How to Write Stunning Sentences: 100 Simple Exercises from Beloved Authors to Improve Your Writing Style

by Nina Schuyler

Overview

You’ve got a great story, but do you have great sentences?

Stylish sentences have their own powerful energy that mesmerizes and even rearranges a reader’s world. Think of this book as a private lesson with Nina Schuyler — award winning author and professor of creative writing — featuring guest appearances by the masters, including James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Anne Carson, Justin Torres, and Toni Morrison. They’ve arrived to show you the mechanics of their magic. 

Featuring 31 essays and over 100 writing prompts, How to Write Stunning Sentences is the best way to practice writing sentences with style. The second edition of this indispensable guide includes seven new essays and more prompts.

Sibylline Press is proud to announce its new imprint, Sibyl Writing Craft, dedicated to providing definitive titles on writing craft and the book business for writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798897400003
Publisher:	Sibylline Press
Publication date:	01/13/2026
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Revered writing instructor Nina Schuyler is a former professor at University of San Francisco, and currently teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies, Book Passage, and Sibyl Writing Craft. She also facilitates the popular Stunning Sentences Substack. Her fiction has received accolades as well and includes, In This Ravishing World, and the novels, Afterword, The Translator, and The Painting. Her short stories have been widely published and honored. She lives in San Francisco, CA.

Table of Contents

How to Write Stunning Sentences

By Nina Schuyler

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Syntax

1. John Updike: The Adjectival Sentence

2. Justin Torres: The Long Sentence

3. Anne Carson: The Short Sentence

4. Elizabeth Tallent: Parentheticals and Digressions

5. Aaron Shurin: The Right-Branching Sentence

6. Catherine Brady: Time Modifiers

7. Chad B. Anderson: The Interrogatory

8. Max Porter: Syntax Variation

Part Two: Rhythm and Sound

9. Melanie Rae Thon: Rhythm and Sound

10. Virginia Woolf: Rhythm

11. Rachel Cusk: Parallelism and Balance and Series and More 

12. Meredith Alling: Punctuation

13. Saul Bellow: The Art of Funny

Part Three: Schemes and Tropes

14. Elizabeth Alexander: The Power of Repetition

15. Joseph O’Neill: Similes and Metaphors

16. Elizabeth Rosner: More Metaphors

17. Melinda Moustakis: Ellipsis

18. Caro De Robertis Ekphrasis

19. Lauren Groff: Metaphors, Similes, and Personification

20. Toni Morrison: Synecdoche and Metonymy

Part Four: Diction

21. Grace Paley: Le Mot Juste

22. Doris Lessing: Adjectives

23. Kevin Barry: Adverbs

24. James Baldwin: Precise Imprecision

25. Toni Cade Bambara: Colloquialism

26. Don DeLillo: Register

Part Five: Imagery

27. Callan Wink: Imagery

28. Amy Hempel: Minimalism

29. Lucy Wood: Magical Realism

30. Haruki Murakami: Surrealism

31. James Salter: The Unexpected Image

Glossaries:

Grammar

Rhetoric

Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Nina Schuyler's How to Write Stunning Sentences

“Nina Schuyler’s How to Write Stunning Sentences is like a Kama Sutra for sentences: it describes the positions and passions of her artful love, and through sharp analyses and generous prompts suggests how you too, writer, may become such an artful lover...Read it and the pleasure will be yours.” —Aaron Shurin, author of King of Shadows and The Skin of Meaning

“Passionately intense and exquisitely precise, Nina Schuyler’s brilliant readings of gorgeously disparate sentences by a wide spectrum of innovative writers illuminate the subversive pleasures of suspension and subordination, the joys of complexity and extravagance, and the potent, piercing delights of language distilled to spare perfection.” —Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man

“Nina Schuyler is an alchemist of style. This book is a fantastic contribution to the literature of craft.” —Caro De Robertis, author of Cantoras: A Novel

Praise for Nina Schuyler's Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal

“Nina Schuyler’s book is a creative antidote for anyone experiencing stuckedness, malaise, bad news, the doldrums. And just as useful for those who aren’t feeling stuck but just want fresh, new ways to charge their writing. In her book you’ll find a host of stunning sentences and prompts for she’s a finder, she knows how to find the stunners, then shows you through specific examples how to bring forth your own great lines.” —Toni Mirosevich, author of Spell Heaven

“Stunning Sentences is simply wonderful. There are eighty magical prompts that author Nina Schuyler has carefully curated, providing writers a wide range of tips and techniques to try out. This workbook is a roadmap to hone skills and will give writers tools to effectively inject imagery and rhythm in their own work.” —Devi S. Laskar, author of Circa and The Atlas of Reds and Blues

From the Publisher