Long and Short... Take 2

After some tangents, digressions, and bits of news, here we go back with our running series; this time, a set of variations on the sentence-length exercises in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft (for the first post in this series walking through the book, click this link).

Part One: If you wrote the [short sentence] exercise the first time in an authorial or formal voice, try the same or a different subject in a colloquial, even a dialect voice—perhaps a character talking to another character. […]

Part Two: If your long sentence was syntactically simple, […] try one with some fancy clauses and stuff […]. If you already did that, try a more “torrential” mode, using ands, dashes, etc. […]

Now as you’ll see if you look back at the first iteration of the exercise, I hated the short-sentence exercise. I look at Le Guin’s instructions and think, “authorial or formal voice”? I suppose it must be, since it’s not colloquial or dialect, but to my ear it’s mostly a crap voice. Dead, flat, and a little pretentious—“second-rate Hemingway,” as she put it. I’m not convinced that this kind of voice has a use, but I’m willing to go with it; following her suggestion, I’m going to attempt it by telling the same story, presenting the same subject, and doing it in a colloquial manner. Guy sitting at a bar, telling another guy about the game, is the idea. A laconic Damon Runyon, if that makes any sense.

I’m sitting at the bar watching TV. They’ve got nothing: just Mex soccer. Field’s open, guy’s lining up, goalie’s squatting. Free kick or penalty or whaddyacall. I’m bored so I watch, you know?

Guy starts moving seriously fast. Like sprinting, Usain Bolt stuff. Pow! And everybody’s just like silent, waiting. Then a big breath. Goalie jumps, you think he’s got it. Those gloves, know what I mean? Touches it with his fingers. Bounces, hits the frame, goes in.

You ever watched Mex soccer? Here’s what happens. SCOOOOOOOOOORE! See, they yell it like that. Crowd’s out of their minds screaming. And I realize I’m standing up too.

I don’t go for soccer. You know that. Don’t go for Mex folks much neither. But I might watch that show again.

So that works a heck of a lot better than the first draft, because I can believe someone talking sort of like this. 

Turning to the other exercise, I don’t think anyone would claim that my huge sentence about Chambers was syntactically simple, so I’ve got to do a “torrent”—only this time it’s not going to work for something like the Chambers story. It’s got to be a torrent of emotion, a buildup of intensity, that stuff, for 250-350 words. Kinda like when I was being gorgeously García Márquez.

Not having immediately to hand a notion about someone’s buildup of emotion, and not being inclined to invent someone’s deathbed scene or the like, it occurs to me that the bit at the bar might work as a very different sort of narrative. See, to my ear, this kind of talk is more or less a long, continuous stream, not a lot of little broken-up bits. The continuous stream suggests the kind of endless blather one hears in a bar fairly often. Let’s see if I can get it to flow:

So I’m downtown on a long job this one time last week, real crappy thing went on forever and Vince—he’s the foreman guy I told you about before—Vince says we gotta finish up everything even when time’s up for the day, and maybe we get overtime and maybe not, and anyways the point is after work I went into this bar at the corner down there, and there’s a big TV and all, only they’re not running the game, just Mex soccer, which isn’t like something I get into, because I’m not much for soccer in the first place, and it’s all Mex guys, not that I’m racist or nothing, you know that; anyhow, point is, the whole field is empty, just these two guys, the one in the goal—whaddayacall, the goalie—and this other guy who’s standing out in the middle, and the ball’s right next to him, only he backs away and kinda like stares down the goalie, see, and everybody goes real quiet, like in the bar and in the stadium and everything, and then the guy’s running at the ball and kicking it, pow, and it hooks up at the corner of the goal thing, you know, where the crossbar hits the up-and-down, and the goalie’s jumping and he touches the ball—you know they wear those gloves, right—and he touches it so it goes up, but then it hits the inside of the bar and bounces right in, and it’s like they sounded a foghorn, like those things on the cans, airhorns or whatever, only it’s the TV guys, the commentators, they’re going, “SCOOOOOOOOOOOORE!” just like that, like on and on, and everybody in the place is shouting, and I gotta tell you, man, I’m on my feet with everybody else: damnedest thing I ever saw.

Now this is definitely not elegant, and it could use a serious lick of polish, but for me it’s instructive. The first version, with the short sentences, kind of works when it’s a narrative like this, but it’s not great. It’s halting and uncertain, and the voice of the speaker doesn’t come across. Then you get this huge thing—305 words, which isn’t much shorter than that thing about Chambers the bank loan guy—and there’s an actual speaker here, with personality. Not a very likable personality, perhaps, but a personality for all that. I have the impression that Roddy Doyle does this kind of thing very well, though I haven’t read anything of his in a very long time (no real reason, I just haven’t).

My conclusion, with which I’ll more or less wrap up this set of bits on sentence-length, is that Le Guin is right—not that I disagreed at the start. We shouldn’t all necessarily go back to writing like Fielding or Richardson or the Brontës or whoever, but it’s time that this insistence on short sentences was discarded. It’s nonsense, and it encourages bad prose.