: Re: How can I keep my writing from being perceived as "too complicated" This is from a piece I wrote a couple of years back: The sky seemed like a big, large pool of grey smoke. The weather

@Carla500

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If writing long sentences is a habit, you have two options:

1) Break the habit.
2) Write Regency romances, where lengthy and convoluted sentences are preferred.

More seriously, it doesn't matter how long or short your sentence is if it's unintelligible — your own word. If your reader can't understand you, then you need to edit until you can be understood.

There's a place for dreamy, lyrical, poetic writing. But even poetry has to be broken up occasionally with short phrases, or the inner ear gets exhausted and the brain can't follow a thought across an entire paragraph.

After you've spilled your pasta on the page, make a copy of it. (I suggest a copy so that you don't feel like like you're butchering your beautiful work. It's still there, on the previous page.) As an editing exercise, in your duplicate, take every sentence and cut it into two or three smaller sentences. Do it just to prove you can.

After you've done that 10 times to 10 different passages, go back to your originals and put the short versions side by side. See if you can weave them together: long long short, long short short, long short. Listen for the rhythm of the sentences.

Read your work out loud. This is important. If you find yourself struggling to keep the melody of the sentence coherent, line after line, your sentences are too long. Throw in a shortie to break it up.

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