Drive Your Readers Forward: The importance of variable sentencing.
Reading and driving are similar actions for the brain. You follow sentences just like you follow a road. Punctuation serves as road signs so you know what to do. A period is a stop sign, a comma is yield, and an exclamation point means SLAM ON THE BRAKES (don’t use those often). You can read on auto-pilot just like you can drive on auto-pilot, with the same result. You get to the end but have no idea what you just did and don’t remember the trip.
Most importantly, the sentence pattern can change your mood, just like a traffic pattern can. If you drive in the downtown area where every intersection is a red light — soon you will be agitated and cranky. If you drive down a freeway that is clear and open with no stops, it’s a pleasurable, fast trip. If you take a sharp curve — you definitely start paying attention. Use your sentence length to do the same thing.
“I put my sandwich on the counter and went to wash my hands. When I returned, my dog had it. In her mouth. All of it. In her mustard coated mouth. Gone. My lunch was gone.”
Notice how the short chops make you feel angry and impacted by the action. Short sentencing can do that.
“Sitting in my kitchen staring out the window at the starry night I began to write a love poem to my beloved sandwich so cruelly taken from me this afternoon by that horrible dog who claims to be my best friend.”
Long sentences keep the reader moving forward but run out of energy near the end.
“I told my wife about losing my sandwich and how it was going to affect my trust of the dog. She laughed in my face. “Get over it,” she said.
Mixing long and short sentences keeps the pace varied and makes the reader pay attention to the next turn.
The better you design the roads of your story, the easier it will be to get your readers where you want them.
