Here’s the fine print:  I’m not an English savant; I don’t have an MFA.  I know just enough to be dangerous, and that’s…well, dangerous.

Despite this, I’ve recently found myself dwelling on the nuances of sentence structure.  I know what you’re thinking: boring.  But stay with me.  If you’re awake at the end of class, it means you’ve read my story about men and bras.  (I’m nothing if not desperate for your attention.)  In the meantime, let's talk about sentences.

Here it goes.

There are a million ways to arrange your subject and predicate, another million ways to splice and compound.  It’s overwhelming, really.  As authors, we’re on the hook to understand at least a modest portion of this mind-numbing subject in order to build our books.  Personally, I hate writing crappy sentences.  Out of context, that last one might qualify.

But anyway, how do we construct our 50,000+ word towers if, on the English-knowledge-scale, we merely qualify as dangerous?  How can we appear to know more, from a literary perspective, than we actually do?

Here’s my trick: Don’t start every sentence the same way.  Get away from what I like to call the “See Jane” syndrome.  The moment you start your sentence with a new and different word is the moment you’ve begun to build a tiny literary masterpiece.

To illustrate this, I’ve written a story.  Each sentence of this yarn starts in a distinctive way, and that’s important.  An unabridged dictionary offers you 600,000 words to choose from, so it would be silly to always begin with “See”.  Just saying.  And for those who are interested in the scientific names for these syntaxes, they’re included.  Perhaps you’ll be able to stomach that portion of the lesson if you consider the subject...

Bras!  Men!  Men!  Bras!

Without further ado, here are eleven unique ways to start a sentence.

At the entrance to the mall’s brassiere shop stood a man with his hands jammed into his pockets.  (A Prepositional Phrase)

He walked inside looking for his wife, but instead ran directly into a faceless mannequin who wore a leopard print teddy.  (A pronoun)

Excusing himself, even though it was hardly necessary, he made his way to the counter.  (A Participle Phrase)

As he did so, his cable knit sweater caught the clasp of a bra hanging from the nearest rack.  (A Conjunction)

Panicked, he stepped away, but the bra stretched and followed him.  (An Adjectival Participle)

Undergarments of all types began pointing to him as the rack tipped.  (A Noun)

Swearing seemed reasonable enough, though he didn’t mean to yell quite so loud.  (A Gerund)

To avoid any more unnecessary commotion, he righted the rack and gave it a well-meaning hug to ensure its stability.  (An Infinite Phrase)

Meanwhile, his amused wife looked on from the entrance where she had been waiting all along.  (A Transition Word and/or an Adverb)

Alas, he had proven her longstanding argument: Men are unnecessarily hung up on women’s unmentionables.  (An Interjection)

The end.  (An Article)

For real…the end.  Wake up.  Class dismissed.  Go forth and put this little nugget into practice.

Let’s go write something not crappy!

- Brooke Fossey, DFWWW Member since 2010

Yep, it's true: One of DFWWW's most successful and adorable YA authors has dabbled a bit in the adult genre.

Rosemary Clement Moore's new e-book, Date by Mistake, is now available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

It's an anthology put out by Entangled Publishing, and includes stories by our Rosemary, Candace Havens, Shannon Leigh, Gwen Hayes, and Jill Monroe.

Buy it and flip directly to Rosemary's Passionate Persuasion.  It's about a playboy who has left a string of hearts in his wake but can’t forget the cellist who haunts his fantasies.  Now it is his turn to use his power of persuasion to prove he’s the only man to keep her satisfied.

Give it a read and try not to blush!

Have you boiled your book down to a two page summary?  Did you cook it some more and turn it into a two paragraph query?  Further still, an elevator pitch?

Here is the ultimate challenge -- the logline.

If you've always imagined your book as a movie, this free contest is for you.

On May 20th, Scott Myers will be accepting your logline.  If he likes it, you'll join him for a 24-week Screenwriting Master Class.  And, if you play your cards right, at the end of it you'll have a completed script along with access to Hollywood insiders.

That's fancy.

If nothing else, this competition forces you to encapsulate your story so that it fits into a single breath.  It's hard as hell to do, but a good work out for any writer.

So, good luck!

Key dates and some instructions can be found here at THE QUEST.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dee_gee/2599026376/

Being complicated doesn’t make your story good. It isn’t said often enough, but a Byzantine plot doesn’t equal a complex story. Who really wants a complicated story anyway? What we want are characters we can care about, events that are worth watching, and maybe a setting that keeps us engaged.

That’s writing in a nutshell. If you need a deeper analysis than that then you are probably trying too hard.

Writing is hard enough without putting undue pressure on yourself. Just sitting down and creating a single interesting character is hard enough. The notion that you have to come up with something complicated for them to do is something we’re taught because . . . well, I’m not sure why.

Maybe it’s because as simple and obvious as the idea of creating an engaging character sounds, it isn’t all that simple. It is where I feel most aspiring writers fail when writing their stories. Give me someone to care about, first and foremost. Without that, you’re almost always wasting my time.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to nail down what makes a character sympathetic or interesting. Plot is simple. Plot is a series of events that lead from the beginning to the end. Plot can be crafted with incredible care, charted out, mapped like a road leading us on a path we’ve traveled a thousand times, yet somehow still worth walking. Plot isn’t easy, but it is easier to understand, easier to nail down. Yet many a book completely neglects plot and somehow still works.

This is the truth I always share with aspiring writers. Stop worrying about your story. Start worrying about your characters. Give them life. Care about their future. Make them worth reading about, and the audience will be happy to travel with them. Neglect this, and it doesn’t matter how well-researched your story is or how elaborate your outline is.

It’s not the ride we care about. It’s the company.

Unless your story stinks, in which case you should probably fix that.

-- A. Lee Martinez, DFWWW Member since 1995

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bk1bennett/2533718691/