out the words that get the main idea across first. Then, any of the words that don’t directly convey that message, you can decide whether to cut or not. For instance, in my example, the main idea of the sentence is that Natalie discovered loving herself and her friends was the key to power.
“Natalie didn’t know the secret to becoming the most powerful wizard was to love herself and her friends, and she was shocked.”
4. Break It Up
If you are loath to cut your words, though, you might try breaking up the sentence into smaller chunks by adding in some punctuation and maybe even line breaks.
“Natalie didn’t know that the secret to becoming the most powerful wizard in the whole world — and maybe the whole universe — was to love herself and her friends. When she found out she was shocked.”
Or even:
“Natalie didn’t know that the secret to becoming the most powerful wizard in the whole world — and maybe the whole universe — was to love herself and her friends.
“When she found out, she was shocked.”
This gives the sentence some variety, so your reader doesn’t feel like they need to read it all in one breath. A good writer will take both sentence breaking and cutting extra words into account when revising their work.
5. Follow Your Train of Thought
The last thing I’d suggest is to rearrange things into a logical order. The order in which you express your ideas can change the meaning or effect of the sentence. For instance, if what I want my reader to know right away about the whole sentence is that Natalie was shocked, it might be more useful to put that up front:
“Natalie was shocked to learn that the secret to becoming the most powerful wizard was to love herself and her friends.”
See how much simpler that sentence is? Perhaps we’ve lost a little bit of the flourish of the sentence, but the sentence itself has not lost any core meaning. It still says what it meant in the beginning, only now it comes through much more clearly.
All In All…
As I mentioned before, your genre can help you determine how long becomes too long for your sentences. The same goes for the scene you’re writing.
As a general rule of thumb, an intense action scene will benefit from short, choppy sentences broken into short, choppy paragraphs. This makes reading the scene quick, and it gets your reader to flip to the next page faster. If you’re writing about a lazy summer day, though, maybe your sentence needs just a little more to it to slow it down.
The bottom line is this: you can play with your sentence structure and length to change the mood of the moment.
Just remember these five tips as you go, so you make sure every single word you write is doing its fair share of the work!
Creative Critiques Editing 