The Art of Writing: How to Write Bestselling Novels

Direct Writing (An Important Skill)

Direct writing is a more important skill to acquire than you'd think. It can make the difference between engaged readers who can't put your book down and readers who drop your book and choose a movie to watch instead.

If you don't know what direct writing is, don't worry--not a lot of people do.

Direct writing is the opposite of writing with lots of commas which are separating what are called "asides," mostly. Here's an example:

Poor Writing

I saw the girl, who had red hair and a glass eye and peg leg, hobbling down the street with what appeared to be a bag of carrots, which looked quite tasty.

Direct Writing

The red-haired, glass-eyed girl hobbled down the road on her peg leg carrying a tasty-looking bag of carrots.

Which sentence do you prefer?

A better question is, which sentence causes your brain to do less work?

The direct sentence is clearly a much easier sentence for your brain to process, which means your read is going to be much more leisurely. And since reading is a leisure activity, that's a big plus. No one likes to read a book that's so full of asides, they can't figure out what the subject of a sentence is for a good minute because their brain's spent that time processing all of the different components.

Notice how I just did something similar in the previous sentence but in a different way? I wrote a really long sentence with several part, which is kind of hard for your brain to keep up with, right? I'll explain that in a second.

For now, let's stick with the components that are "asides" and how to adjust them to create a direct sentence.

All I did was put the parts of the sentence together that could be easily and naturally combined due to their subject matter.

The girl had red hair, a glass eye, and a peg leg. So I put the red hair and glass eye together in the same part of the sentence since they're both on her head. Next, I put her peg leg and hobble together since they relate to one another. Then I took the carrots and combined them with the adjective used to describe them (tasty). In other words, I ordered everything properly. Everything was separated out before with commas into different parts of the sentence. All I did was cut down the number of sentence pieces by joining the related parts together. That created a simplified, easier-to-read sentence.

Asides are what you'd call the parts of the poor writing example that intrude on the narrative, causing it to sound like things are out of order. That creates lots of pauses and, therefore, the need for commas. The sentence tells you there's a girl, but then stops to tell you she had red hair and a glass eye. I removed some of the stops--the need for commas--by simply moving the adjectives before their described object.

Direct writing is actually pretty simple. Anytime you see a comma, just as yourself, "Does that comma really need to be there, or is there a better way I could configure this sentence to get rid of that comma?" Then you play with the sentence structure until you come up with a better one to eliminate the comma(s). Not too difficult, right?

Long sentences

There's nothing wrong with long sentences as long as they're well-written. The sentence I mentioned earlier that was too complicated was packed full of too much information. Here it is again:

No one likes to read a book that's so full of asides, they can't figure out what the subjects of the sentences are for a good minute because their brain's spent that time processing all of the different components.

So, how could you change that sentence to make it easier to understand? You can do one of two things: you can either cut it into two sentences or just figure out a way to deliver the information more simply.

Reconfigured Sentence

No one likes to read a book full of sentences packed with asides. Their brain spends a good minute processing every sentence because there's too much information in each one.

Simplified Sentence

A sentence full of asides causes your brain to spend way too much time processing the sentence to figure out what it means.

See how easy that was?

ASSIGNMENT

Now, take just this one skill and go apply it to an entire book you're writing. Don't write anything else until you're done improving that entire book with this skill. Then start writing a new chapter and implement the skill. Those two activities will seat this skill in your editing mode and your writing mode so that you'll start writing and editing this way naturally, which will save you TONS of time editing in the future.

Now, stop making excuses and go write. And if you liked this chapter, please vote for it! The more you vote, the more people will see this book and read it. That means there will be more well-written books on Wattpad for you to read. So it'll benefit everyone and Wattpad if you vote!