Over the course of having my work critiqued in local writers groups I have gotten back this remark numerous times: This sentence is too long. It takes up two and a half lines, and should be made into two or more sentences.
Where does this belief that all sentences should be short stem from? Is it the result of the shrinking American attention span? Of over-exposure to ‘sound bites’ and commercials and texting and tweeting? Is it instilled by the pallid preaching’s of exhausted high school English teachers, struggling to cram some semblance of education into the hormonally preoccupied, marginally literate minds of teens hopped up on Red Bull and Monster?
I have listened while writers tell other writers that their flawlessly crafted sentence should be chopped into shorter lengths – “because it is too long, you see.” (And these were not sentences dealing with action…just to clarify.)
At a recent writers’ group meeting a lovely young woman who might someday – if she diligently studies craft and reads a lot – become a writer, told the group, with unblinking sincerity and conviction (for her JC English teacher had said so), that any sentence over 10 or 12 words was suspect of being a ‘run-on’ sentence. After a stunned pause while those around the table absorbed this proclamation a discussion followed, with some writers claiming that most readers don’t have the patience or intelligence to read a novel containing long sentences.
With the exception of age appropriate genres like children’s and YA, (and perhaps pulp fiction and detective novels), I disagree.
And so today, my darlings, to both rebuke and refute this erroneous thinking, I am going to regal you with very long, very beautiful sentences—written by literary masters.
If you belong to the Cult of Short Sentences, gird yourself:
The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.
And another:
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them as silently as eyes.
From The Road, by Pulitzer prize winning author, Cormac McCarthy.
It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has just finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration.
And another:
I ate roast duck stuffed with oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah, which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves were off the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which come dragging so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.
From All the King’s Men, by Pulitzer winning poet/author, Robert Penn Warren
“The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the Great,’ and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate, but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—The Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the ‘I.’”
From The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (contributed by writer, David Waid). In 2008, The Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945″
It was a city in which the very old and the very new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farms, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every manner and color and kind.
From Neverwhere by award winning author Neil Gaiman
“That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.”
From The Green Hills of Africa by Pulitzer prize winning author, Ernest Hemingway (Yes, this is all one sentence…all 424 words of it.)
Do you have a favorite long sentence? Do you know someone who fears them—for whom we might perform an intervention?
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J.J. Brown was born in upstate New York and has worked in New York City for two decades as a scientist, author, educator and now publisher. Brown’s current author site and blog is http://www.jjbrownauthor.com She studied writing with South African poet Dennis Brutus and genetics with Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock, completing a PhD in Genetics on work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. The author has previously published in leading science journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hepatology, and Genetics among others. Vector is her first published novel.
