After that ever-vital first draft, things can get messy. When you return to your first chapter for a read-through, it might be shocking to find our that your book just doesn’t read the way you thought it did! All those moments of beautiful prose, those scenes you thought worked so well—yeah, those never age well. Nothing hurts quite as much as returning to this work you’ve poured your heart and soul into, only to realize that it’s a bunch of overwritten crap you’d never let anyone else read. All those creative writing tips must have bounced off of you. Instead of writing clearly and concisely, you wrote all these drawn-out, dull sentences that just don’t work. It’s an unfixable mess! How could you have let this happen? You’ll probably have to scrap everything and start all over again.
But maybe not.
See, any sentence can become concise. It’s all a matter of revision. If you work hard enough and long enough, you can turn the most boring, overwritten sentence in the world into a masterwork of concision. And you should! I’ve long held my belief that good writing trumps good plotting. You could write the best story in the world, but if it reads like a fourth-grader wrote it, nobody will stick around long enough to see how great it is. Concise sentences can change everything in a book! Just ask Stephen King!
So, how do you simplify things?
The first step in revising any sentence is diagnosing the problem. Let’s say you want to describe a fancy house:
It was a really big house with pure white columns and massive picture windows that glinted in the sun, while some white swirly bits of carved wood jutted out from the rafters and into the sky, dancing like wisps of smoke, looming over the giant marble tile patio that was sitting in the middle of the floor like a checkerboard with a row of seats beside it and a massive marble statue of a grinning lady polishing a cup in the center of the hedge maze.
Okay, so you might’ve noticed that the paragraph I just wrote was a single sentence. And while it’s not technically a run-on sentence, it doesn’t really work, does it? Let’s try splitting it up a bit.
It was a really big house with pure white columns and massive picture windows that glinted in the sun. Some white swirly bits of carved wood jutted out from the rafters and into the sky, dancing like wisps of smoke. They loomed over the giant marble tile patio that was sitting in the middle of the floor like a checkerboard. A row of seats beside the patio bordered a massive marble statue of a grinning lady polishing a cup in the center of the hedge maze.
Well, it isn’t a single sentence anymore, but maybe it’s still a little too long-winded. If we want this to be a concise sentence, maybe we should consider cutting things down! See that progressive phrase in the middle? “Was sitting?” Here’s an opportunity to turn two words into one without losing anything! “Was sitting” can turn into “sat” seamlessly! But that doesn’t buy us much space on its own. How about the adverb up in the first sentence? That doesn’t need to be there, so let’s cut that too. And the phrase “into the sky” is already implied since we know the wood is on the rafters.
And hey, isn’t “the middle of the floor” saying the same thing as “the center of the hedge maze?” Why not move that detail over and cut the checkerboard metaphor? After all, we all know what tiles look like, and we’ve already included a metaphor earlier on. Perhaps it might work better if we linked the last two sentences by shifting the “bordered” verb to the start of the sentence and picking a new verb for the seats.
It was a big house with pure white columns and massive picture windows that glinted in the sun. Curving swirls of of carved wood jutted out from the rafters, dancing like wisps of smoke. They loomed over the gleaming tile patio that sat in the center of the hedge maze. Bordering the patio, a row of seats circled a massive marble statue of a grinning lady polishing a cup.
There! Much better!
But what if it's all too short and choppy?
Just because you’re leaning toward concise sentences doesn’t mean you have to make every sentence short! “Concise and precise” doesn’t mean everything has to be short at all! It just means putting in some effort to make sure every sentence uses the fewest number of words to convey its meaning as possible. If you add details to a sentence, you aren’t necessarily making the sentence less concise. So long as the details you’ve added are concisely written, the sentence just gets longer, not wordier. There’s a limit to how long you can reasonably lengthen a sentence of course, but my previous suggestions on varying your sentence lengths are still perfectly valid!
In fact, you should always make sure to only include a few short sentences per paragraph. And only have a few long ones, too! Medium-length sentences should form a slight plurality of your prose, but keep in mind that you should always switch things up!
So, in the end...
All you’ve got to do is pay attention to your sentences! Looking at your writing with a critical eye can make a world of difference for your prose, and it all comes down to the level of effort you’re willing to put into the nitty gritty details. It’s definitely possible to overdo concise sentences, but it’s pretty hard. So long as you work on your manuscript with an open mind an and eye for detail, you’ll succeed in the end!
Happy writing!
