Writing Prompt: The Skill Builder: Fixing Your Narrative Flow

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

This week’s prompt focuses on an exercise designed to work on a particular skill or technique, such as a POV exercise or character builder.

Today’s prompt is a bit more revision focused, with a task aimed at editing your current project and experimenting with it.

I’ve been discussing sentence flow and structure a lot the last few weeks, so let’s put some of that into practice. Today’s skill:

Sentence flow

Pick a scene and copy it into a new file so you’re free to much with it without losing anything.

Next, review it specifically for sentence structure and narrative flow. Look for paragraphs that use mostly the same style of sentence. Look for clunky or awkward dialogue tags. Look for repetition of words, ideas, or structure. Look for faulty parallelisms.

Move some dialogue tags around and see where they best fit in the scene. Break up a few longer sentences. Combine short sentences so they flow better as one longer, complex sentence. Even move some paragraphs around and see if changing when the information is revealed changes the flow or feel of the scene.