Le Guin 3.1: Down With Hemingway

Continuing this series of exercises and discussions from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft…

“Rules” about keeping sentences and paragraphs short are mechanical spin-offs from journalism and a highly artificial school of “action” writing. If you obey them, you’ll probably sound like second-class Hemingway. If that’s what you want, that’s how to achieve it. To me it’s only worse than sounding like first-class Hemingway. But then, it takes all sorts. (Steering the Craft, 50)

Teachers trying to get school kids to write clearly, and journalists with their weird rules of writing, have filled a lot of heads with the notion that the only good sentence is a short sentence.

This is true for convicted criminals. (Steering the Craft, 40)

The central point of chapter 3, “Sentence Length and Complex Syntax,” is that a lot of writers (or would-be writers, or whatever) deprive themselves of a great many possibilities by insisting on short sentences at all times in all ways. When they do write long-ish sentences, the result is often a short sentence with a single dependent clause. This is unfortunate, because so many really great writers have written an awful lot of very long sentences.

Of course, it’s not just a question length. What Le Guin is really talking about is rhythm.

Rhythm in prose generally manifests most obviously when there’s something wrong, whereas explaining how to do it well is awkward and difficult. Indeed, Le Guin doesn’t have a lot of concrete advice here. But at base, the core principle is variety: if you have a lot of different types of sentence, with lots of different lengths and structures, with a wide range of different clauses and locations for them, you’re doing okay. You may not have great rhythm in your prose, but you don’t have the really bad kind:

Prose consisting entirely of short, syntactically-simple sentences is monotonous, choppy, a blunt instrument. If short-sentence prose goes on very long, whatever its content, the thump-thump beat gives it a false simplicity that soon just sounds dumb. See Spot. See Jane. See Spot bite Jane. (Steering the Craft, 40).

At the same time, she can’t wholeheartedly recommend that we go over to full-blown Jane Austen-style long sentences, although she gives as her first example a block of three paragraphs from Mansfield Park, the second of which is one very long sentence broken up with semicolons and other “pausing” techniques. She admits that this kind of thing now often seems “stately” or “overcomposed”; I would use the word “mannered.” We’ve gotten out of the habit of reading this kind of prose, which is one thing; we’ve also decided that such prose is intrinsically bad, which is quite another.

In a writers’ group of which I’m a member, most of the contributors subscribe to the “short sentences are always preferable” principle. When contributors post pieces that include the odd “long” sentence—and they’re never long on the Jane Austen or Henry James scale—many will mark these and say that this is a problem, that the sentences should be cut down. What’s interesting to me is why they say this, by which I mean, what these critics say is wrong with long sentences and what benefit accrues from cutting them down. In essence, the point is that long sentences are hard to read, get in the way, and therefore deter readers; inevitably, at least some of them continue on to point at “how to write” stuff from money-making genre writers.

Is this what we’ve come to?

I am reminded of a student I had in a college writing course, lo these many years ago (about 20 years back). He described himself as “a writer,” and it was clear that his ambition was to be a successful author of action-thriller stuff in the vein of Tom Clancy or Clive Cussler. Now in this course, we read Frankenstein, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and some others, culminating with John Crowley’s spectacular Little, Big. The student ultimately gave the course a terrible satisfaction rating, and my boss—a professor from the English department who specialized in people like Fielding—always read any really bad student ratings carefully. He took me aside and showed me what the kid had written. In response to the prompt, “What did you learn in this course?” the kid wrote, “I learned that Stevenson and Wilde and those guys were bad writers. Their books are boring.” My boss remarked, “All by itself, that pretty much invalidates everything he said.”

For me, this is a perfect example of what Le Guin is getting at. You don’t have to write like Wilde or Stevenson or Austen or James to appreciate that they were masterful prose stylists. If Austen captures your attention at a given moment, you do have to be careful: simply importing her style wholesale into your brutal urban fantasy isn’t likely to work. It’ll seem mannered and experimental instead of graceful and elegant; it’ll be difficult to handle fast-paced action, of which, chances are, your brutal urban fantasy requires quite a lot; frankly, it’ll be a weird prose-style experiment, and I think it’ll fail. But you can and should sit down and think about what you like in Austen’s style, and why it works, and what you can steal. If on the other hand you start with the core principle that sentences need to be short and punchy, you’ve already decided that a huge range of great prose is bad.

I’ve mentioned Crowley’s Little, Big. Here’s a beautiful example from very near the opening, in the section called “A Long Drink of Water”:

She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her. 

It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.

That is what Le Guin means about rhythm. 3 sentences, one genuinely long, one medium, and very short. The first sentence is broken up into odd little blocks by semicolons that don’t always work quite the way, officially, they’re supposed to work. The second sentence, by contrast, skates fascinatingly close to the thin ice of a run-on. The third is not only short but weirdly content-less, an expletive and the essentially meaningless adverb “very” strung together. Now notice that every sentence has the same apparent object—the room—and that by the end, “It was that very room” clearly isn’t about a room at all.

Now try this, just a couple of pages later:

He worked in a wide, white room where the little sounds he and the others made would rise to the ceiling and descend again strangely altered; when someone coughed, it was as though the ceiling itself coughed, apologetically, with covered mouth. All day long there Smoky slid a magnifying bar down column after column after column of tiny print, scrutinizing each name and its attendant address and phone number, and marking red symbols next to those that were not the same as the name and address and phone number typed on each card of stack after stack of cards that were piled daily next to him.

In the first exercise Le Guin was talking about “being gorgeous,” about sound and such. Here you go: “wide, white room,” “coughed … with covered mouth.” On the issue of rhythm and length, notice how in this example unlike the last one, it is the absence of punctuation that produces the effect: “marking red symbols next to those that were not the same as the name and address and phone number typed on each card of stack after stack of cards that were piled daily next to him.” It’s perfectly clear, it’s not at all hard to read, but the absence of punctuation makes it feel simultaneously rushed and drearily repetitive (name and address and phone number; each card of stack after stack of cards).

A few years ago, we were staying in a house built on an open plan, and my daughter—then about 7 years old—woke up in the middle of the night. I was up anyway, and reading Little, Big for the umpteenth time. She asked if I could read to her, so that she could get back to sleep. I simply started reading Little, Big from page 1. I got about five or six pages in, and then she stopped me, and said she thought she could sleep now. The next day I asked her what she thought, and she said, “I didn’t understand all the words, but it didn’t matter, because it was so beautiful.” (Incidentally, I forwarded this to Crowley himself, who responded with characteristic warmth and humility.)

If you haven’t read John Crowley yet, you must.

Next time, I’ll try my hand at some sentence-length exercises.