Paul Whybrow
Full Member
As writers, we are warned about run-on sentences, though these can be short as well as long. An author's use of punctuation can give their writing a distinctive style, with some eschewing conventional punctuation. Their defiance can lead to a narrative that's difficult to read, as in James Joyce's Ulysses, and some sentences become very long indeed.
Marcel Proust wrote an 847-word long sentence (in the original French text) in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. William Faulkner opens Absalom Absalom!, with a sentence that's 122 words long. He continues in this way, and it's considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century. I somehow doubt, that his style would get past the gatekeepers at a modern literary agency!
I've been aware of such legendary stylistic eccentricities for some time but came across a more modern example last night. I recently began Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, which is the first in a series of novels featuring a detective protagonist. In the novel, he's investigating three seemingly unrelated family tragedies. One of these involves the inexplicable murder of a young woman, who's acting as a clerk for her father at his solicitors' practice. The long sentence come as a stream-of-consciousness, as he stumbles into his office to find his daughter lying stabbed to death on the floor of the boardroom after a mysterious intruder attacks one solicitor, before turning his blade on her:
And Laura, who liked apricot yogurt and drank tea but not coffee and who had size six feet and who loved horses, who preferred plain chocolate to milk chocolate and has spent five years learning classical guitar but never played any more and who was still sad that their pet dog, Poppy, had been run over the previous summer, Laura who was Theo's child and his best friend, dropped the land registry form and ran into the boardroom after the man—perhaps because she had a Red Cross certificate or because she had done a self-defence course at sixth-form college, or perhaps it was from simple curiosity or instinct, it was impossible to know what she was thinking as she ran into the boardroom where the man, this complete stranger, had spun on the balls of his feet with the agility and grace of a dancer, his hand still moving in the same arc that had cut through David Holroyd's arm and which now scythed through Laura's neck, carving through her carotid artery, sending a great plume of her precious beautiful blood across the room.
It certainly works as a shocking sentence, with the solicitor's jumbled memories falling over themselves, but it's 185 words long!
I've just finished editing my third novel, and the longest sentence I found was 35 words long, which I tidied by inserting a pair of dashes.
What is your longest sentence?
(I'm not talking about marriage!)
Marcel Proust wrote an 847-word long sentence (in the original French text) in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. William Faulkner opens Absalom Absalom!, with a sentence that's 122 words long. He continues in this way, and it's considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century. I somehow doubt, that his style would get past the gatekeepers at a modern literary agency!
I've been aware of such legendary stylistic eccentricities for some time but came across a more modern example last night. I recently began Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, which is the first in a series of novels featuring a detective protagonist. In the novel, he's investigating three seemingly unrelated family tragedies. One of these involves the inexplicable murder of a young woman, who's acting as a clerk for her father at his solicitors' practice. The long sentence come as a stream-of-consciousness, as he stumbles into his office to find his daughter lying stabbed to death on the floor of the boardroom after a mysterious intruder attacks one solicitor, before turning his blade on her:
And Laura, who liked apricot yogurt and drank tea but not coffee and who had size six feet and who loved horses, who preferred plain chocolate to milk chocolate and has spent five years learning classical guitar but never played any more and who was still sad that their pet dog, Poppy, had been run over the previous summer, Laura who was Theo's child and his best friend, dropped the land registry form and ran into the boardroom after the man—perhaps because she had a Red Cross certificate or because she had done a self-defence course at sixth-form college, or perhaps it was from simple curiosity or instinct, it was impossible to know what she was thinking as she ran into the boardroom where the man, this complete stranger, had spun on the balls of his feet with the agility and grace of a dancer, his hand still moving in the same arc that had cut through David Holroyd's arm and which now scythed through Laura's neck, carving through her carotid artery, sending a great plume of her precious beautiful blood across the room.
It certainly works as a shocking sentence, with the solicitor's jumbled memories falling over themselves, but it's 185 words long!
I've just finished editing my third novel, and the longest sentence I found was 35 words long, which I tidied by inserting a pair of dashes.
What is your longest sentence?
(I'm not talking about marriage!)
