Freshman Comp for Fiction Writers
Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.
I spent today teaching four of my five Freshman Comp classes - Mondays and Wednesdays are brutal for me this semester - all about the different kinds of sentences: simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound. We do this by writing a whole bunch of them, and then asking ourselves what effect we get by having a whole lot of them all in a row. (Hint: the answer we’re looking for is that we want to mix them up.) But it occurred to me that the advice that the classes all seemed to come to is also good advice for fiction writers.
So, for the benefit of those who haven’t taken a formal grammar class in a while, simple sentences are the ones that follow the basic subject-verb-object structure without additional clauses. “I kicked the ball.” Short and, well, simple. If you write nothing but simple sentences, the effect is staccato and childish.
Compound sentences have more than one (and for the sake of avoiding run-ons, less than three) independent clauses. “I kicked the ball, and it sailed over the fence.” Either clause could work as an independent sentence (each having a subject and a verb that is conjugated in a way that could stand on its own). If you write nothing but compound sentences, the effect is singsong - I had one friend who told me that she literally get seasick reading such writing.
Complex sentences have an independent and a dependent clause. “I kicked the ball and fell on my face.” The dependent clause couldn’t stand on its own a sentence, in this case because it’s borrowing the subject from the independent clause. Write nothing but complex sentences and the effect is repetitive and boring.
Complex-compound sentences have multiple dependent and independent clauses. “After I kicked the ball and fell on my face, it bounced off the wall and rebounded into my nose, sending blood spurting everywhere while my friends laughed so hard they peed on the blacktop.” Write too many of these in a row and the effect is dense and confusing. Complex-compund sentences slow readers down and trip them up, sometimes literally requiring them to stick their fingers on the page to map out what goes with what as they read them.
So we want the students to realize that they need variation in their writing. But “mix them up” is too simplistic an answer. This is college, and we want to know when to use which one. So I always ask the class what each one is good at. And inevitably the class comes to the conclusion that simple sentences are good when you want to make your point clearly. So use these for the things the reader needs to remember. Use these to emphasize you key ideas.
Complex-compound sentences are good in that they allow you to explore an idea in depth. These are what you trot out for your analysis. Correctly used, they lend credibility to the author and demonstrate complex thinking. They also force the reader to consider what you’re saying more carefully by not allowing them to skim through them and parse what your point is.
The compound and complex sentences are a good compromise. They’re good for more depth than a simple sentence, but not so dense as a complex-compound. You don’t want to use them all the time, but they’ve got a good cadence and rhythm. These form the backbone of your writing.
Well, guess what? The same “rules” apply to fiction. Simple sentences when it’s something important you need to reader to catch and remember. Complex-compound sentences when you need them to think about it. Compound and complex sentences the rest of the time.
There are, of course, many other reasons for using different sentence types, and there are multiple approaches, but see if this one helps your prose.
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