Unknotting the Knots

Writing should be simple, right? Writing is just the act of taking all the words and putting them on the page. We should be good with words. We’ve been dealing with words for many years. We use words inside our heads. We use words out loud. But when it comes to putting words on the page, especially when it comes to writing fiction, we can often tie ourselves into knots. Sometimes, we read a sentence we’ve just written and we can see that it is problematic but we don’t know how to fix it. Other times, we think the sentence is a wonderful sentence but our readers disagree. They get tripped up. There is a knot within the sentence that causes them to stumble as they read.

Wordy sentences. Wonky sentences. Illogical sentences. “Where’s Wally” sentences. Rhythmically awkward sentences. There are lots of ways a sentence can go slightly awry; and I thought this would make an interesting focus for my craft article this month. To make this analysis as authentic as possible, I’ve asked four intrepid writers to send me a story draft and I’ve used these to pick out example sentences. These are four writers who really know how to write. The pieces they kindly shared with me are full of highlights; but in looking for commonalities between them, I kept coming back to this idea of a knotty sentence – sentences that don’t feel quite right.

Is sentence construction really that complicated?

“Bob wakes up. He has a shower. He gets dressed. He eats breakfast. He opens the curtains. The sky is blue. The sun is a triangle…”

If we only use simple sentences then, no, it isn’t that complicated. All of these example sentences have at most a subject (“Bob” / “he” / “the sky” / “the sun”), a verb (“wakes up”, “has”, “gets dressed”, “eats”, “opens”, “is”) and a complement (“a shower”, “breakfast”, “the curtains”, “blue”, “a triangle”). The possibility of creating a knot is relatively small. But writing purely in simple sentences is very limiting. It can get quite dull quite fast for both writer and reader. So, we take the decision to stretch some of our sentences. “He eats breakfast” becomes “He eats A MARS BAR FOR HIS breakfast”; and the degree of complication ramps up. Perhaps I want to say that the eating of breakfast and the opening of the curtains happens at the same time, so I turn “he eats breakfast” into a subordinate clause and end up with “as he eats breakfast, he opens the curtains.” Not too complicated. Not too knotty. But the risk of knots gets higher the more we push things, so how about combining everything together for “as he eats a Mars Bar for his breakfast, he opens the curtains.” Does that quite sound right? Or is there a little knot in there? How about if we push things to the extreme and go with “as he quickly eats a fun-sized Mars Bar in the modern kitchen for his early breakfast, he lazily opens the blue curtains with his left arm which is an inch smaller than his right”? Complicated, yes. The best sentence ever, almost certainly no!

Here is a sentence from one of the stories I was sent:

“Her doctor was calling out medical jargon I didn’t understand as a nurse inserted a canula into her right arm.”

This is a complex sentence. It starts with a subject (“her doctor”) then we have the main verb phrase (“was calling out”) then we have a complement (“medical jargon”) which is followed by a relative clause (“I didn’t understand”) and a subordinate clause of time (“as a nurse inserted a canula into her right arm”). Each of those elements can be broken down further. The complement is an adjective (“medical”) and a noun (“jargon”). The subordinate clause contains a simple clause (noun + verb + complement) followed by a prepositional clause (“into her right arm”):

The sentence is perfectly understandable. It tells a reader what is happening and paints a rich sense of scene. But to me it reads a little awkwardly. Are there too many elements competing for space? This is a question I often ask when I am analysing a writer’s prose. The more complicated we make our sentence construction, the more we ask of our readers, pulling them in multiple different directions all at once. My follow-up question to the “are there too many elements” question, is “can anything be cut?” Here, I would query the need for “I didn’t understand” since that, for me, is wrapped within the meaning of “jargon.” Does cutting one clause make the whole sentence much easier to grasp?

Pruning the prepositions

In my “let’s push things to the extreme” sentence from above, one of the things I’ve ended up with is an overload of prepositions. “In”, “for” and “with” are competing with the conjunctions of “as” and “which”. This is something I come across quite a lot in my editing work. Even the most skilled of writers can end up a bit bogged down by these smallest of words. Take this sentence from one of my awesome foursome, for example:

“Sorry, I haven’t got time, he said when I asked him to play a computer game with me that Dad had posted from the states.”

Here we have a “when”, a “with”, a “that” and a “from”. That doesn’t seem like much. But each of those little words is starting a new clause so we perhaps end up with a similar effect to what we saw above, a case of too many clauses spoiling the broth:

Often, the issue with this over-clausing is to do with how the clauses actually connect. I like to think of these connections as bridges. “When I asked him” bridges back to “he said”. “From the states” bridges back to “had posted”. And both “with me” and “that Dad had posted” bridge back to “computer game.” Is that double bridge from “computer game” perhaps causing a slight issue? If we throw in some other elements for “when I asked him to play a computer game about zombies with me in the living room that Dad had posted from the states”, that perhaps highlights the issue in a clearer fashion. We now have four things (“about zombies”, “with me”, “in the living room”, that Dad had posted”) bridging back to “computer game” and the sentence definitely feels quite knotty because of it.

Of course, it is one thing to identify possible issues and another entirely to come up with a good solution. Here, perhaps the “with me” can be cut since it feels implied that the narrator is asking the “he” character to play with them. But what if they were asking him to play with someone else? What if it was “with Cecil” rather than “with me”? In that scenario, we need the information. To me, the phrase already feels less problematic because it has a real reason for being there. But if the writer decided that the sentence still felt slightly knotty then they could perhaps consider splitting it into two, creating a separate sentence to explain the origin of the game like “Dad had posted it from the states.” Smaller sentences generally mean simpler sentences mean fewer knots. But this solution would depend on context. One of the problems with my initial example about Bob and the triangular sun is that a lot of simple sentences building up on top of each other can create a tedious rhythmical effect. So, in solving one problem, do we risk creating another? That is perhaps a good thing to bear in mind. Sometimes, the perfect solution doesn’t exist. Sometimes, we have to compromise. Sometimes, we still end up with knots.

Where’s Wally sentences

Another thing I often come across in my editing work is what I refer to as a “Where’s Wally?” sentence (or “Where’s Waldo?” for my American / Canadian readers). These are the sort of sentences with so much crammed inside them that it is difficult to know where to look. There is a tricky balancing act in many aspects of writing between too much and too little.

Here is a lovely list from one of the pieces I was sent by my four intrepid writers:

“The crush of limbs, licking flames, hands shoving her toward safety. Cracked wood, a glimpse of escape”

That is a lot of details all coming at a reader thick and fast. But, for me, the balance of details works because the writer hasn’t pushed things too far. They could have added an adjective to every noun. Maybe those “limbs” are “flailing”. Maybe the “hands” are “rough”? Maybe the “safety” is “uncertain”? A different writer might have plumped for an adverb-verb combination instead of “shoving” – “forcefully pushing” perhaps? A different writer might have doubled up the descriptors before “flames” and “wood” for something like “violently licking flames” or “cracked and charring wood.” If we make all those changes, we might get something like:

“The sweaty crush of flailing limbs, violently licking flames, rough hands forcefully pushing her toward uncertain safety. Cracked and charring wood, a splintered glimpse of escape”

Certainly, we have more details in there. But how many of those details are adding something concrete to the original list? Do we expect the “crush” to be “sweaty”? If yes, we probably don’t need that stated explicitly on the page. Is a “flame” by definition already “violent”? I often think that a good question to ask is “What are the important details I want my reader to focus on?” Be kind to your reader – the human brain is an amazing thing but there is still a limit to how much information we can retain. Also, trust your reader – if you give them the breadcrumb details their amazing brains will start to fill in the rest.

Knots of rhythm and flow

Another possible issue caused by overburdening our sentences is that we cause knots within their rhythm. Prose isn’t traditional poetry. It doesn’t have a defined metre to it. But it still has a sense of rhythm. The rhythm of our sentences is part of what makes our writing flow. And when that rhythm becomes knotty, it risks pulling a reader out of the story.

This is possibly something to consider in my final example snippet:

“a lucrative side-line in keeping an eye out for those who slip into the river by mistake”

The above is part of a longer sentence which comes to thirty-nine words in total. That is quite long as sentences go. And the longer a sentence becomes, the more we are asking of our reader. This particular sentence is perfectly understandable. There are no obvious details that could be cut – every element is needed to convey this idea. But is the rhythm of the sentence as strong as it could be? On my first read, I found myself stumbling slightly over “in keeping an eye out for” and I wonder if there is a wordiness here that could be avoided? Phrasal verbs are by definition much wordier than their non-phrasal cousins. So could “keeping an eye out for” be replaced by a simpler verb?  “Watching” perhaps doesn’t have the same creative energy behind it, but one of the things I particularly loved in this piece was the dialectal tone of voice, so perhaps there is a simple verb within that idiolect which might take the place of the phrasal one we have here.

The sentence then moves on as follows:

“a lucrative side-line in keeping an eye out for those who slip into the river by mistake, or perhaps meaning to slip out of this world.”

Consider that final element (“perhaps meaning to slip out of this world”). That is very chilling. But is it causing a slight knot within the flow of the sentence? Who does the verb “meaning” refer back to? Logically, we know who it refers to, but grammatically, it is a different story. It is difficult to build a backwards bridge. If we shift the verb from “meaning” to “mean” then that would connect with the preceding “who” and the flow would be strengthened. But does it still risk pulling a reader momentarily from the story as they try to get things right in their minds? Would a simpler phrasing like “or perhaps not by mistake” be more effective?

Final thoughts

Each sentence is its own unique thing and each writer / reader is also unique – even at a word / sentence level, what works for one might not work for another. But we all write knotty sentences from time to time and hopefully there are some useful ideas in what I’ve written above that you might put in your back pocket for the next time you come across one in your work.

What to look out for?

• Multiple subordinate clauses, especially ones that “bridge” back to the same element within a sentence

• A build-up of prepositions and / or other little words

• “Where’s Wally” sentences that are so full of detail a reader doesn’t know where to look

• A build-up of adjective-noun pairings

• Adverb-verb pairings that might be replaced by one strong verb

• Phrasal verbs that disrupt rhythm

• Sentences that lack internal logic in terms of how they flow from one thing to the next

Taking things further

All of my writing courses deal with writing at a word / sentence level and all of them touch on this idea of a knotty sentence in some way. Want to play around with rhythm and tempo? Perhaps you might enjoy “Lyrical Writing”? Want to learn more about sentence flow? My new course “Go With The Flow” is a deep dive into how to connect your sentences from one to the next. Want to rocket boost your word choice and imagery? How about “Glorious Words”?

If you want to ponder sentence construction a little more deeply then I have a free resource on my website that might be helpful. Another brilliant free resource on sentences is “Stunning Sentences” from

Nina Schuyler

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