Lecture 11 variety in prose. In general, human beings like variety, we get bored very easily. And most entertainment brings us surprises in one form or another. If a reader becomes bored with your writing style, then he may abandon your book. And the story will never get told. prose should have variety, and this takes different forms.
The structure of your prose is one way to ensure that the reader doesn't find your fiction monotonous. narrative and dialogue should be thoroughly mixed up and have elements of each on a page instead of two or three pages of one and then a couple of pages of the other reading too much narrative pulls the reader away from the action of the characters. Conversely, if we write too much dialogue, your prose will see more like a movie script and a novel. If your book has 30 chapters, they should be a various lens. Some will be short, and some will be long, and all the others somewhere in between. paragraphs should also be different lens and not always the same.
The reader will find it monotonous, predictable, and downright tedious. One of the most important lint rules, concerns sentences. If all sentences were 10 words long, a book would be incredibly boring. Some can be longer, but should be interspersed with shorter sentences. Such sentences tend to be dynamic and active, pushing the story forward. mix up your sentence length, often beginning of paragraph with a short one, or ending it with a short one.
This tends to emphasize an idea, make a point or set the scene. Do your sentences tend to begin in the same way change the structure, all the words used to add variety. For example, one way to change the structure of a sentence to make it different from the surrounding ones is to start it with a verb in this way, looking over his shoulder, he will close to the wall. In a previous lecture, we looked at the use Have colons and semi colons. The use of these when appropriate, in a place of a comma will also serve to introduce variety into your sentence construction. Search your prose the overuse of simple sentences, those which have no commas for example, and see if the two can be joined with a semi colon or a cola.
Ideally, there should be a good mix of good and bad characters in your novel. The characters should be happy, some should be sad. Some will be mean and some kind. There will be beautiful people and ugly people and your storage should contain them all. The scenes in your book should be a different lens. Some will be filled with action and all this quite slow and thoughtful.
Vary the pace in this way, so that your novel has ups and downs and moves along briskly. Some scenes will focus on dialogue, and others on description. Some will end happily, but some will be downright disastrous for the hero, and your story needs them all. Fiction needs the full range of moods. Sometimes a mood is light, and sometimes it's tense. It can be funny, one minute and deadly serious the next this is part of the art of good fiction