Young Writers Society

When I write I write topic > action with little variation and it makes me afraid that the constant monotony will scare away readers, anyone have any ideas on how I could change it?

Sentence variety does make it more interesting to read prose. For me it's easier to think about varying sentence length, and when you vary sentence length with long and short sentences sometimes this ends up forcing you to vary the structure too. Other than that I'm not sure there are any real tips or tricks to it, except trying to be conscious of it while writing and editing. A quick google search also showed me this article online: Link Here that might help you a bit.

Good luck!

There's nothing particularly wrong with using a topic > action structure, so long as you have more than just topic and action in each sentence. I seriously doubt your writing is along the lines of "He said this. He did that. She went there." and only that (which even then includes an object in each sentence).

If you're varying the lengths of your sentences and the placement of supporting clauses, then most readers probably won't notice that you're almost exclusively using the same core structure in your sentences.

Hi AneiDoru

So... I went through the liberty of glancing over some of The Light Maiden's Mark and picked out a few examples of where I might be able to help out with this.

People have different things that they tend to focus on. Some people think quite visually, some emotionally. You seem to think quite kinisthetically, and when imagining things you do so by looking at what they're doing and how things are interacting, even with the most mundane things. It's probably worth trying, when you imagine something, to imagine things simply as things that exist, rather than what they're interacting with.

Here's what I found.

1. Eliminate 'looks' and 'notices' and other of the likes.

From chapter one: "Opening her eyes again, she found she was in a completely different place. Instead of her bedroom ceiling, she was looking up at a clear, dark blue evening sky... She got up, shaking cherry blossom petals off of herself. Looking down she realized that she was in a beautiful white dress instead of her pajamas. While turning to get up she noticed that there were other people next to her, all of them sleeping."

Here what you tend to do is over-mention how Gabrielle is looking at things. She opens her eyes, looks, she notices. If you switch her out as the subject of the sentence and make the thing you're describing the subject instead, then it quickly breaks up that monotony and gives you more room to play with your descriptions, which are quite pretty. You're particularly good at using shadows and colour to create a sense of atmosphere.

She wakes up in a different place. There is a clear, dark blue sky and cherry blossom petals scattered across her. Her pyjamas are now a white dress, and she is surrounded by people. Now things exist independently of her noticing them.

The easiest way to do this is simply to go through your work and eliminate every case of looking, glancing, seeing, noticing, e.c.t. It will force you to rethink and weed out that issue and it's a pretty easy habit to break once you get the hang of it.

2. Describe what is felt, not just what is done

I got this one from Chapter Two: "There isn't much time, step forward dear." the Mystic said, motioning Gabrielle to come closer. Stepping forward, Gabrielle stood in silence, clutching the collar of her dress..."

Here Gabrielle stands in silence. I imagine there's probably a lot going on in her head right now. Instead of showing that through her actions you could explain her thought process a bit, perhaps there was an uncomfortable air in the room, or the dress was starting to weigh her down. Added note- I love the chandelier image that follows this, you could take a bit longer to delve into that description.

3. Allow things to exist independently

This is from chapter six: "Looking closer at the markings, the Mystic grinned and gave her a knowing look..."

The Mystic has done something to indicate a faint sense of bemusement or familiarity. Instead of showing this through her interaction with the markings and with Gabrielle, you could do it through her behaviour. She might hunch over to examine it closer, maybe she'll clap her hands at the thought of the union, or spend a few moments in her head with her own memories. There is a whole universe of occurrences that happen to a single person or object before they interact with something else. Try focusing on what a thing does on its own before going into how they carry this onto their interaction with others.

I hope that helps some. Another thing that might be good is to read works by writers who have a particularly slow pace, they tend to be the opposite of
kinesthetic thinkers so it might give you some clues about what to include. I'm glancing through my bookshelf now and I can't think of any to recommend off the top of my head but I'm sure some YWS folk might have ideas.

Lemme know if you have any questions =]

I wasn't expecting someone to review my entire story, also I can't switch perspectives just yet, so I'm going to have to refuse the last edit. I'm sorry.

Huh? Oh, I didn't really review your entire story. If I did I would have had many more positive things to squish in there =] I just figured that to give you better advice it would be worth checking out your work to see what particularly it was you were referring to with the topic > action thing. Was I too critical? I may have been a bit enthusiastic, I'm a geek for sentence structure.

As for the last bit, you don't really need to switch perspectives. It's more like... describing a person like you would an object. You could still do it from Gabrielle's perspective, in fact it would be even cooler if you did! It would just mean describing what she observes in other people without interacting with them.

I once started reading a novel written by this ex military high official and all his sentenhces were the same rythm. It was like he was marching to some inner drumbeat. When I pointed it out he said he couldn's see it and the site adminisrators became angry with me for having pointed it out. I just couldn't continue reading it with every sentence having that predictable beat. I asked him if he had done a lot of marching in the military. Everything was taken as if I were making it up.


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