And so we get to part 3 and the final tip on jazzing your sentences up. By now you should be comfortable playing about with those sentences and seeing what you can come up with so we’re going to take it to the top level now.

Use a Series Of Actions in Your Sentences

When you use the right series of actions in a sentence, you can create some real tension for your readers. There is a fine line here; don’t overdo it with the descriptions – the adverbs or adjectives – because your sentence will go from being boring to completely unreadable. You need to allow your readers to use a little of their own imagination:

She crept past the table, peered beneath it, looked into a cupboard and inspected the lounge and hallway, but still she couldn’t see what made the noise.

You may have spotted that all we did here was joined a pair of independent clauses together using a conjunctive, “but.” The real difference is that, in our first independent clause we have several verbs that work with the subject – “crept”, “peered”, “looked”, and “inspected”. This is just another way of making your sentence work or jazzing them up.  Here’s another one.

The thunder crashed, lightning lit the windows up, and the rain poured as she wondered whether she had imagined the noise.

An independent clause with several verbs together with a dependent clause and using the dependent marker “as” to join them together.

Bonus Tip

Do you want to know what happened to Shania? Obviously, you did pay close attention to our story and not just the verbs and the nouns in the examples, didn’t you?

Add Tension With Fragments and Super-Short Sentences.

The lights went off again. Dark. Fear. An odd noise, a different one this time. A bit softer. Closer. Getting louder. Something brushed her leg. She screamed and the lights came back on. Her cat shot past and ran for the window, but got wrapped up in the curtains instead. Shania shouted with laughter.

Oh, you thought there might be a murderer on the loose. We can do that too.

The lights went off again. Dark. Fear, an odd noise, a different one this time. A bit softer. Closer. Getting louder. Footsteps. Something touched her neck. She screamed and the lights came back on. A man, holding a knife to her throat. She shoved her fingers in his eyes while ramming her knee up. He fell back and Shania grabbed the knife.

So, Simon. It’s come to this then, has it? She watched him fall back, one hand between his legs, the other covering his eyes. She stepped toward him, watching, hardly breathing.

And breathe!

When you get the balance right, your story will read right and your readers will be falling over themselves to see what happens next.

Please note, I kept these sentences as simple as possible just to let you focus on the structure. Once you get the hang of this, you can do it with any sentence.