Practice the forms — a writer's scales

"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" — "Practice, practice, practice." Musicians can just show up and run their scales; writers, we're told, have no scales, only a blank page. But what if writers do have scales? Sentences have forms underneath them, and you can practice those forms the way a pianist practices arpeggios — which turns "I don't feel inspired today" into a session you can always run.

How it works

Practice form, not content — structure, not meaning. The game is Mad Libs. Take a sentence's shape and swap new words into its slots: "the slithy toves" becomes "the misty mountains," "the colorful balloons," "the hungry wolves" — but not "the colorful hungry" or "the misty shimmering," because your ear already knows the form even if you couldn't name the rule. That's the point: you don't study grammar, you play the structure, and your intuitive command of it grows. It beats practicing on nonsense like Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which has form but no life. And unlike piano scales, this practice isn't purely mechanical — every rep produces a new sentence, which is exactly what DeLillo means by sculpting sentences.

Why it matters

Waiting to feel inspired makes writing hostage to mood; scales make it a craft you can practise on any day. Drilling the forms builds the fluency that lets you compose good sentences without thinking about grammar at all, the way a fluent player stops thinking about finger positions. And because each rep is a real sentence, the practice doubles as generation — you're limbering up and drafting at once.

Try it

1. Take a sentence you admire, strip it to its form (adjective-noun, subject-verb-object), and fill the slots with your own words.
2. Feel where a fill "doesn't work" — that flinch is your grammar, already trained; trust it instead of consulting a rule.
3. Make it daily: a few Mad-Libs reps on strong forms, the way a musician runs scales, whether or not you feel inspired.

Common pitfalls

Practising on meaningless strings for their own sake — the goal is command of form, so use forms that could carry real meaning, not word salad. And confusing this warm-up with finished writing; the scales build the hand, but the piece still has to be composed and revised.

If you want to practice writing great sentences, focus on form, not content — structure, not meaning.

WILLIAM · WANT TO WRITE GREAT SENTENCES · 2025

Writers have scales after all. Play the form, and a new sentence falls out every time.

Drawn from

• William, Want to Write Great Sentences? Forget Grammar—Do This Instead (Writer Science, 2025).
• Related: A sentence is relationships, not words, Write with whimsy — play, not judgment, Write to think, not to report.