Long live long sentences!

A piece of conventional wisdom that gets frequently passed around among writers is if a sentence is so long that it can't be read out loud without taking a breath, then it's too long. Of course, most times we don't curl up in our favorite chair with a novel and proceed to recite the thing aloud, but the idea seems to be that if sentences stretch on for too long, our mental gasps for breath can cause us to faint along the way. Too many in a row and we're ready to be shoveled into an ambulance.

There's a corollary to this "rule" that states that action scenes are best written in short sentences. After all, "action" happens fast, sometimes at blurred speeds, and the choppier the sentences, the more realistically they illustrate the feel of one event merging at lightspeed into the next...

Er, well, no. I propose to turn both of these gnomes on their pointy little heads.

Let's take those long sentences first.

Reading prose is both an aural and a visual experience. We see the words, puncuation, sentences, and paragraphs all laid out on the page, and if there is scant white space, then we can find it tiring to read, even if most of the sentences are of average to short length. If the sentences tend toward long and complicated, one after another, then this can worsen the effect (though I would argue that if they're properly punctuated and balanced, they are no more tiring to read than huge blocks of medium-sized, predictably structured sentences. Certainly they're less monotonous).

The trick is, of course, to write sentences of varying lengths. A wise writer I know once said told me (paraphrased from memory): "The problem with long sentences is not the sentences themselves; it's the company they keep."

So, suppose you have a long sentence with five commas, a semi-colon, and three dependent clauses, running to about sixty or seventy words. Break it up? Not necessarily. Not if the sentences around it are short. In fact, a hundred-word sentence can be balanced very nicely if followed by three-word sentence. Even better if the three-word sentence is in its own paragraph. When it comes to making a page visually attractive and easy to read, it's not the length of individual sentences so much as it is how you mix you them up. Likewise with paragraphs. And while not all stories or writing styles lend themselves to pages that are more white than black, if you have a variety of sentence and paragraph lengths, the eye is kept refreshed and interested.

However, it's not just about how the text looks on the page. It's also about how it sounds in the ear.

To say that a sentence can be no longer than what can be easily spoken in one breath is like saying a song must be sung in one sustained note. The singer breathes while singing. So can the reader breathe while reading, even if he hasn't yet reached the end of a sentence. At least, he can if it's correctly punctuated, balanced, and coherent.*

Which brings me to the idea that action scenes must be written in bite-sized chunks. Terse sentences have their place: they provide a break from more intricate sentences, and can be extremely effective in both focusing attention and delivering punch. But consistently short sentences can be a problem. Instead of allowing me to breathe, what they lead to is a kind of mental hyperventilation: stop. start. stop. start. inhale. exhale. inhale. exhale. pant. pant. pant. I begin to feel twitchy. The eye may be skipping down the page with mad abandon, but the ear feels jolted and irritated. It begs for legato, not incessant staccato.

I posit that action--fast-paced, breathless, intense, one-crazy-thing-after-another action-- can be very effectively written in long, flowing sentences. Because action doesn't stop and start. It starts and like a boulder rolling downhill, it keeps going without a pause.

You doubt me?

Read the following passage, from Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom:

"Bail!" I shouted desperately. "Bail!" And then, with a noise like thunder, the great sail split into tatters that whipped off the yard, and the ship came slowly upright, but she was low in the water, and I was using all my strength to keep her coming around, creeping around, reversing our course so that I could put her bows into that turmoil of sea and wind, and the men were praying, making the sign of the cross, bailing water, and the remnants of the sail and the broken lines were mad things, ragged demons, and the sudden gale was howling like the furies in the rigging and I thought how futile it would be to die at sea so soon after Ragnar had saved my life.



Yes, it's a run-on sentence. A very long run-on sentence. But oh, so beautifully constructed, so musically flowing, so masterfully depicting events spinning out of control, all while immersing the reader in the primal fury of the storm. Had he broken this up into several shorter sentences--per conventional advice today--that effect of fast-moving chaos would have been subdued, if not lost altogether. It certainly would have been more jarring to the ear.

I'm not suggesting that everyone take up writing 122-word sentences (or longer; this is common for him**) when penning battle or disaster scenes, but it does seem obvious to me that connected, flowing sentences like this put the lie to the idea that short sentences are the only proper medium for writing action. Long sentences have their (deeply misunderstood) place.

*There are some readers who resist long sentences no matter how gracefully they're written. I blame modern education and to some extent modern writing, but in the end, this is very much a matter of personal taste and I respect that. Those readers can certainly avoid works that tend toward longer sentences.

**Though it's worth noting that Cornwell does tend to bracket long sentences with shorter ones, something most good writers do instinctively. (He does not, unfortunately, do the same with paragraphs--they could definitely use more white space--but no one's perfect.)