He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled

Your Sentences Aren’t Short Enough (Here’s How to Fix Them)

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I want you to take any famous writer and find the shortest sentence in their book and the very longest sentence in their book. And now go to a piece of your writing and look for the very shortest sentence in your book and the very longest sentence. 99% of the time, you will find that the established writer has both shorter sentences than you and longer sentences. That’s because they’re really good at sentence variety, and sentence variety is one of those things that every writer can get better at.

Now, we’re not gonna deal with long sentences today. That’s a video for another time. But today, we are gonna focus on short sentences, like really, really short sentences. Here are 7 tips on how to write short sentences that will have readers obsessing about your book.

1. Use Contrast

What’s the perfect place for a short sentence? It’s after a very, very, very long sentence. Why? Because the contrast makes the short sentence seem even more shocking.

You probably know Cormac McCarthy because he wrote The Road and No Country for Old Men, and he is renowned for writing very long sentences. But you know what? He doesn’t shy away from very short ones either. In Blood Meridian, there’s one short sentence he repeats again and again and again. It’s very short — it’s 3 words: “They rode on.” Repeating it multiple times makes it feel like the journey is endless, like they just kept on riding and riding.

But the placement of where he puts this very short sentence is very telling. The sentence before it is 89 words long. Then he says, “They rode on.” And then the sentence after it is 78 words.

So use contrast to your advantage and have a very long sentence before and maybe after a very short sentence. Also, it should be a bucket list item for you that you should try to write a 3-word sentence in your book. It’s a good goal to have.

2. Make a Catchphrase

Kurt Vonnegut has a 3-word phrase he uses again and again in Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.” You get this sense of resignation, like, “Eh, what can you do?” And when Vonnegut uses that phrase again and again against the backdrop of World War II and the carpet bombing of Dresden — one of the most horrific events of that entire war — it creates this crazy contrast between that sort of lackadaisical attitude and the horrific events actually happening on the ground.

So I ask you: what 3-word phrase captures the spirit of your novel, and what character could repeat it throughout?

3. End Your Book on a Short Line

George Orwell’s 1984 is about a man fighting a totalitarian government named Big Brother. He spends his entire life resisting the authorities and trying not to submit. But after loads of torture and social conditioning, the novel ends with one of the most chilling lines of all time: “He loved Big Brother.” Only 4 words.

Could you imagine if this had been a longer line? Just imagine if Orwell had gone on for another full sentence explaining that the struggle was finished because he had won the victory over himself. Ugh. The wordiness would diminish the sadness. When readers get blindsided by that sparse, forward reply, they wanna cry.

So don’t feel like you need long sentences to convey complex emotions. Sometimes you just need a gut punch of a very short sentence.

4. Make a Funnel Shape

Sometimes a short sentence works really well as the climax to your paragraph. Joan Didion has this great essay about marriage, specifically about the relationship between her husband and her family. This paragraph is made up of 6 sentences, and every single sentence gets a little bit shorter until finally we reach the climax of that last sentence, which is the point of the whole paragraph: “Marriage is the classic betrayal.”

The first sentence is 104 words, then 57 words, then 50 words, then 12 words, then 12 words, and that last sentence is only 5 words long. So the whole paragraph is shaped like a funnel, starting large and then funneling you down to that tiny, powerful sentence.

5. Cluster Short Sentences Together

Usually, you don’t want too many sentences of the exact same length in a row because then it’ll seem redundant. But over and over again, I see authors put 3 very short sentences in a row because it hits you like 3 quick punches.

Roberto Bolaño uses 4 short sentences in a row: 5 words, 5 words, 6 words, 4 words. And what it does is it really forces the reader to slow down and actually look at these tiny details. The sentences are very matter-of-fact, and they’re all concentrating on different colors of shoes.

Clustering is a wonderful technique to use when you wanna slow down the pace of a certain paragraph or when you really want to emphasize something. And I should also point out that the sentence before those short sentences and the sentence after are both longer.

6. Open Your Novel

It is so difficult to decide on the very first line of your book. There’s so much at stake. There are so many possibilities out there. But instead of trying to cram a ton of information into that first line, why not start with a very short sentence?

If you think about it, a ton of famous novels start with very short sentences:

  • “Call me Ishmael.”
  • “The old man was dreaming about the lions.”
  • “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”
  • “All this happened, more or less.”
  • “I am an invisible man.”
  • “A screaming comes across the sky.”

All right, bonus points if you can name the authors or the book titles for those lines. Well, maybe a couple of them should be pretty easy, at least.

So there are at least 3 advantages to starting your book with a very short line:

  1. It’s difficult to misinterpret. It’s a very clear start line — the reader’s not gonna be confused if you start with a three- or four-word sentence.
  2. The reader is immediately inside your world. We immediately know there is an old man, and he is dreaming about lions. Or with the last one about screaming across the sky, we realize there’s a missile coming.
  3. A short first line is easy to quote, and it’s very memorable. “Call me Ishmael” and “I am an invisible man” — they’re quoted so often.

Gabriel García Márquez said that he used to spend months trying to get that very first sentence right, but once he did, everything flowed out from there.

7. A Short Sentence Allows You to Change Your Writing Approach

David Foster Wallace has a short story I would not recommend you read — it is probably the most horrific short story I have ever read. It’s about a man accidentally spilling a pot of boiling water on his baby. Ugh.

The short story is everything the father does in the minute afterward to try to save his baby’s life. It has some very long sentences as the father is picking the baby up and putting him in the sink and running cold water all over him as the baby’s screaming and crying. The long sentences are just filled with the sounds and sights and smells and the frantic, wordy energy of the father.

But after all of that, David Foster Wallace switches to a very, very short sentence. It’s not anything about the description of the event, what’s happening in the scene — it’s much more about an abstract idea or a commentary upon the scene. Here’s the line: “If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

Oh, kill me. If you have children, you know this is true. And it’s true in the big picture — yes, children will break you — but it’s also true in this particular circumstance with this father and this child.

So you might adopt this strategy if you have a short declarative sentence that comments on everything that’s happened beforehand.

If you’ve enjoyed this and wanna learn more about sentences, you might enjoy my course, How to Write a Splendid Sentence. The link is in the bio. In it, you will learn things like the 2-3-1 rule, the leaning standalone rule for sentences, and how to break free of common sentence guidelines.

Happy writing.

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