James Baldwin and the Long Sentence

You’re not meant to be forever the writer you are today.

Prose Style

In today’s article, I talk about how concision and clarity applies to long sentences.

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…and now…

James Baldwin and the Long Sentence

I want to share a paragraph from a short story I’m working on.

Theodore Beasley bought a gun. No, Elizabeth didn’t want to hold it. No, it wouldn’t solve her inability to sleep at night and the lingering certainty that safety was an illusion. Instead, it meant death had a place in their home, in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand, beside the bed they shared and where she lay awake at night, staring into the ceiling and thinking not of this ceiling which was smooth and still but of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain as dragons, knights, and princesses danced across her midnight canvas. Sometimes she was the princess, sometimes the knight, but often the dragon, and she wished she could be the dragon now, fierce, eternal, and unafraid.

As I work to expand my style and the repertoire of techniques available to me, I’ve followed the advice of Brooks Landon and turned to the long sentence as a mechanic for the expression of style, and in this context, I want to apply a different piece of advice.

You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

James Baldwin (from a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

In applying Baldwin to the long sentence, let me first say that sentence length isn’t the point, other than as a matter of symphonic flow vs. muscularity and the variety needed for lectic interest.¹ Sentences are arbitrary and fraudulent in their length.² William Faulkner’s sentences are longer than they need to be because he chooses not to end them with the hard stop they’d usually demand and deserve. Baldwin’s interview has a touch of fraud with sentences appearing shorter because the hard stop comes early: It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too.

A sentence in the hand of a master like Faulkner or Baldwin doesn’t exist for the sake of its punctuation. It’s a unit of communication, and its rules are those of the master.

A student like me seeks to learn, emulate, and innovate, which brings me back to my long sentence. Here’s what it looked like in its first pass with the areas I changed in bold:

No, it wouldn’t solve her inability to sleep at night and the lingering certainty that safety was an illusion, it meant death had a place in their home, in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand, beside the bed they shared and where she lay awake at night, staring into the ceiling and thinking not of this ceiling which was smooth and non-transmutational but of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive at night in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing outside her window with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain as dragons, knights, and princesses danced across her midnight canvas.

In this version, I’d fraudulently extended the sentence with a comma slice, and as I had no artistic reason to do so, I corrected the mistake and broke it into two, proper sentences, which isn’t the point of this article.

Instead, I’m thinking of the unnecessary phrases I removed:

and the popcorn ceiling that came alive at night in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing outside her window with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain

Oh, I could certainly cut much more, but in doing so, I’d lose information. These cuts removed words whose meaning is still conveyed in their absence. Once you’ve applied the techniques to make long sentences work (see Putting Zing in Your Long Action), the concerns of the long and short sentence are the same. Length can be clear and concise.

I pondered that last line for several minutes—and I’ve rewritten this one—in my attempts to be clear and concise about what role clarity and concision truly play, and this where I stand. Clear and concise should be viewed as a rule, and like all rules, it’s not absolute. This article isn’t about when the rule should be broken, but how long sentences follow it.

Let me be rude.

I’ve stated that literary prose and balanced prose can both be “wonderful or woeful” and that genre fiction has its focus on storytelling, so faults in prose can be forgiven. Remember that. This means that popular storytellers can be poor writers, and many of our beliefs about what is desirable in fiction is based on their example. Readers think they don’t want long sentences because their favorite writers can’t write one.

When influencers rage, it’s not just about long sentences but long and complicated sentences, and here I want to separate the complex from the complicated with the former being a feature and the latter being a bug. (Usually a bug. I’m not talking to the complicated-is-punk crowd, except to say that you better be spectacular before you get complicated.)

I want to argue that longer sentences grow by removing unnecessary language. If I take my sentence and break it up, more verbiage is created, not less:

Instead, it meant death had a place in their home. That place was in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand. It was right there, beside the bed they shared. It lay hidden a few feet from where she lay awake at night. In her insomnia, she stared into the ceiling and thought not of this ceiling which was smooth and still but of her childhood bedroom and its popcorn ceiling. At night, it would come alive in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain. In those shadows she saw dragons, knights, and princesses dance across her midnight canvas.

Sometimes, the repetition of information is wanted and intentional, but of these two options, I find the longer sentence clearer and more concise.

But whose to judge what’s concise and what’s not? Well, you are, which means it’s a matter of taste, but—and this is a huge, silicon-filled but—we need to consider the curse of knowledge. Everyone who reads your story and fails to praise its brilliance will sound mindless, and that’s not just a matter of your ego getting in the way (although it does). When we know a thing, it’s very hard for us to imagine other people not knowing it too, and no one knows our story better than we do.

(In first writing that paragraph, I mistakenly called the phenomenon “the paradox of prior knowledge,” and then decided I should consult some references. I’d confused my phenomenons! The paradox of prior knowledge is when what you already know makes you astutely aware of how much you don’t know in that subject. For example, I had no idea there was so much I didn’t know about prose style and thought I’d run out of material after a few essays. Now, I’m astutely aware that this could be a never-ending pursuit.)

The curse of knowledge is best exemplified in children, because as adults we typically gain more self-awareness which helps us overcome the cognitive bias to some degree. Studies of children will have them approach a box that clearly identifies its contents as A, but when opened, contains B. They’re surprised, but when told that another little girl is going to come into the room and open the box, if asked, what will that girl think is in the box? the child will answer B. The box contains B, therefore they’ll expect B. When the child is asked what they thought was in the box before they opened it, they answer B. They can’t understand a state prior to having attained this new knowledge.³

When I was a teacher, I’d admonish my students, but I wish I’d understood this concept so I could have taught it to them. Instead, I’d say, “You’re impatient with your classmates for not understanding something that you’ve understood for two minutes. I’ve understood it for twenty years. Should I have been impatient with you?”

We know our story and understand the reasons for our choices. Your beta readers and editors don’t have that understanding. When they tell you something is too complicated, they’re not being stupid. They’re being a reader.

Clarity for one writer is not clarity for another. McCarthy is a master of erudite words, but word choice isn’t just about knowing a word but using it well within the flow of your writing.

When I started writing about my long sentence here, it still read: this ceiling which was smooth and non-transmutational…. And I liked it. That word makes me feel like a cross between Cormac McCarthy and Bill Watterson (long live Calvin and Hobbes). However, my eyes kept tripping over the word, and eventually, I went for the alliteration instead.

(In the excerpt above, I love its rhythm, but for me, it didn’t work within the rhythmic context of my full sentence.)

I’ve tripped over my own words before and didn’t change it. In Ship and Sighting, I have the phrase Lucy’s remains remained, an example of a polyptoton, and my eyes trip over it every time because I’m expecting it to say Lucy remained—which it did until I chose to employ the technique. Should I have removed the word? Should I have kept this one? Ultimately, there isn’t a right or wrong answer but only the answers of those whose taste has some say in what you write.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin, quoted in The Writer’s Chapbook by George Plimpton

To quote the famous words of every pastor:

In conclusion…

I implore you in every instance, not just in word choice and concision, not to be afraid to develop as a writer.

I think it’s important that a writer change, that there be a natural development, and not a decision.

Raymond Carver — a 1987 interview with Claude Grimal

Young writers are eager to define themselves, to make a decision about who they are. Years ago, I decided I was like Hemingway, and that mostly meant short sentences. Out of playfulness, I’d make a rule of including one long sentence, but I didn’t understand how long sentences work and thought my readers dullards when they’d complain.

Change. Develop. Learn.

You’re not meant to be forever the writer you are today.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Where to find all my articles on style, theory, and analysis:

Prose Style, Literary Theory, and Analysis

1. lectic: (adj.) having to do with reading

2. I call sentence length fraudulent when it extends or shortens its length only by ignoring standard punctuation rules, but this is a case where I happily aid and abet the fraud, if the writer feels there’s artistic / communicative merit behind it.

3. Apologies to whoever introduced me to “the curse of knowledge,” but I can’t find whoever or whatever that was to reference it. In fact, I can’t even imagine a time when I didn’t know this already, so never mind. (Sarcasm detected. Warning, sarcasm detected.)