What Is Sentence Structure?
Sentence structure in fiction is how you put together your words, phrases, clauses, and use sentence lengths to control a reader’s experience. Novelists use sentence structure to shape pacing, build tension, emphasize important moments, and develop narrative voice.
The most important element of Sentence Structure is control. To keep your reader connected, it’s important to use sentences you can control—some of this comes from intuition and some of it benefits from a bit of learning.
Why Sentence Structure Matters
When you know how to build strong sentences, putting your strongest words in clearly recognizable parts—like subject, verb, object—you’ll write better prose, connect more with readers, and your stories will be read. Often early writers use unnecessarily complicated sentence structures. Here we’ll unpack how to avoid that so readers will love your writing!
TL;DR: Use strong subjects and verbs in your sentences and you’ll be headed in the right direction.
When the right elements of your story show up where a reader is sure to take them in, your story will land and get real consideration by editors, agents, and readers.
How Sentence Control Builds Reader Trust
When a sentence doesn’t quite add up — when the clauses don’t connect cleanly, or the grammar gets a little wobbly under the weight of everything you’re trying to include — readers feel it. They may not diagram your sentence in their heads, but they register a drop in confidence. Something feels off. Their trust in you as a guide dips.
This constitutes what I call a loss of Reader Capital. Every sentence that lands cleanly builds trust. Every sentence that wobbles costs you a little. And often, the wobble comes not from lack of skill but from trying to pack too much into a single sentence rather than giving each idea room to breathe.
If you think of a sentence as an equation, the math has to work out. If you’re writing simple, clear sentences, the equation is straightforward — easy to check, easy to trust. If you’re writing longer, more complex sentences, the equation gets harder, and if any piece doesn’t balance, the whole thing falls apart. There’s nothing wrong with complex sentences, but you earn the right to use them by keeping them within your control.
Don’t spend down your Reader Capital unnecessarily or from decisions you didn’t realize you were making. If you’re using complex sentences, know it, and know why. (For more on Reader Capital, read this post.)
The solution here, almost always, is to simplify. Not to dumb things down — but to give each strong thought its own space, to give each strong word the structural position it deserves. For now, use this strategy to help you get back your control over your sentences.
Tips to Help You Improve
A writer sent me her opening chapter recently, and her first sentence had a lot going on:
Gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers ached, she drove along the highway as the morning light began to burn off the dew.
I see strong imagery, a sense of place and tension, good words, real ambition in the language. But something doesn’t land. The problem: all her best material is buried in the weakest parts of the sentence.
She has a great verb, ached, but who’s doing it? Her fingers. Also, this subject/verb is tucked inside a dependent adverbial clause.
Note: Do the words “dependent adverbial clause” make you feel like you’re back in a high school English class you didn’t like? If so, it might be worth avoiding these in your writing. Or at least a sign to write more simple sentences for the time being.
Now notice all the verbs in her sentence: gripping, ached, drove, (began to) burn.
That’s four—a sure sign she’s packing in too much.
Strong Words: Verbs
Here’s one simple test for complicated sentences:
- Count up your verbs in a sentence. If you have 3 or more verbs, there’s a good chance your sentence is unnecessarily complicated. Look for ways to break it up into shorter, simpler sentences.
Which verb above is the strongest? Drove. See where it lands in the middle of the sentence? That’s a good place for something to get lost. “…she drove along the highway…” That’s the meat of the sentence—the first thing the reader needs to know. So unbury it; present it right up front.
She drove along the highway as…
Anywhere you go from here is going to read more clearly than what we started with.
Strong Words: Subject
Here’s an easy way to check the complexity of your sentences.
Take a look at a few of your sentences. Can you pick out the subjects and verbs?
First check: Are your subjects mostly people?
If you’re using inanimate objects (the morning light, the car, the temperature of a room), it’s going to make your sentences more abstract, your meaning harder for a reader to picture. Disembodied body parts do the same thing (her fingers, his hands, my back…).
Compare the following sentence starts:
Gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers ached…
She squeezed the steering wheel…
Which one carries more energy, has fewer words, feels more direct?
Look at the subjects of your sentences, the do-ers of your verbs. These are the actors in your story. Let them be people a reader can see.
Also, keep the verbs after their subjects so it’s clear who’s doing what. Who’s gripping the steering wheel above? We don’t know until half-way through the sentence. (She)
The Hierarchy of Word Types in a Sentence
In On Writing, Stephen King talks about the writer’s “toolbox” as having levels where yyour most essential tools go on top because you use them most often, and the less critical ones go further down.
Here’s how I think about the hierarchy:
- Verbs (As one client said, “Verbs are number one!”)
- Nouns
At the top, you have verbs and nouns. These are the load-bearing walls of your sentences. They do the actual work. A verb tells the reader what’s happening. A noun tells them who or what is doing that thing.
Every sentence needs both, and the stronger these are and easier they are to find, the less work everything else has to do—including your reader.
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
Below that, you have adjectives and adverbs. These modify your nouns and verbs. They add color, specificity, precision — and they can be useful. But they’re not structural. They’re decorative. When a sentence leans too heavily on modifiers, it starts to feel like a house with beautiful curtains and cracking walls.
King tells us to never use adverbs. (An easy way to find them is to know that they often end in -ly.)
- Functional words
Below that, you have prepositions, conjunctions, articles — connectors of language. You need them. You can’t write without them. But they’re not the content of your sentence. They’re how you connect the pieces.
The mistake isn’t using words from the lower levels. The mistake is letting them run the show.
How to Strengthen Sentence Structure
When I work through this with writers, the instinct is usually to find better adjectives or more vivid adverbs. But the real fix is almost always structural: slow things down, break sentences apart, and let your strong verbs each have their own sentence.
What if that sentence above became two or three?
She drove along Route 283 in the early morning, gripping the wheel until her fingers ached. The sun burned the dew off the fields into a low mist.
Now ached gets to close its own clause. Burned is the main verb of its sentence, not a subordinate detail. The content hasn’t changed, but the hierarchy has — and the writing feels more controlled because the strongest words are carrying the most weight.
(See this post on why you might be rushing and what to do about it.)
The Power of Slowing Down
Breaking up your complex sentences can feel strange at first — like you’re losing sophistication or maybe you’ll start to worry that you’re starting your sentences off in a way that repeats too much. Don’t.
What you’re actually gaining is control. And control, on the page, reads as confidence. For yourself, your writing, and for your readers.
Make that connection. Build your Reader Capital.
Want to improve your sentence structure? Read Find Your Prose Rhythm next.
For more on Reader Capital, read this post: Building Reader Capital and Spending It Wisely.
Or take this quiz to find out What Kind of Writer Are You? and what your best solutions will be for when you get stuck.
