No Flat Writing

A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing.

Ready?

A lot of the times your story seems flat because all your sentences are the same layout.

You want to vary your sentence structure.

Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t. Count the words in your sentences for two or three paragraphs.

Are they all five word sentences? Twelve? Twenty-seven?

That robotic sameness in sentence length is one of the main reasons that writing can feel flat.

It’s like those ancient Dick and Jane books.

• See Dick run.
• See Jane skip.
• See Dick wave.

The other big bugger is when all of your sentences are simple and declarative.

• I walk to the forest. The trees are gracious, tall. I inhale the pine scent.

There is actually a whole, entire world of different sentence styles that writers can use and when you use them? That’s when you make your writing shiny and sexy and all the good things.

The names for these structures are pretty boring, honestly, but we’ll try to look beyond that, right?

Simple – You have one main clause.

• Carrie is the best wife.

Compound – You have more than one independent clause. You probably use a conjunction.

• Carrie wants to get another dog, but Shaun keeps saying no.

Complex – Oh, the sentence that probably has to pay for a therapist or is reading Foucault obviously in the park. This sentence has an independent clause and a subordinate clause.

• When hell freezes over, we will allegedly get another dog.

Compound-Complex – It sounds like a place with a cult, right? But it’s just a sentence with at least two independent clauses and one subordinate clause.

• Carrie really needs a new dog to love, so Shaun said that they would get one when hell freezes over, so Carrie immediately purchased some dry ice at WalMart and sent some down to Lucifer.

So, to keep your writing from feeling flat, you want to vary those sentences. Why?

• It keeps the reader engaged.
• It helps highlight important details. It helps vary tone. It puts emphasis on things (especially when you use a short sentence for that).
• It sounds more real. People don’t speak in identical sentence patterns. When they do, just like in your writing, it feels unnatural and stilted.
• It can be easier to follow when you change your sentence structure up.

How do you vary the structure?

• Use different lengths, like we mentioned above
• Use different types of sentences like we also mentioned above. Throw in that complex sentence in the middle of all your simple sentences.
• Don’t start all your sentences the same (the way I did up there).

Refresher moments:

What’s a clause? A bunch of words chilling out together and one of those words in the group is a verb and another is a noun. Fancy people call the verb, the predicate, but we aren’t fancy here.

What’s an independent clause? It is a bunch of words that has a subject and a predicate. Got fancy! It is grammatically complete all by itself and doesn’t need anyone. Not any other words to stand alone! Darn it.

What’s a subordinate or dependent clause? A bunch of words that needs other words to be a sentence. This poor beautiful...

This week? This week has been a bit rough for me.

But I am still writing. And we are still podcasting! Gasp!

I am still doing this because I think that writers write. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Say it with me, okay?

Writers write. That’s all it takes to be a writer—the actual writing things down.

We write rebellion. We write acceptance. We write through grief. We write through joy.

Sometimes our work is absolute poop, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we write, that we give ourselves voice no matter what.

Do not stop writing.

100 words a day? 30 minutes a day? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that your voice is there. Yours.

You matter.

Your voice matters.

Your writing matters.

Here are the things you need to do:

You need to:

1. Follow your writing wherever it takes you. Let the words carry you.
2. When you ache, write it down because that ache? Someone will connect with it. Someone will feel less alone.
3. The best writing is full of yearning. That yearning helps inspire us all to make a better world.
4. Whenever you feel joy, lean into it. Don’t worry that you don’t deserve it. Take it when it happens. Let your characters have it, too. Dance around the house. Sing in the shower. Catch raindrops. Even if you feel like the world is shattering around you. Allow your work and your self to be human.
5. When you write, you take power. You take the power to look at pain, at problems, at issues, at grief right in the damn face and you make it into art, into action, and into power. That’s a big deal.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Keep fighting for what you want.

COOL EXERCISE

Take 30 minutes at most. You can use no more than 500 words. Gasp! I know! I’m terrible.

And in that time and word count, I want you to write about one image that happened in the last week and has stayed with you.

Write down details.

Now, I want you to connect that concrete image to what you yearn for.

COOL PLAYLIST TO DO THIS TO

I picked songs without words for this one. Songs that feel like yearning to me.https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/6geuR3LwqThjiMydkhsHwA

PLACE TO SUBMIT

Parentheses Journal is a Canadian biannual.

You can send in up to two poems, flash fiction pieces, or short stories (max word count 2000).

Its reading periods are from November 20— March 10 (so now) and May 20—September 10.

Deadline: 10 March 2025

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Our random thought came from here.

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.

In our Random Thought, we talk about why people are mean. The link to our source is at the end of these notes.

All you all,

I (Carrie) am the WORST copyeditor for my own work. I’ll admit it and that’s because as a writer, I’m too close to it to pick out my errors, right?

That’s why it’s good to have other people read your stories before you put them out there.

So, we (Carrie and Shaun) are going to talk about some grammar mistakes: three super common ones. Ready?

1. Every day or everyday

What the what, right? There’s a difference?

Yes, yes, there is.

Everyday when it’s all one word is an adjective. That means it’s describing something that happens all the time.

Dreaming about manatees is an everyday occurrence for Carrie.

Every day when it’s two separate words is an adverbial phrase. Doesn’t that sound fancy and terrifying? Adverbial phrase.

It just means “each day.”

Every day Carrie dreams about manatees.

2. The magic apostrophe

I (Carrie) talk about apostrophes a lot and that’s because a lot of us just haven’t gotten the memo yet. That’s okay! Don’t be hard on yourself. Here’s the memo again.

Apostrophes have two main jobs.

Job #1 is to show that something is possessing something else. No! Not in an exorcism kind of way, but an ownership kind of way.

The manatee’s flipper was so cute.

The manatee owns that flipper. It possesses it.

Job #2 is to show there’s some letters missing because we have smooshed or contracted two words together.

So, ‘It is’ becomes it’s. The apostrophe is replacing the I in ‘is.’

Or ‘they are’ becomes they’re. The apostrophe is replacing the A in ‘are.’

A lot of us write a word and maybe that word ends in an s. We go, “AH! It ends in a s. There should be an apostrophe in there, right? I shall put one in.” Only DO THAT IF IT IS A POSSESSIVE.

Right: Apostrophes are cute little buggers and it’s hard to resist them.

Wrong: Apostrophe’s are cute little buggers and its’ hard to resist them.

3. Lose it or Loose it?

These words are evil little buttfaces. It’s that double ‘o’ versus single ‘o’ that gets our brains all hooked up. Choose or chose has this issue too.

Why are those o’s so confusing? I don’t know, but I do know that when I was little, I (Carrie) loved to put pupils inside them and make a smiley face.

Here are the hints:

LOOSE means not tight. It rhymes with moose!

LOSE means you have lost something. You poor honey. That rhymes with booze.

CHOOSE means you have to make a choice. It’s the present. It’s happening now. It rhymes with moose.

CHOSE means you already made that choice. Are you regretting it? It rhymes with pose.

Spoiler Alert: Don’t be a butthead about other people’s grammar mistakes.

Here’s the thing: We are all human. We all make mistakes. It is not the end of the world and other humans (the good ones) shouldn’t be trolls about it. No offense to trolls. But we all have to be a little less harsh, a little less judgmental and a lot more understanding and forgiving.

If someone writes its for it’s or lay for lie, it doesn’t mean they deserve to die or get your hairy eyeball of judgment. It just means they made a mistake. It’s part of being human. And it’s okay.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Enjoy life when you’re here and don’t waste your time being a meanie.

BE A PART OF OUR MISSION!

Hey! We’re all about inspiring each other to be weird, to be ourselves and to be brave and we’re starting to collect stories about each other’s bravery. Those brave moments c...