SENTENCED TO DEATH

by Steve Steinbock

Last week I posed a question about physical description in fiction. What is the right amount when describing a character’s appearance? A lot of people weighed in on the question. The general consensus was that physical description is good, but the best descriptions are the subtle and economical ones.

I have another question this week. When is a sentence too long?

This question came to the forefront of my thoughts when, a week or so ago, my friend and the founder of Criminal Brief James Lincoln Warren — whose own column this past week was dubbed “Life Sentence” — referred me to a story, “Space-Time for Springers,” by the great science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, a story about a cat with a high IQ and theories about physics; a cat who thinks he is destined to become human. It was a wonderful story. The author was a genius with a true sense of the music of words. He’s also a genius at making his sentences sing. I have to admit, however, that one of his sentences was so long that I it took me out of the flow of the story and forced me to go back and read it again. (How long, you may ask, is so long? Two hundred and sixty words).

Here’s the sentence. (For explanation purposes, Gummitch, Ashurbanipal, and Cleopatra are cats, while Kitty-Come-Here, Old Horsemeat, Sissy, and Baby are the cat’s names for the human characters):

Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay unconcern and with secret amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge, in the same spirit that he accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned catfood but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn’t know the difference between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more serious — because cleverly hidden — maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched out for warily — especially when you were alone — and whose retarded — even warped — development Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here’s deepest, most secret worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited intellect of Kitty-come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings — that to get from here to there they had to cross the space between — and similar fallacies; the mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone, nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status — a rather nice old god but a maddeningly slow-witted one.

That’s all one sentence. And it’s pretty brilliantly written. It is logical, and expresses character and ideas, and it has a cadence that keeps you reading it. And any author who would name a cat Ashurbanipal is all right in my book. But when I finished the sentence I had to stop reading the story. It took me out of the tale of Gummitch and into the idea of long sentences. I’m not sure that’s what Leiber would have wanted.

At the moment, I can’t locate my copy of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, but I know he suggested an exercise of writing really long sentences. Although creating long, creative, logically flowing sentences without letting them sound like run-ons is a fun and interesting challenge, I’m not sure what it does for storytelling. Good fiction writing, it seems to me, allows readers to completely immerse themselves in the story to the point that they forget that they’re actually reading words. When the writing draws attention to itself, it defeats the purpose.

Masterful writing involves having style and finesse. Varying sentence length is an important part of that. Good fiction is written with a slightly off-beat cadence; too much rhythm and you rock your reader to sleep. But really clunky sentences don’t work either. Prose shouldn’t lead to repose.

Meta-fiction is another matter. If your name is Borges, and you’re writing about the meandering mazes of existence, it might make sense to do it with really long sentences. I suppose that if your name is John Gardner or Fritz Leiber, you can write sentences of any damn length you please.

Let’s Talk About Sex

Did the above subheading get your attention? I’ll bet it got you to stop thinking about long sentences.

A couple weeks back I discussed the problem with binary thinking. Lest anyone think me a stickler for consistency, allow me to contradict myself:

There are two types of people in this world: males and females.

You might argue that there are variations on the above, and you’d probably be right. But by and large, human beings (and most of the animal kingdom, for that matter) fit neatly into those two genders.

Loosening up on my binary thinking a little, I postulate that generally (with emphasis on generally), writing by men tends (notice how carefully I’m covering my behind) to show a different set of aptitudes than writing by women. There’s clearly no black-and-white, but I’m suggesting women and men tend to have different strengths. Argue with me all you want, but remember, I’m just postulating.

Following this postulate, I suggest that one of the areas wherein men’s and women’s writing differ is in their descriptions of sex.

In general, from my reading experience, men are not as comfortable writing about sex as women are. (A notable exception is probably in gay literature). Although I’m specifically addressing fiction writing, this relative comfort/discomfort was illustrated for me on Thursday when on television news I watched three women news anchors discussing a case involving the wife of basketball coast Andy Kennedy filing a loss of consortium suit against a cab driver with whom her husband had an argument. The case claims that since the December altercation between Andy Kennedy and cab-driver Mohamed Moctar Ould Jiddou, Mrs. Kennedy hasn’t been getting any nookie from her hubbie. The three women presenting the story were having a fun time of it. Perhaps three male presenters would have had an equally fun time. But my guess is that their humor would have involved a lot more bravado than wit. Just a guess.

My Friday counterpart at Murderati, J.T. Ellison (whose weekly column, incidentally, is called Comma Sutra), has written an interesting piece on writing about sex. Also, this past week at Kill Zone, Clare Langley-Hawthorne wrote a funny column about The Top 5 Mistakes Made in Sex Scenes.

Over the next month I’ll be thinking about this because I’ve been asked to write a piece on the topic as a guest-blogger elsewhere. I’d love to know what you think.

See you in seven.