In the last two style essays, I covered relatively short, simple sentences (§1.1) and their longer counterparts (§1.2). Now I’m going to (literally) put the pieces together.
When combining sentences, my focus is on the art of variation. At the risk of turning an art into a science, I’m going look for a few recurring patterns to these variations.
Take your time with these examples. Read them slowly and focus on the constructions. This section shouldn’t be rushed. Each example is a little different. Each, I think, offers something unique. (As before, examples are taken from The Penguin Book of the Modern Short Story, ed. John Freeman (New York: Penguin Press, 2021).)
Hyphograms
To visually display the lengths of these sentences, I’m going to use something of my own invention called—perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not—a “hyphogram.” A hyphogram will simply display the length of a sentence: one hyphen equals one word. With several hyphograms lined up vertically, you can easily see the length variations of the sentences they represent. Of course, by reading these examples you’ll hear the variations, which is more important, but I hope experiencing these sentences with both senses—sight and sound—will be helpful.
Long and Short
A short sentence or series of short sentences creates a kind of cadence—a landing—after the relative complexity of longer sentences. I see this sentence combination again and again. There’s something musical about the sound. It reminds me how in jazz, a good soloist (especially a brass player, who has no choice in the matter) knows to allow space for a breath after a long line of melody; the shorter sentences are like these breaths. Here are a few examples (I’ll embolden the short sentences):
In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. ¶ Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” 18
1. ----------------------------------------------.
2. -!
3. -------?
4. ------?
So they went to the movies and then came back to his place and then I called and then she left and he called back and we argued and then I called back twice but he had gone out to get a beer (he says) and then I drove over and in the meantime he had returned from buying beer and she had also come back and she was in his room so we talked by the garage doors. But what is the truth? —Lydia Davis, “Story,” 71
1. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
2. -----?
She glanced up from under her spring hat past the pulpit, past the choir of black and brown faces to the agonized beauty of a bearded white carpenter impaled on a rood, and in this timeless image she felt comforted that suffering was inescapable, the loss of vitality inevitable, even a good thing maybe, and that she had to steel herself—yes—for someday opening her bedroom door and finding her Rudolph face down in his breakfast oatmeal. He would die before her, she knew that in her bones. —Charles Johnson, “China,” 78
1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
2. -----------.
The fact of the matter was finally that Sherman hadn’t stolen anything and hadn’t come across in any way threatening and so Douglas kept his fears and suspicions in check and counted his savings. No more electricians. No more plumbers. No more repairmen of any kind. —Percival Everett, “The Fix,” 301
1. ------------------------------------.
2. ---.
3. ---.
4. ------.
As a freelance editor (beyond my work with Submitit), I often edit so-called genre fiction, and I find myself often (really: constantly) telling these writers: style still matters! Here, King—genre writer extraordinaire—varies his sentences effectively. Note the length and complexity of the first two sentences and the relatively simplicity of the last two (in bold):
Once he was the son of the richest man on the Florida Gulf coast, then he was a lawyer, then he was a judge on the Pinellas County Circuit, then he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. There was talk, during the Reagan years, of a nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but that never happened, and a week after the idiot Clinton became president, Judge Harvey Beecher—just Judge to his many acquaintances (he has no real friends) in Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis and Venice—retired. Hell, he never liked Tallahassee, anyway. It’s cold up there. —Stephen King, “The Dune,” 406
1. --------------------------------------.
2. --------------------------------------------------.
3. ------.
4. ----.
Long Surrounded by Short
Sometimes writers embed a long sentence in several shorter sentences. The shorter sentences function rhythmically as a kind of framework or scaffolding for the longer sentence, thereby accentuating the latter. I’ll embolden the long sentence below:
We went out to the car. It was spring. The sun was shining very bright. My little sister Bonita came out and made us stand together for a picture. He leaned his elbow on the red car’s windshield, and he took his other arm and put it over my shoulder, very carefully, as though it was heavy for him to lift and he didn’t want to bring the weight down all at once. “Smile,” Bonita said, and he did. —Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible,” 46–7
1. ------.
2. ---.
3. ------.
4. --------------.
5. --------------------------------------------.
6. ------.
Here’s one from Tim O’Brien’s masterpiece (the long sentence is emboldened). Oh, that last sentence!:
He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something—just boom, then down—not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle—not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. —Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried,” 129
1. ----.
2. ------.
3. -----------------------------------------------------.
4. -.
5. -.
6. --
7. -------.
Short and Long
Writers often like to use short sentences and then hit you with some relatively long ones. In a previous post, I used the first part of the following example to illustrate fragments. Below, you can hear how Wolff uses these first few sentences to get things started, like an engine revving up before the car takes off:
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whir of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They’ve been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders, an oppression, like the heat. —Tobias Wolff, “Bullet to the Brain,” 226
1. -----.
2. -.
3. ---.
4. ----------------------.
5. --------------.
6. -------------------.
Here’s an example from the master (you’ll recognize these shorter sentences from above):
It’s Thanksgiving. Susan and I are over at Ann’s and Roger’s house for dinner. The storm has knocked out all the power down in town—it’s a clear, cold, starry night, and if you were to climb one of the mountains on snowshoes and look forty miles south toward where the town lies, instead of seeing the usual small scatterings of light—like fallen stars, stars sunken to the bottom of a lake, but still glowing—you would see nothing but darkness—a bowl of silence and darkness in balance for once with the mountains up here, rather than opposing or complementing our darkness, our peace. —Rick Bass, “The Hermit’s Story,” 227–8
1. --.
2. ------------.
3. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------. (!)
After some shorter sentences, Groff lands this story with a doozy (emboldened), a wonderful sentence filled with complexity, figurative language, and repetition:
My husband filled the door. He is a man born to fill doors. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, he was enormous above me. In his face was a thing that made me go quiet inside, made a long slow sizzle creep up my arms from the fingertips, because the thing I read in his face was the worst, it was fear, and it was vast, it was elemental, like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt. —Lauren Groff, “The Midnight Zone,” 448
1. -----.
2. --------.
3. ----.
4. ---------.
5. ---------------------------------------------------------------.
It’s hard to overstate the effectiveness of following a short sentence with a longer one. Note how complex and phrase-filled the second sentence is below. This is how you start a story:
Her immediate concern was money. It was a Friday when the men didn’t come home from the fields and, true, sometimes the men wouldn’t return until late, the headlights of the neighborhood work truck turning the corner, the men drunk and laughing from the bed of the pickup. —Manuel Muñoz, “Anyone Can Do It,” 449
1. -----.
2. -------------------------------------------.
Short Surrounded by Long
We already saw how short sentences can serve as a surrounding framework for a longer sentence. Short sentences can also serve as a break, a kind of breath, in the middle of surrounding longer sentences. In the example below, I’ll embolden the shorter sentences:
But after he had brought her inside, she insisted that she felt better and made them both a cup of tea while Jones potted the rest of the plants and carried them down cellar [sic]. She lay on the sofa and Jones sat beside her. They talked quietly with each other. Indeed, they were almost whispering, as though they were in a public place surrounded by strangers instead of in their own house with no one present but themselves. —Joy Williams, “Taking Care,” 60
1. ----------------------------------.
2. ----------.
3. ------.
4. ----------------------------.
Here’s an effective balance of long and short sentences (the latter emboldened):
The world that he worked in, however, was becoming increasingly visible in the late seventies, which is when I saw it for the first time after a friend got a few of us invitations to a fashion show Michaele Vollbracht was having on a covered pier on the Hudson River, where we sat down a few rows from the elevated runway. The place was mobbed. The lights dimmed. Rows of gaunt, grave people leaned forward with expectant faces. The music began. The models walked out in sequined clothes with a circus motif, turned, walked back again. There were lights, music, a sense of drama, and a well-dressed, attentive audience. —Andrew Holleran, “The Penthouse,” 263
1. ------------------------------------------------------------.
2. ----.
3. ---.
4. ----------.
5. ---.
6. ---------------.
7. --------------.
Flowing and Choppy
Finally, we can balance the sound of sentences (beyond their lengths) by varying their flowingness and choppiness. (See §1.2 for a discussion of “flowing” and “choppy” sentences.) Note in the example below how these two sentences balance each other. The first is choppy (asyndeton helps create this choppy effect); the second is wide open (of course Berlin’s decision to avoid the compound comma (more on compound commas here), which would have slowed down the reading, is entirely intentional):
I got out of the car, sick at heart, shaking, climbed the stairs to our house like an old person, fell onto the porch swing. ¶ I knew that it was the end of my friendship and I knew I was wrong.” —Lucia Berlin, “Silence,” 194
By adding the punctuation to my hyphograms, I can go beyond a simple comparison of sentence lengths and also compare choppiness vs. flowingness:
1. ------,---,-,----------,-----.
2. ----------------.
In the example below, Liu begins with a short, simple sentence (with no internal punctuation), and then creates more complex sentences with a series of phrases (participial and prepositional) and dependent and independent clauses. The last sentence has a wonderful cadence (asyndetic, with repetition (“towards”)), which lands the paragraph perfectly. But I think all of this works because of that simple first sentence (emboldened):
Qingming was the Chinese Festival for the Dead. When I was very young, Mom used to write a letter on Qingming to her dead parents back in China, telling them the good news about the past year of her life in America. She would read the letter out loud to me, and if I made a comment about something, she would write it down in the letter too. Then she would fold the letter into a paper crane, and release it, facing west. We would then watch, as the crane flapped its crisp wings on its long journey west, towards the Pacific, towards China, towards the graves of Mom’s family. —Ken Liu, “The Paper Menagerie,” 397–8
1. --------.
2. ----,---------------,---------------.
3. ---------,--------,---------.
4. ----------,---,--.
5. ----,------------,---,--,------.
Note how the smooth, punctuation-free sentences below (emboldened) balance the long, complex sentence in the middle:
The second photograph had been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action shot—women’s volleyball—and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. —Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried,” 127
1. ------------.
2. ----- — -- — --------,-,--------,---,-----.
3. -----.
4. -----.
Adding Sentence Style
So how do you create your own sentence style? You’ve already been doing the best thing possible: reading. (I’m talking about the examples above, but hopefully you’ve been inspired to read the stories in the Penguin book in their entirely.) As it is with playing a musical instrument, listening to “the greats” is an important part of the process—I’d argue it’s the most important part. Your writing will become more stylish, I think, unconsciously, through a kind of osmosis (style will kind of “seep into” your writing).
But consciously thinking about your sentences is important. A good first step is to consider sentence lengths. Take a few of your paragraphs, and start creating your own hyphograms (hint: highlight the sentence and then check the bottom left of your screen in MS Word—there should be a word count showing). If your sentences are of average length—probably around fifteen to twenty words each—with only minor variations, look for opportunities to create some shorter ones, or try combining some sentences to create longer ones.
Also consider the kinds of sentences (see the two previous essays on sentence structures). Have you tried some fragments? Are you exploring asyndeton and polysyndeton? Are you mixing flowing sentences (minimal punctuation) and choppy sentences (multiple phrases and clauses, with commas and dashes)? (Warning: watch out for overuse of compound sentences, something I see often.)
If the answer is no to the questions above, start taking some chances. And don’t worry if you’re not in love with the sound of your sentences right away. This takes time. There’s something almost clinical, I admit, about all of this, but I do believe that over time you will start to develop a sound that works for you. This, I hope, will become your style.
Erik Harper Klass is the founder of Submitit, the WORLD’S FIRST full-service submissions and editing company. He has published stories and essays in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Ninth Letter, South Carolina Review, Yemassee (Cola Literary Review), Blood Orange Review, Slippery Elm, Summerset Review, and many others, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. He has published a novella from Buttonhook Press.
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