March Writing Yoga: Strong, short sentences

Welcome to the March Writing Yoga. This month we're getting back to basics. In yoga there's a pose called the Mountain Pose. If you look at someone doing it, it looks like they're just standing there, but they're standing with good posture and good alignment, in a way that can support all of their actions going forward. So the writing yoga equivalent of the Mountain Pose is to write a simple, strong sentence that can support all of your writing going forward. This exercise is a variation on 1 of the exercises in The Writer's Voice, which is my book about writing voice. And the exercise there, in turn, was inspired by a book called Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which I highly recommend. It's really fun to read, and it will make you look at sentences differently.

Here's the exercise. Take something that you've written. It doesn't have to be long. Maybe an email, a few paragraphs of a blog post, a few paragraphs of a chapter that you're working on for a book, anything. Sit down to rewrite it with one sentence per line and each sentence should be short and simple. By simple, I mean that structurally it should be simple. There should be a subject, there should be an action, and there should be maybe an object of that action, and that's it. No dashes, no semicolons, no colons, no clauses that qualify what you're saying. Just one essential thought per sentence.

Now, your first pass at this might result in something that sounds kind of like a children's early reading book. “The dog has a bone. The dog likes the bone”. No. If that's what it sounds like, take another pass. You may need to rearrange the way that you present your ideas. You may even find yourself thinking a little differently and writing with much greater clarity.

A clear sentence structure exhibits clear thinking.

So why do this? Well, Verlyn Klinkenborg would say that we must master the fundamentals of sentence structure before we start building more elaborate sentences.

Short sentences can be powerful. They break complex ideas into their atomic parts. You'll feel the rhythm pulse through the words of the sentence.

Think of this as practicing the mountain pose, the basic posture you need for everything else in your writing. So keep revisiting that this month. Go back and as you write something, think, “What if I tried this one sentence per line exercise? How would that change what I write?” And let me know if it makes a difference for you. I'll see you next month.