Dec 15, 2019
Writing magazine Aug 2019
Anatomy of the sentence - James McCreet
The ability to craft sentences is the basic element of good writing.
The effective writer must always identify why and how a sentence works (or doesn't).
Examples:
HAIL OF BULLETS
He ran a kitchen-help union. He rigged low pay. He had coin. He had pull. He pushed right-wing tracts. He hobnobbed with fat cats. He knew J Edgar Hover.
James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand
Too many short sentences can look childlike. Ellroy's percussive short sentences (all starting with 'he') create a relentless rhythm that generates low-level anxiety. Powerful effects. The repetition of 'he' heaps layers to what we know about the character - most of it bad. He's a bad man. He's also a powerful man, which makes him dangerous. Ellroy provokes tension. Ellroy turns his literary gunshots into brutal music.
GOING WITH THE FLOW
Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
A great sentence does not only describe an experience - it is the experience. Conrad turn his sentences about a voyage into a voyage itself. The lst sentence is leisurely and long. The second is not grammatically a sentence at all. Its triplet of adjective-noun pairings sets is disjointed and incoherent. Why?
Narrator is dumbfounded at the scene and can't sort his thoughts or express himself. He lists breathlessly what he sees. Conrad opts for four adjectives in the next sentence, not one. The narrator is overwhelmed and so must we. The final sentence sees our storyteller grasping for something to summarise the sense. He uses this masterpiece of ambiguous paradox. Unnerving.
TRIUMP OF THE MILLER
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.
Henry Miller, lived a virtually homeless life in 1930s Paris produces a unque anti-novel. Here, he expresses both not giving a toss and the glory of creation. How?
The commas and repeated 'no' of the first sentence create a series of waves that lead to the striking contradiction of the subsequent one. He repeats the effect again with the commas of the third sentence and another partial reversal. He's writing the loops of a roller coaster. He's encoding his triumph not only in his description of it but in the expression of it. The italics cap the effect.
LET'S TALK
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew eally did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhosue 5
V is the master of deceptively simple prose. It's as if he's talking directly to us in his own voice. Partly, this is the halting conversational rhythms he establishes within and between sentences. How does he do it?
A combination of long and short sentences. Also how he inserts throwaway asides ('more or less,' 'anyway', 'and so on'). The repetition of colloquial 'really' and the italics that add his emphasis. The final sentence comes as an afterthought that has the punch line without a preceding joke. It's absurd, but then so is the entire story.
WAR ON PEACE
The mother and the father in their crumpled clothes and greasy hair, him flicking at the dandruff on his collar, her fiddling with her wedding ring, both twitching at the bang and the wail of a microphone being switched on, looking for all the world more the sinners than the sinned against.
David Peace, 1974
What a long sentence. At 52 words, it is twice as long as a typical long sentence and it contains a lot of information. this long sentence is NOT rambling or unfocused. It is as focused as the seat of fear.
Peace created a sense of unease and anticipation. He does this by building momentum into a wave that doesn't break.
Note the initial repetition of 'and' and the way that clauses are joined by commas that preserve the ceaseless flow. The pronouns ('him,' 'her,' 'both') draw our attention to details within the larger scene but without giving each their own focal sentence.
The sentence is alive with detail and movement. Verbs - 'flicking,' 'fiddling,' 'twitching,' 'looking' - that create a sense of constant activity when in fact everyone is waiting for something to happen. Peace has described bustling activity that itself bustles with activity.
CLAUSE FOR APPLAUSE
By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the greatest.
Virginia Woolf, The Art of Biography.
Why VW preface her basic point that biographers stimulate the imagination more than poets with a plethora of clauses and that dangling disclaimer at the3 end?
She summarises points made previously and add emphasis by stacking reasons ahead of her conclusion. The sentence has more force by containing everything within a single, focused whole. Its length is a rational onslaught without the possible equivocation or hesitation of full stops. That final phrase is an important truth. That is why W relegates it to the end as a kind of parenthetical ahem.
In summary, the sentence is a world in itself, but a world that operates
within orbits and systems of other worlds.
Harmony is key to the cosmic order. We must ensure that every single sentence is effective.
Maybe it is stunningly powerful.
Maybe it is a single beat.
Maybe it's self-effacingly simple. Always, it matters.
