One joy
of writing this blog is the way readers share their favorite examples of
effective and interesting prose. Mike
Janssen sends along a passage from Cormac McCarthy, with attention to the
creative power of the long sentence.
Hi
Roy,
I
just read your writing tip about long sentences, in which you quoted Annie Proulx. Here's one I liked from Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," which I read recently. Thought you might
like it, too:
They
rode the horses at a gallop and they rode them at a trot and the horses were
hot and lathered and squatted and stamped in the road and the campesinos afoot
in the road with baskets of gardenstuff or pails covered with cheesecloth would
press to the edge of the road or climb through the roadside brush and cactus to
watch wide eyed the young horsemen on their horses passing and the horses
mouthing froth and champing and the riders calling to one another in their
alien tongue and passing in a muted fury that seemed scarcely to be contained
in the space allotted them and yet leaving all unchanged where they had been:
dust, sunlight, a singing bird.
Not
even a comma for 115 words, then a colon and a list of three things (another
device you've written about [see Tool 20]). I just love the way the sentence charges on and
then culminates in those three elements, just as the scene it describes does.
Mike
Janssen
Thank
you, Mike. I do admire this
sentence. It reflects a trend in
contemporary fiction to make the language poetic, so poetic that some readers
get bogged down in it, even as others savor every word. Two things interest me in particular: the way this galloping sentence begins with
an easy subject-verb-object structure: "They rode the horses ..."; and then the way the author reins the
sentence to a stop with punctuation: a colon, two commas, and a period. Whoa, Nellie!
I
encourage readers to send along some passages you admire. Please try to describe
briefly why you admire them. I'll be
happy to consider them for inclusion in the blog. -- RPC
