How to make your writing sound less stiff
Just a few suggestions. You shouldnāt have to compromise your writing style and voice with any of these, and some situations and scenes might demand some stiff or jerky writing to better convey emotion and immersion. I am not the first to come up with these, just circulating them again.
1. Vary sentence structure.
This is an example paragraph. You might see this generated from AI. I canāt help but read this in a robotic voice. Itās very flat and undynamic. No matter what the words are, it will be boring. Itās boring because you donāt think in stiff sentences. Comedians donāt tell jokes in stiff sentences. We donāt tell campfire stories in stiff sentences. These often lack flow between points, too.
So funnily enough, I had to sit through 87k words of a āromanceā written just like this. It was stiff, janky, and very unpoetic. Which is fine, the author didnāt tell me it was erotica. It just felt like an old lady narrator, like Old Rose from Titanic telling the audience decades after the fact instead of living it right in the moment. It was in first person pov, too, which just made it worse. To be able to write something so explicit and yet so un-titillating was a talent. Like, beginner fanfic smut writers at least do it with enthusiasm.
2. Vary dialogue tag placement
You got three options, pre-, mid-, and post-tags.
Leader said, āthis is a pre-dialogue tag.ā
āThis,ā Lancer said, āis a mid-dialogue tag.ā
āThis is a post-dialogue tag,ā Heart said.
Pre and Post have about the same effect but mid-tags do a lot of heavy lifting.
They help break up long paragraphs of dialogue that are jank to look at
They give you pauses for ~dramatic effect~
They prompt you to provide some other action, introspection, or scene descriptor with the tag. *don't forget that if you're continuing the sentence as if the tag wasn't there, not to capitalize the first word after the tag. Capitalize if the tag breaks up two complete sentences, not if it interrupts a single sentence.
It also looks better along the lefthand margin when you donāt start every paragraph with either the same character name, the same pronouns, or the same ā as it reads more natural and organic.
3. When the scene demands, get dynamic
General rule of thumb is that action scenes demand quick exchanges, short paragraphs, and very lean descriptors. Action scenes are where you put your juicy verbs to use and cut as many adverbs as you can. But regardless of if youāre in first person, second person, or third person limited, you can let the mood of the narrator bleed out into their narration.
Like, in horror, you can use a lot of onomatopoeia.
Drip Drip Drip
Or let the narration become jerky and unfocused and less strict in punctuation and maybe even a couple run-on sentences as your character struggles to think or catch their breath and is getting very overwhelmed.
You can toss out some grammar rules, too and get more poetic.
Warm breath tickles the back of her neck. It rattles, a quiet, soggy, rasp. She shivers. If she doesnāt look, itās not there. If she doesnāt look, itās not there. Sweat beads at her temple. Her heart thunders in her chest. Ba-bump-ba-bump-ba-bump-ba- It moves on, leaving a void of cold behind. She uncurls her fists, fingers achy and palms stinging from her nails. Itās gone.
4. Remember to balance dialogue, monologue, introspection, action, and descriptors.
The amount of times I have been faced with giant blocks of dialogue with zero tags, zero emotions, just speech on a page like theyāre notecards to be read on a stage is higher than I expected. Donāt forget that though you may know exactly how your dialogue sounds in your head, your readers donāt. They need dialogue tags to pick up on things like tone, specifically for sarcasm and sincerity, whether a character is joking or hurt or happy.
If youāve written a block of text (usually exposition or backstory stuff) thatās longer than 50 words, figure out a way to trim it. No matter what, break it up into multiple sections and fill in those breaks with important narrative that reflects the narratorās feelings on what theyāre saying and whoever theyāre speaking toās reaction to the words being said. Otherwise itās meaningless.
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Hope this helps anyone struggling! Now get writing.
