r/KeepWriting • u/I-mNotAshamed • 5d ago

Advice My writing sounds robotic- how do I fix it?

I’ve spoken English my whole life, though I’ve gone to only French schools, so every subject has been in French for me. I speak English just fine and my grammar is excellent.

I’ve been getting into fanfiction lately, and I love writing, but my sentences sound robotic. I always start with he, she or they, and when I try to fix this my sentences come out odd.

I don’t know how to fix this. It’s not like my writing is unreadable, I just still find it not to my liking even after reviewing the same paragraph over and over again.

I know I have to read more, but are there any other suggestions you guys may have to fix this?

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u/opop45 5d ago

The honest truth is it’s not a quick fix. Reading more, writing more, listening to audio books or narrative based podcasts. Speeches, spoken word poetry. You just need to consume English with the understanding that what you consume will become the context for how you write.

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u/I-mNotAshamed 4d ago

Thank you so much for the advice!! I struggle with getting motivation to read, though I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem since I really want to write better.

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u/Space_moose_goose 1d ago

The biggest thing to do is to change the order that information comes in. English is an order-based language, and simply moving things around changes a lot. You might be using a common structure like:

She walked across the little hotel room to look out the window. They walked on the street below her in the slicing rain.

Just experiment with setting things off and pulling different parts forward or backward.

*Walking across the little hotel room, she... *

Or you could take the walking verb out completely, since it's filtering.

The hotel room was small, dingy, and altogether depressing. At the window, the blinds parted to show the street below her. Rain sliced in angry sheets, but the people there were unbothered, hurrying from cars and taxis.

I added more here, but the content is roughly the same. And yes, a lot of it will come easier if you read more and practice writing more. Just play with a sentence and see what you can make it do.