A sentence is not about self-expression but about editing your thoughts into a partly feigned fluency, building a ladder of words up to a better self. Train your ears, for how a sentence sounds in the head is also what it says to the heart. The bones of a sentence are just a noun and a verb, so put the right nouns and verbs in the right slots and the other words fall into place around them. Good prose is not a windowpane: a sentence reads best when the writer has tasted and relished the words, not tried to make them invisible.
