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...

THE ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Let’s be honest, here. Sometimes I throw the word “sexy” into a podcast title just to get Shaun to pay attention.

But the one-sentence summary is kind of sexy.

Over on the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, Randy Ingermanson writes:

In that summary, you want:

• To show us the setting via information about where or when the story is happening.
• What Ingersoll calls “a paradoxical description of a major character.”
• Something weird/shocking/surprising that makes you think of that story question
• Something sexy. He calls this an emotive/kicker word.

Why is this sexy?

It’s sexy because if you can do this, you can understand your novel. Understanding is sexy. It becomes a map for your novel. You can see where you’ve gone off on a tangent, where things don’t adhere to that sexy summary.

Us writers often go off on tangents.

Or as Nico Waters on Rene Pen says,

“It’s the quickest way to explain or write what your book is about. It’s the hook to entice readers to want to buy your book. It also serves as our compass, our true north, as we continue writing the book.”

Waters has a great post about this and shows three formulas to do this, too.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Don’t be afraid to amuse yourself. Confidence and goofiness is a sexy combination.

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. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

Subscribe

Wendy MacNaughton on her Substack Draw Together talked about negative space this week and she wrote,

“Negative Space performs many functions: it focuses our eyes on the subject, it moves our eyes around a drawing or it keeps them still, it allows for visual space/room to breathe, and sometimes it gives the subject an extra layer of meaning.

“For example, ever seen this logo before?

“Sure, you’ve probably seen it a million times.

“But have you noticed the hidden symbol in the logo?! Focus your attention on the negative space of the logo - the space between the letters. Do you see it? Look between the E and the X. Now do you see the arrow?? YES. It’s subtle. It took me YEARS to see it. But once you see the arrow formed by the negative space you can’t unsee it. In this case, designer Lindon Leader used the negative space to create an image that informs the meaning of the subject. An arrow takes your package from here to there. Very clever, Lindon.”

This obviously has societal implications, which she writes about as well. She talks about sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ work Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, which shows in data and visualization what was and wasn’t going on.

In writing, we call this negative space white space, right?

How writers use it impacts readers’ experiences.

1. It focuses attention on shorter words and paragraphs.
2. It gives a visual break—especially when it’s at the end of the scene or chapter, right? A new chapter almost always begins on a new page. There’s a reason for that. It’s to let that last bit resonate. It’s to signal, “Hey! Rock star! You just read a chapter!”

So… how do you create white space?

1. Make your sentences shorter. Vary these babies.
2. Make your paragraphs shorter. Vary these babies, too.
3. In articles, make lists.
4. Make sure in dialogue that each person speaking gets their own paragraph. Don’t embed the dialogue.

WHY NEGATIVE SPACE IS GOOD IN OUR LIVES, TOO

Last week, on our blog, I talked about how boredom is actually a pretty awesome thing.

But basically, being bored allows us to have creativity, to replenish, to incubate ideas a and thoughts.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

Our random thought came from here.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

POGIE AND MR MURPHY DOG: This is 100% positive truth. We live about 65% of our lives in this white space where you think we’re sleeping but we’re really just chilling and trying to figure out how to get snacks in new ways.

PLACES TO SUBMIT

The Masters Review Short Story Award for New WritersEligibility: Emerging writers only Prize: $3,000 + publication + agency review Entry Fee: $20 Deadline: February 2, 2025

And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful

There’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast.

I get this.

There is a lot of information out there in the world.

Short-form content is, they say, the key.

Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where you share big ideas, be a little contrarian, drop cliffhangers for your stories, and share who you are. It gives people a taste.”

“Many old-school writers want to take a stranger on the street and send them to their newly published book on Amazon. All the reader has to do is give up $15–20 and 15–20 hours of their life,” Denning writes. “None of this works anymore because the internet and all its information have burdened us with a high cognitive load.

“Our brains hurt.”

So, yeah, we say to hell with that. One size fits all doesn’t fit everyone and that comes to readers of everything—books, blogs, news sites, magazines. To say that it does? It’s a little depressing and fatalistic.

High cognitive load when it refers to writing usually refers to the principles of plain English.

What’s that?

It’s just concise sentences. It’s active voice. It’s anti-jargon.

KEEPING IT SHORT AND SIMPLE

Keeping it short and simple has often been a dictum of novel writing when it comes to length (make it only 50,000 words, God forbid it hits over 100,000). It’s also part of content creation (other kinds) keep the reels and videos to 1 minute or less, the picture books to less than 500 words, and so on.

But I’ve (Carrie, not Shaun) also been lucky enough to go on book tours and listen to readers complain that books are too stripped down, not long enough to get lost in any more. Those specific readers? They don’t want short and simple.

BLOWING THAT MAXIM OFF

We’ve built a hyper-local daily paper on the opposite of this thought. We aren’t simple. Our articles tend to not be short. Our word choice and sentence structure is though.

And we have no short-form content to lure people in. We rarely remember to share our posts on Facebook and Instagram. And when we do? It’s never pithy.

But despite this (and our complete lack of marketing and despite that there are some amazing and award winning papers in our area already), in two years we’ve grown to a digital subscription base larger than both the major legacy weekly newspapers in our county with their very large (compared to us) staffs.

Our staff of two (the same goofballs you’re listening to right now) has written over a million words this year, just on that paper, and our open rate hovers over 60%.

We write long.

And people? They like it because they get to parse through the information and determine what matters to them when we cover something like a town meeting. We don’t decide what matters for them.

We trust our readers to be smart, to make their own decisions. So, no, we don’t write short. It’s something that Heather Cox Richardson (one of the most popular writers on Substack) and Andrew Revkin do, too.

Dumbing yourself and your content down? It’s not sexy.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE YOU

The other aspect of this is something Denning agrees with and that it’s okay to be you—your weird self, your personal self—in your writing. AI can do a lot of super amazing things, but it can’t do that—it can’t be personal. It can’t be you.

So, when you are writing—anything and everything—just be yourself. Think about who you are writing for, yes, but also be true to who you are, too. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where the communication and the connection happens, too.

Hey! It’s a quick happy holiday greeting from us. We took a quick pause in our celebrations to make the shortest podcast episode ever.

We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out. <3 This photo is from outside our neighbor's house.

SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago.

Ready? Let's go!

A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits.

To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.'

But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of flirting. We're here to talk about writing, life, and dogs. Actually, flirting is part of most people's lives. But we're FOCUSING on the writing aspect.

Flirting is showing someone that you are attracted to them.

If you've listened to the random thought portion of the podcast, it's obvious that Carrie fails at flirting and in knowing when other people are flirting with her.

Side note from Carrie: This is because it's really extremely rare for me to be attracted to people in that way.

So, when it comes to writing about flirting, she has to do a lot of research about how people flirt, how people react to flirting, what the common aspects of flirting are.

All of us, as writers and humans, have blind spots or flaws. These places can be viewed as writing weaknesses or human weaknesses, but they honestly just make us real.

Second side note from Carrie: Not being attracted to people that way isn't a flaw, it's just something that's different than what our society considers the 'norm.'

When we're writing, we have to look for those places where we're not as strong. It could be setting. It could be showing our character's emotions. It could be plot. It could be making a character realistically flirt. It could be making dialogue real. The secret to becoming a better writer is to dive into those places where you're not as strong, and focus on them.

WRITING TIP OF THE POD

Be courageous. Go right to where your weaknesses are and excavate them. If you can't write a fight scene. Go write fight scenes. Read them. Watch them. Go into the places where your weaknesses are.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Flirting is not the same as being friendly. It's about intent.

SHOUT OUT

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 “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.

IN THE WOODS, appeared in July with Steve Wedel. It’s scary and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Buzz Books . There’s an excerpt of it there and everything! But even cooler (for me) they’ve deemed it buzz worthy! Buzz worthy seems like an awesome thing to be deemed!

HELP US AND DO AN AWESOME GOOD DEED

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips. We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!

ART

You can buy some of my art. I paint to help inform my stories and some of the prints are available now. There will be more soon. You can check it out here.