Longer, more complex sentences are much smoother and more graceful on the page than in the mouth. If you want dialogue to sound real, listen to it–literally. Reading silently, your brain fills in and evens out. So, when you feel your work is in pretty good shape, read it aloud. Any place you stumble needs to be reworked. Reading your work aloud–whether prose or poetry–helps identify rough patches, awkward words, and other problems. If feasible, it’s even to have someone else read your work aloud for you.  Good listening!

Whether describing a person, a place, a thing, or a process, long detailed descriptions–unrelieved by action–are likely to be deadly. If very well done, readers will get so involved in the description, in visualizing exactly what the author had in mind, that they are taken out of the story itself. If not well done, those passages are likely to be skipped altogether. Elmore Leonard advises leaving out the parts that readers skip anyway. Replace length with strong, vivid, memorable language.

In describing people, go for details that will help define the character for the reader. For example, in describing an employee saying, “Her dress was black and blue and ruffled, better suited to a ballroom than a boardroom,” would not create the same image in the mind’s eye of every reader but it’s likely to convey the same impression–which is generally much more important.

And consider not describing transportation at all. If you need to get your character from New York to Philadelphia, put her in a car, a plane, or a train and get  her out again and let it go at that–unless something important to the story happens in transit. Even then, skip as much of the before and after as possible.

Finally, leave out the parts of routine actions that the reader can assume. For example, if a man is going out and locks the door behind him, we know without being told that he had already opened the door and closed it again.

Conglomeration is another of those words I love because it sounds so much itself. Technically, it has to do with a spherical shape, and disparate things brought together in one. But its more common usage, of miscellaneous or even random things brought together (no particular shape) make it a very useful word. Try writing a sentence–a scene–a whole story–around “conglomeration.”

I stumbled across Jane Austen at the end of spring term my sophomore year in college. During finals week, I devoured every Austen I could lay my hands on–which may partly explain why I missed by a hair making Phi Beta Kappa. But that is not the point here.

Over the years I have, at irregular intervals, reread her novels. In the midst of  the current Jane Austen Mania, I am in the midst of another of those periods–the first since I started writing fiction. And so I find myself reading Austen with a different eye, one focused on identifying the components of her genius, her methods of revealing human nature and human relationships that make us recognize commonalities between people then and people now.

At the moment I am reading one of her less well known books, Lady Susan, an epistolary novel involving multiple letter-writers. Although not a popular form today, it still can be found in novels such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. As an aspiring writer, you might want to read one or both of these books with an eye to noticing character development in the absence of the usual devices.

Redundancy takes many forms and it makes for clunky, dull writing. Below I shall give a few examples.

When words and punctuation are redundant, stop with the quotation:

• “Stop!” he shouted.
• “Why?” he asked.

When the whole concept is embodied elsewhere, the underlined word or phrase can be eliminated:

• She sat down.
• …she thought to herself.
• and etc.

And, finally, don’t use two–or more–words when one  would do. Simply choose the strongest, or the one closest to the meaning you are striving for.

• She hated, loathed, and despised him.
• The wind blew hard, raging across the open field.
• Joe was tall, towering over his teammates.

The basic rule is that short, simple sentences–even sentence fragments–convey more energy than longer, more complex sentences. They are less likely to be beautiful in the poetic sense, but they carry more punch.

Take an emotion such as anger. If it is a long-held, smoldering anger, longer sentences with modifiers and clauses might be appropriate in a narrative passage. But if it is an anger outburst or a heated argument, you are more likely to want short sentences.

If you use lots of ands, buts, whens, and thens, consider whether wordiness is sapping energy from your writing. Consider breaking one long sentence into two or more shorter ones.

I was driving west on a two-lane road, straight as a plumb line, and then…

Finish the sentence and then the scene. If you are on a roll, finish the story. This exercise is akin to games you may have played as a child, when one person starts a story which is then expanded and redirected by each subsequent participant.

You can generate these story starters for yourself by opening any novel to any page, choosing a sentence at random, and writing from it or any part of it.

If this sort of story starter appeals to you, check out The First Line. Every quarter this journal posts the first line of a story.  Every story submitted for that issue must begin with exactly the same line.

Whenever something strikes you especially intensely, focus on it with a writer’s eye. Whether it’s a salmon-hued sunset or anger so strong you’re left shaking, a bit of amusing dialogue or a drooling newborn, note as many details as you can and work them into your writing–for that day, or in a notebook you keep for future use. When you write use strong verbs and nouns, and try to incorporate all five senses. Even if that scrap never finds its way into a story, the practice is good for you.

This tip emerged during my interview with Sharvette Mitchell (see previous post) but it bears repeating: Read what you want to write! You need to know the unwritten rules of the genre to which you aspire. Readers in a particular genre expect–even demand–that authors conform. Need I say that the rules for romance novels differ drastically from the rules for a spy thriller? There are many books out there with titles that begin How to Write a …. Such books typically spell out the rules for you. But even knowing the rules, you still need to read broadly within that genre–books you like and those you don’t. Try to analyze their differences, identifying what you want to emulate and what you want to avoid.

To Sharvette Mitchell for being such a great interviewer! Before I knew it, my fifteen minutes of fame had expanded to twenty-five, and it was all her doing! If you missed the show–or would like to hear it again–you can do so at  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/mitchell-productionss/2010/03/15stacy-hawkins-adams-and-vivian-lawry–richmond-authors-spotlight.