Le Guin 3:2: The Long and Short of it
Ursula K. Le Guin gives two exercises on sentence length and complex syntax, and recommends doing them several times in different ways. This is the first iteration of me doing the exercises; here are the instructions:
Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each must have a subject and a verb.
Part Two: Write a half-page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence. (Steering the Craft, 47-48)
You couldn’t ask for simpler instructions. How did it work out?
He squinted hard at his prey. It lay there, waiting. Far off lay its den, a rectangle. He crept up on it. His legs were soundless in the grass. At the last moment, he kicked. The ball flew, far and fast. It soared high above the pitch. An intricate satellite, it hung midair, motionless.
A low gasp rose then. Hundreds of throats inhaled sharply, together. Green-gloved hands flashed, legs leapt. Surely he had caught it? It bounced off iridescent fingertips. With a crack, it struck wood. Free of obstacles now, the ball moved. The crowd emitted wild, ululating screams. The home team had scored at last. The match ended in triumph.
Later, they carried him on their shoulders.
And…
Chambers was the sort of man who took a definite satisfaction in saying no, in rejecting others’ pleas and demands, and perhaps for this reason he had achieved considerable professional success as a loan officer in the Tri City Bank; for many years, in fact, the bank’s managers, both in the Marksburg branch where Chambers performed his severe dance of repudiation from ten to four o’clock each business day, and in the wood-paneled boardroom in the state capital where the Senior Men presided, had rewarded this quiet functionary with their highest accolades: at base, they reasoned, he held fast to Our Money and refused to hand it out, willy-nilly, to profligate wastrels whose only claim lay in their having originally placed the funds in the Bank’s safe-keeping; and so confident, so practiced, so smooth was Chamber’s habit of denying applications that when, come one fateful September late in the last century, a memo of instruction was passed down from the Senior Men—a new generation now, smart young men with edgy suits and vivid ties and shark-toothed smiles—suggesting, by way of a new “policy initiative” that would bring the firm in line with “industry best practices” and make the bank’s “operational processes” (Chambers puzzled over the meaning of this phrase) “more customer-facing,” that petitioners be granted loans of considerable size with only the vaguest, most cursory examination of their securities, income, or anything else that might indicate their ability eventually to pay back the loans—a memo, when you came right down to it, that instructed Chambers and all his kind to disregard everything they had ever done to protect the bank (and, incidentally, to prevent the bank’s account-holders from default) and instead to hand out vast sums to people who had not the slightest hope of paying them back—Chambers looked up at the calendar to verify that it was not April 1, and that the new Senior Men were not likely playing some bizarre practical joke.
Obviously I liked Part 2 a lot more than Part 1.
The interesting thing to me about Part 1 is how quickly you begin to strain at the bit. A few really short sentences is no trick whatever, but once you get past about 30 words, the whole thing starts to become a chore. The hardest part, at that point, is avoiding “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run.” That’s when I remembered Le Guin’s note that, just because you’re writing short sentences doesn’t mean you’re confined to short words, which is why things like “intricate satellite” happened. But however you slice it, this kind of prose quickly becomes self-parodic. It will be interesting to see whether, in the various iterations of this exercise that occur over the next couple of weeks, I can compose an example that I don’t think is simply bad writing.
Part 2 was a lot of fun, in part because I decided on this go-round to ignore Le Guin’s suggestion—not intended as an instruction, only an idea—that very long sentences work well for building emotional intensity, and that therefore this big sentence might be good as a deathbed scene or the like. Instead, I wanted to try my hand at late-19th/early-20th century prose, set much closer to our time. So I just started writing—and suddenly I had this notion of a novel or long short story which I’ll never write.
Chambers is a dour, basically nasty man in late middle age, with no real friends and a tidy packet of money. His job, is as a loan officer, and he’s got seniority and a lot of annual bonuses because he gets off on saying no. But then in the very late 20th century, we get a new breed of bank executives, and their approach is different. Unlike the old-school fat-cat businessman with the cigar in the boardroom, utterly uninterested in the petty difficulties of ordinary working people, the new guys are rapacious: they don’t ignore the ordinary people but rather see them as suckers to be fleeced and destroyed. This is of course the beginning of the predatory lending schemes which led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Chambers can’t understand what’s happening, but he knows it feels very wrong, and slowly he comes to realize that his own nastiness is trivial compared to the outright viciousness of the new bosses. And so, in some fashion or other (I have no idea how), he concocts a scheme to destroy his bosses, steal and share their money, and become a deeply unlikely Robin Hood.
As I say, I’ll never write the tale, but some (suitably-revised) version of this huge sentence would make an admirable opening for it.
As far as what was interesting, the main thing for me is how tricky it is to make a semicolon-splice (to invent a phrase) convincing. We expect periods these days, and when we get a semicolon instead, we wonder why. If I were to go back and punctuate that sentence without regard to Le Guin’s exercise, I’d add at least one period, maybe two. The trick, of course, is how to revise such that a given semicolon should not be a period. I’ll keep tinkering.
Next time, I’m going to keep working on long and short, using some variations on these exercises. Thus far, this is much the most interesting and enjoyable exercise, and I do feel I’m learning something.
Thanks for reading!