Writing Prose with Variety
This article is all about how to achieve variety when writing prose. But before I talk about how to do that, I should first say that variety is something you should aim for in novel writing in general, not just when writing prose.
Novels need a good mix of characters - heroes and cowards, beauties and beasts, ones you love and ones you hate. Novels need a variety of scenes - some short and others long, some action-packed and others built around dialogue, some with good outcomes for the protagonist and others which end in disaster. Novels need a range of moods - sometimes light and sometimes tense, funny one minute and deadly serious the next.
And so on and so forth. If fiction is peopled by characters who are all virtual clones of each other, and if each event is like a re-run of the previous event, and if the tone is all shadows and no light, or all light and no shadows, the fiction will quickly become monotonous.
Variety is interesting. But you can draw up the most varied novel plan ever devised and still fail to bring it to life if your writing is dull.
Back to Writing Prose...
"Each phrase of each sentence...should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Moving from the big picture of prose to the finer details, here are some of the ways to achieve variety:
Vary the chapter lengths. A typical novel might consist of a dozen chapters at twenty five pages each. But making one ten pages long and the next forty would be better. Mix dialogue with narrative. Reading a page or two of dialogue can be a welcome break after a lengthy stretch of pure narrative. Equally, too much dialogue can be like reading a screenplay if it isn't broken up prose. If you have long chunks of one or the other, try to mix them more thoroughly. Vary the paragraph lengths. If every paragraph is more or less eight lines long, reading the book would soon become tedious. The same would be true if every paragraph were two lines long or twenty. So mix it up. Vary the sentence lengths. This one is the most important piece of advice in the entire article. It lies at the very heart of writing prose that is a pleasure to read. The following example illustrates why...
"Varying sentence length is the key to writing interesting prose. Make them all a similar length and a passage soon becomes dull. The third sentence in this example is about as long as the first two. If I kept it going for too long, you would start to feel sleepy.
"So I'll shake it up! Sometimes I will use long sentences that go on for a while, particularly sentences with lots of clauses separated by commas, like this one, or perhaps even some dashes or brackets if I feel like using them. (Incidentally, semi-colons can be a useful way of joining related sentences together to make a long one; they really are the most under-rated of all the punctuation marks.) And sometimes I will keep the sentences short. Maybe twice in a row. Or even three times. Before concluding this example of writing prose with a good old medium-sized sentence. Or maybe another short one. Like this."
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