Fab fiction sentences

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had a good one? And maybe 2023 is going to be the year that you write your first novel? Or maybe you’ve written a few now, and this year is when you’re going to write your masterpiece, or at least pump out something really great. You know, being a good novelist is like having a toolbox, placed right beside you. With minimal effort, you can grab a tool out of the box as soon as you need it, deploy it in the right place, then move on. You hardly think of it. That’s it. It just happens. Nothing too special.

One of the things in the toolbox you need to have at hand, is a good instinctive subconscious sense of the type of sentences you need to deploy. You’re doing all these anyway, on instinct. But knowing what they are can really speed up your subconscious workflow or at least improve your core competencies.

Okay, I’ve called this post “fab” fiction sentences, but sentences are fairly dull. They are technical, functional forms. A modern successful contemporary writer writes functional sentences. They don’t draw attention to themselves. You – as a reader – don’t even see them. You don’t want people to notice them. You want them to invisible. You only want people to delve into the story and character. Not be impressed by the technical prowess of the sentence. If you’re doing that, well, I’d suggest you’re doing it wrong in this day and age.

Here’s the main sentences you’ll write in fiction all this time. Deploy them as you need:

• History of the character. Where they came from? What happened to them in the past that matters now?
• Your characters telling us what they think about the situation they’re in or the emotion of the moment.
• Details of scene. What does it smell, look, taste, feel like? I’d keep this light and breezy if anything else would get in the way of your pace.
• Anything that’s actually happening. In screenplays we’d call these the action lines. You have ’em in novels too.
• Dialogue. Obviously. Generally using “said” as the verb. Don’t come up with fancier ones that will slow down the reading experience and draw attention to itself (unless that’s what you’re going for).

And there you go. There’s other sentence-types, and we mix these elements into single-sentences all the time. but in the 30,000-ft view, this is a nice breakdown. What’s that, the 5 main sentence types? Most multimillion-selling novels contain just these, and nothing else. Just think about that.

Don’t worry about consciously picking these as you go in the writing process. But know that 99.999% of the time, THESE Are the five sentence-types you’ll be using. That’s it. Nothing too much to learn. Nothing that will get in your way of the story. These are your tools. Just know them, master them, then… well, forget about them. Put them in the back of your mind. They’ll come when you need them.

Happy writing!