Consider this paragraph (which I’ve broken up into smaller paragraphs because I knew that you, dear reader, probably wouldn’t read it if it were one big chunk of text; I know I wouldn’t), from the scene in which the children have a meal at the Beavers’:

You can think how good the new-caught fish smelled while they were frying and how the hungry children longed for them to be done and how very much hungrier still they had become before Mr. Beaver said, “Now we’re nearly ready.”

And when each person had got his (or her) cup of tea, each person shoved back his (or her) stool so as to be able to lean against the wall, and gave a long sigh of contentment.

What struck me about these sentences as I listened to Jack read them was how very long they are. I had never noticed this before – and I’ve read this book at least half a dozen times.

Here is a book whose primary audience is ostensibly 8- to 12-year-olds, and yet Lewis uses 291 words in just 5 sentences. The second sentence above is 71 words long; the third is 88. These same two sentences have sentences within them (couched in parentheses), and the third also has an aside in dashes. Add in the dependent clauses and compound sentences and you’ve got not just long sentences but grammatically complex ones.

But Lewis is such a good writer that he can get away with using 70+ word sentences on a regular basis (trust me, there are a whole lot more of them scattered throughout the book) without losing his young readers.

Granted, a long sentence isn’t cool just because it’s long (well, maybe it is); the content also needs to need a long sentence to express it. I wondered if Lewis’s sentences were long of necessity, so I tried revising them into shorter sentences. Here’s the second sentence above, cut into six smaller ones:

Susan drained the potatoes. She put them all back in the empty pot to dry on the side of the range. Lucy was helping Mrs. Beaver to dish up the trout. In a very few minutes everyone was drawing up their stools. (It was all three-legged stools in the Beavers’ house except for Mrs. Beaver’s own special rocking chair beside the fire.) Then they prepared to enjoy themselves.

It felt sacrilegious to me to mutilate Lewis’s sentence, especially since my revision is awful times two. First, my version is choppy; it keeps stopping and starting, instead of flowing smoothly from one thought to the next as the original did. Second, it eliminates all sense of connection among the clauses of the original sentence; Lewis used “and” twice and “so that” once, and for good reason: he wanted to show a sense of time passing, and of the children’s anticipation of this meal.

All the piling up of clauses one upon another creates anticipation that we as readers share; the commas keep coming, keep us waiting, and waiting, whetting our appetite along with the children’s, for the time when they finally get to dig into all that good food and eat. This sentence (and the paragraph in which it’s couched) had to be written this way in order to have that effect of accumulation, the steady accretion of clause upon clause, sentence upon sentence, detail upon detail, that leads, at the end of the paragraph, to the long sigh of contentment.

I suspect Lewis didn’t really think twice about the length of his sentences when he was writing them. I suspect he didn’t think twice about them when he was revising his manuscript. I suspect he was such a master of his words he didn’t need to.

I think he probably knew his audience would follow where he led them, and lead us he does, with confidence and ease, right through some fearsomely long sentences. And he’s such a master guide that we don’t even realize how difficult the terrain is.

That, my friends, is some dang good writing.

,

That richly satisfying ending transfigured the whole rest of the book, which I’d found a bit of a slog while I was reading.

As I ruminated why I’d felt this way, I realized that only the narrator hinged all the various subplots together, which made the book feel really disconnected and scattered. (This may have been the author’s intent, but as a reader I found it off-putting and distracting.)

But in spite of the slog and the randomness of the story, I’m actually glad I was stuck with no other reading material, because it meant I got to read that beautiful ending. I just wish the first 200 pages of the book had been as compelling and powerful.

Moral: All subplots must relate to the main plot and to each other in multiple places. Otherwise the story feels disjointed, the subplots seem tacked on, and the book feels thin. The connections among plot and subplots can be symbolic or visual (recurring images, for instance), but they must be clear, and they need to appear early on and keep building throughout the novel, so it feels like a tightly woven whole.

One of them is considered a classic of 20th century American literature, the kind of book that English majors are forced to read in their American lit courses. (I managed to skip that class, took Major Southern Writers instead and still didn’t have to read this book, lucky me—until I chose to, last week. Ugh.)

I actually liked the story and the writing was beautiful, sometimes stunningly so, but I got tired of the main character wandering around, describing her surroundings, and ruminating. I wanted something to happen.

To be fair, some of the ruminations worked well, created a shorthand in the story that the author could then use to describe or encompass the present action, which was very effective. But most of the ruminations and descriptions drew attention to themselves and away from the story.

It could have been a powerful and haunting book. As it was, it grew wearing and tedious. I just wanted the author to get on with the story. When she did, it was good. When she didn’t, I actually skipped whole paragraphs (which is blasphemous, a sacrilege)—I was that bored.

Moral: I must be ruthless with my own writing. Beautiful prose will only carry a reader so far, and she will only tolerate it for so long if it’s digressing from the story. Cut. Cut. Cut.