The great writing teacher, John Gardner, has been quoted by every teacher in the business, but his famous comment bears repeating: "You are trying to create a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind and that dream is broken by bad technique."

Many writers focus on the plot, the characters, and the story concept and pay little attention to the "how" of putting their words together. But bad technique occurs at the very basic level - the sentence. You can't create a vivid and continuous dream for the reader if your sentences are awkward, twisted, dull, or say something that's contrary to what you intend.

The good news is that you can systematically search out sentences that are poorly constructed and rework them. Small improvements in two major areas can produce a big pay-off:

• General sentence structure
  
• Passive voice/Passive sentence construction
  

Let's review the first topic this month and the second one in Part 2 next month in the May issue of JAW.

Wallace Stevens once said: "Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor."
Truer words were never spoken. The real world can appear flat and boring if it's not described well. You want to provide your readers with colorful, emotion-laden, sensory detail and description. You fail to reach this goal when awkward or mundane sentences slow down your narrative. Lifeless and prosaic sentences prevent you from providing the reader with those ever-so-necessary images and metaphors.

In fiction writing, creating a vivid world where actions are clear and character intentions make sense contributes to readers losing themselves in your captivating prose. You want your readers to experience your writing like an uninterrupted dream in which they are one hundred percent focused. You achieve that goal primarily by using active sentence structures that engage the imagination and include an effective blend of ideas and images, heavily weighted toward the latter. You get ideas from newspaper reports; you want an experience from fiction.

Reportage vs Fiction

Study the comparison shown in the chart below. If you picked up a novel, which would you rather read?

Key differences between the reportage above and the fictionalized version include:

• Passive language vs. Active language.
• Brief abstract summary vs. a full-blown scene that is longer, concrete, and more enjoyable to experience.
• Dry facts that Tell vs. image-laden description and details that Show, allowing readers to imagine and become involved in the situation.

Reportage is, of course, shorter. Books, films, and epic adventures can be summarized in their entirety in considerably fewer words than the original text or movie. But how enjoyable is a report? As John Hersey once said, "Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it." To entice your reader to live in your story, you must create smooth, descriptive text that uses metaphor, imagery, detail, and good, solidly constructed sentences.

In "reality" (outside fiction) everything is rather hackneyed and clichéd. We say that the weather is warm, the child grew big, the fire was hot, the dinner was huge… But all these descriptions say next to nothing. They give the IDEA of something (size, temperature, amount, etc.), but fail to provide any detailed visual or sensory information. How huge was the meal? You need to hear more precise data: The steak was a full sixteen ounces and covered half my plate. The baked potato was as big as the baby's head!

So rather than using idea-based description, write description composed of strong nouns, powerful verbs, and detail. Not big man - try: six-foot-five brute. Not smelled nice - try: carried the fresh scent of eucalyptus. Not the music was loud - try: the pounding bass and squealing guitar gave her an instant headache.

Become Aware of Your Sentence Starters
One of the first techniques you can use to identify less-than-optimal sentences is to do a Global Search on the following sentence starters:

It is	It had	There is	There had been	These
It was	It would	There was	There would	Those

In particular, IT and THERE sentences are a slow slog for the reader. Consider the following sentence:

It was a cold and windy day.

What "it" is this referring to? The first thing the reader has to do is figure out what "it" means. She's in her analytical brain, then, not in her imagination. In addition, nobody - no character - is experiencing this state of the weather. Instead, the reader has to think intellectually about what "it" refers to and try to assign some level of meaning to it. How different if the author writes this instead:

The brisk wind had long ago numbed his face into a frozen mask, and he couldn't feel the tips of his fingers.

There was a big rainbow in the sky.

A rainbow, luminescent with neon green, blue, purple, red, and orange, arched over the distant schoolhouse, lighting up the morning sky. Savannah walked toward it, wishing she could reach out and touch the brilliant colors.

1. Make the subject of the sentence a solid noun (often the actor or subject is a character) that takes some action using a strong verb;
2. Clean up the sentence so that it clearly expresses what you mean;
3. Create a specific image or images for the reader to absorb.