Great Sentences, by Brooks Landon
This is part of a series of weekly reviews of writing craft books written in 2019, later revised and collected in Kristen’s book All the Words: A Year of Reading About Writing. Read the first chapter or buy the book in our Shop.
It is week forty-nine of 2019. How’s the writing going? Here at the garret, the atmosphere is peaceful, contemplative. The next few weeks are busy ones, with gatherings to host and cookies to bake and a road trip to plan, but I’ve set aside a few hours this morning to savor writing this last (!) newsletter of the year. If you are able to carve out your own writing sessions over these next few weeks, treat them with extra reverence. Relax into them and enjoy them. Give yourself permission to play with words rather than count them up. Go slowly.
If you want to try out some aimless writing experiments, this week’s book, Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read by Brooks Landon, is a good one to dip into. Landon’s goal is to teach you how to add detail and richness to your sentences by starting with a simple base clause and attaching words, phrases, and clauses.
There are three methods for adding material:
Connective: Starting with a base clause or kernel (in bold in the examples) and then adding information like adding boxcars to an engine. For example: “The girl raised the flag and was proud to see it waving once again over the town square.”
Subordinative: Weaving new information into the base clause through relative clauses or phrases. For example: “The girl, who had just realized she was the only survivor, raised the flag.” Or: “The girl raised the flag that had long been the symbol of the resistance.”
Adjectival: Adding words or phrases that modify our understanding of the base clause. For example: “The young girl raised the flag.” Or: “The girl raised the flag, a triumphant grin on her face, the flag’s green striped fabric tattered and torn by bullets, her bravery an inspiration to her compatriots.”
Landon focuses primarily on the last strategy, showing us a variety of ways to create “free modifiers” – phrases, often set off by commas, that can be easily moved around in a sentence without disrupting the essential meaning. If you read my review of Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, you’ll recognize the phrase. There is some overlap between these two books, and they make good companions for one another. Landon supplies the grammatical explanations that Tufte skips over, and Tufte’s gorgeous banquet of sentence examples will inspire you to experiment with your own in ways that Landon’s samples might not.
Landon makes the point that sentences have two different axes: they move forward in time, building meaning as they go, but they also have a vertical axis, which pauses the forward momentum of the sentence to add detail about a word or clause that we have just read or are about to read. Here’s an example that Landon breaks down into different levels, starting from the base clause:
(1) Cumulative sentences can take any number of forms,
(2) detailing both frozen or static scenes and moving processes,
(2) their insistent rhythm always asking for another modifying phrase,
(3) allowing us to achieve ever-greater degrees of specificity and precision,
(4) a process of focusing the sentence in much the same way a movie camera can focus and refocus on a scene,
(5) zooming in for a close-up to reveal almost microscopic detail,
(5) panning back to offer a wide-angle panorama,
(5) offering new angles or perspectives from which to examine a scene or consider an idea.
And here’s a nice example from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
(1) The great wall of vegetation,
(2) an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons,
(3) motionless in the moonlight,
(1) was like a rioting invasion of soundless life,
(2) a rolling wave of plants piled up,
(3) crested,
(3) ready to topple over the creek,
(3) [ready] to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.
After walking us through various methods for creating cumulative sentences, Landon warns us about a few ways that long sentences can come to grief (hello, dangling modifiers) before turning his attention to advanced effects a writer can achieve using his methods. There are useful notes here about rhythm and about parallel structure and balance, but my favorite chapter in this section is about the “periodic sentence,” which is a sentence that holds its meaning until the end.
Here’s an example from The Great Gatsby: “Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.”
Landon renames this kind of sentence “suspensive,” which I like because it captures both form and function. Henry James is famous for writing labyrinthine periodical sentences that, despite their beauty, tax the reader’s powers of memory. But Landon shows us how to harness the drama of the suspensive sentence without drowning the reader in detail.
Throughout the book, Landon emphasizes that a writer doesn’t need to remember or even know the grammatical terms that describe these sentences as long as they can embed the structures themselves in their brain, voice, and fingers. Think of this book as offering a toolbox full of strategies for adding (vertical) depth and (horizontal) length to your sentences. Once these tools become part of your writing brain, you will automatically reach for their rhythms to create detail and meaning, enriching your sentences. As Landon puts it, Building Great Sentences is not a “textbook that sets forth yet another set of guidelines or rules for good writing.” Instead, “the chapters of this book are investigations, interrogations, explorations, and celebrations of the sentence and of prose style.”
That has also been the goal of my newsletter this year – to explore what a great many (forty-two!) authors have to say about how to write, how to tell stories, how to use words. I have loved the reading, but I have surprised myself by loving the writing even more. I’m grateful to all of you who have followed along this year, and I hope these pieces have helped to light your way. I’m going to take the next few weeks off, but I’ll be back in your inbox at the end of week one of 2020 with a longer reflection on this year’s reading and some notes about what’s coming next.
I’ll leave you with these wonderful words from Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I discussed way back in week two:
“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
This newsletter has been my tea ceremony; thanks for joining me at the table.
Here’s to reading the books, y’all, and also to writing them,
Kristen
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