It is a pleasure for a learning writer to recognize some of the skills practiced to perfection within the pages of a novel. One of my own writing flaws, that of the run-on sentence, has been played with and twisted into an art form by Cormac McCarthy by forcing it to serve a purpose in pacing, and I’ve just crowned Gabrial Garcia Marquez as the record holder of the longest sentence I believe I’ve ever read. It starts on page 348 and ends on page 350, two full pages of a single sentence.
How does he manage this? Well, I have seen it done before, but it is relating the thoughts of Fernanda as she bitches and complains about how her life within the Buendia family is well below that which she expected as righfully her due. Yes, a non-stop diatribe listing her undeserved troubles. Obviously, just the length of the sentence confirms the tedium of Fernanda’s complaining "voice."
Action can be built slowly and steadily through the use of a long sentence. It can be immediate and urgent through the use of short staccato bursts of very short. minimal but action worded sentences. Structure is a tool.
And so I smugly sit back and realize that I can once again run-off in a long string of words unpunctuated by the jerking effect of periods but allowed instead to weave and twist through story, allowing for a breath, to build once more to apex of a matter that is just as important in the tone and speed presented as the information given. BUT, it need be for a purpose, matched and suited to the action.
I feel I want to write, to practice this freely, as a child oblivious to all but the immediate moment. Free to leave the bike out in the driveway, irresponsible until as Mother Editor I see the bike and bring it safely home.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Modern prose tends to short clips. Hemmingway was out of control that way, never really liked him or that style. But I can’t go Marcel Proust either, endlessly long-flowing sentences. I’m more a Henry James guy, or Jane Austen, lingering elegance finely shaped.
Yes, I think that more than being an author’s style of writing, a writer should consider the sentence structure as to pace, dramatic effect, voice, etc. and how it affects the movement of the story.