Part III: Style

As I’ve mentioned before, agents and contest judges periodically said my writing style is too formal. This criticism, probably more than any other, stung. After all, I was a lawyer for several years. Lawyers write. And when lawyers write something to submit to a judge, lawyers write formally. My bosses routinely complimented my writing style. I was a decent legal writer. Therefore, I reasoned, I would be a decent romance writer.

See the logic?

“You need to write in short, declarative sentences,” an agent told me as she rejected my manuscript.

Excuse me?

Shocked, disbelieving and determined to prove that the lousy agent didn’t know what the heck she was talking about, I took another look at the book. To my horror, I discovered the following:

“She did not really want to find herself without a job as she stared down the disciplinary panel of the state supreme court and tried to explain that her phone calls and kisses with Jack had not compromised her client’s case in any way.”

Who wrote that monstrous sentence? Me? Surely not. I read further:

“Mandy had already gone to the ladies’ room, and Sondra had hoped to have a private word with Jack before he left, but she could see that Cynthia was taking her sweet time packing up her stenograph and apparently hoped to have a word with Jack herself.”

Ugh. Maybe my sentences were a little too … dense.

“Your writing is too formal,” another agent said as she (you guessed it) rejected my manuscript.

Too formal? No way. Not MY writing. Not a chance. Slow to learn and unwilling to believe what was right before my eyes, I read the manuscript again and found this:

“When she had composed herself sufficiently … ”

Composing herself sufficiently? Is that anything like calming down?

Well, fine. I finally got it. My writing was jumbled and formal. Stilted, even. I needed to write in short, declarative sentences. I could do that. If only I knew what a short, declarative sentence looked like.

I took another look at Brenda Joyce’s “The Game” and quickly found an example:

“Katherine did not move, stunned.”

Wow. So that’s a short declarative sentence, huh? I would have written:

“Frozen and petrified, Katherine stood with her feet rooted to the floor and tried to gather her wits about her but was unsuccessful for several seconds.”

Since that stunning moment of clarity, I’ve focused on keeping my writing less overblown. I say “less” because it’s a constant struggle. My internal default setting is formal, and I have a tough time getting around it. But at least now I know I have a problem, and once you’ve identified the problem you’re halfway to the solution, right? So now when I write: “Since childhood she’d despised cooked carrots” in the first draft, I change the second draft to read: “She hated carrots.” Much better, huh?

Short, declarative sentences. Gotta love ‘em.