Long Sentences Are Just Fine (If You Can Pull Them Off)

Illustration by the author.

When I first became deliberate about becoming a writer I read every book on writing that I could find in the library and bought the ones I thought best so I could study them. More than one of these books wrote about sentence length. Most urged writers to use short sentences. Most also suggested that writing is more interesting when we vary sentence length. One of these authors, if I recall correctly, stated that we shouldn't write sentences longer than 17 words. 

Like many young writers I took these instructions to heart. Hemingway famously wrote short, punchy sentences, right? Wasn't Raymond Carver a "short sentences" kind of guy?

So I was mildly amused the other night as I read an article by Tennessee Williams about how his life had been changed through the sudden fame garnered by his play The Glass Menagerie. The article first appeared in The New York Times. It drew me in immediately, despite the absence of short sentences. In fact, I really wasn't paying attention at all to sentence length because the storytelling was so engaging.

Now check out this sentence.  

No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind--and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success--there may be some point in comparing the two estates.    

63 words. A paragraph with only one period. But what struck me was the 68-word follow-up paragraph, another single sentence. 

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.   

The only reason I noticed these two sentences is because I'd listened to a series of lectures on writing longer sentences. The written language is an art form and once you know the rules, it's OK to make your own rules. 

No, that's not the whole of it. I noticed these sentences because I could relate to what he was saying. 

As for Hemingway, he also knew how to vary sentence length. Check out this 125-word sentence that I bookmarked the last time I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. The sentence appears at an intense moment in the story. As you read it, there is a feeling of breathlessness as the motorcycle ascends and the sentence ascends with it. 

And as the motorcycle passed the high gray trucks full of troops, gray trucks with high square cabs and square ugly radiators, steadily mounting the road in the dust and the flicking lights of the pursuing staff car, the red star of the army showing in the light when it passed over the tail gates, showing when the light came onto the sides of the dusty truck bodies, as they passed, climbing steadily now, the air colder and the road starting to turn in bends and switchbacks now, the trucks laboring and grinding, some steaming in the light flashes, the motorcycle laboring now too, and Andrés clinging tight to the front seat as they climbed, Andrés thought this ride on a motorcycle was mucho, mucho. 

For the record, Faulkner has a couple sentences that are more than a thousand words each. 

Are you a writer? Do you restrict yourself with rules about sentence length? What other rules do you bind yourself with? It's never too late to learn a few new tricks. 

Table Scraps: Primarily for Writers

If you're a writer you are probably like me. You enjoy reading what other writers say about writing. One of the writers in this list once wrote, or said, that he takes more pride in how many books he's read than how many he has written.

If you're not a writer, I'm certain that many of these table scraps will speak to you in some way or another anyway. Take your time. Relax. Chew slowly. Enjoy the flavor of the ideas as well as the words. 

* * * * 

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
--Elmore Leonard

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero. A bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. "
--Walter Pater

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
--Washington Irving

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
--Italo Calvino

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
--E.L. Doctorow

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
--David Foster Wallace

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
--Carlos Fuentes

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
--Carlos Fuentes

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."
--Raymond Carver

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
--John Gardner

And One Last Quote
"A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing."
--Don Roff

Editor Gordon Lish

While doing research on Gordon Lish I came across a very interesting discovery. This guy, former editor for Esquire magazine from 1969 to 1977, completely changed writers' works. So much so that the original, when compared to the stripped down finish, might conceivably be unrecognizable.

An October 2007 New York Times article, When We Talk About Editing, revealing the deep cuts Lish made in Raymond Carver's work is eye opening. Astounding, actually.

What is especially interesting to me is that when I was first writing fiction, a New York friend in the publishing business said my work was O.K. but to see what great writing really looked like I should read Raymond Carver who exemplified the new minimalism in literature.

Now, more than two decades later, I discover Carver is not what everyone thought he was. Or rather, the Carver that critics called "great" was actually Gordon Lish. How can this be?

Editors do play several important roles when it comes to writers. I am grateful for having had some very good editors massage my work at times. A takes a second set of eyes to see that two ideas in a paragraph may not be linked very well, or that a meaning is ambiguous, or that a sentence is clumsy. Young writers are more likely to get repeat jobs if they don't mind this attention to detail by a second pen.

Here's the opening paragraph of the Times piece.

''One More Thing'' is the final story in both ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,'' Raymond Carver's breakthrough collection from 1981, and ''Beginners,'' a proposed volume of what Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, and some scholars, consider Carver's original versions of the same stories. They were later trimmed and sometimes reshaped by Gordon Lish, Carver's first editor. In the story L. D. is threatening to walk out on his wife and family.

Check out these two versions of the end of one of Raymond Carver's more famous stories, revealing how the piece was originally submitted and what readers saw after Dr. Lish applied the scalpel.

What do you think?