The Sentence
Week Three in rereading Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin has, naturally, brought us to Chapter 3: Sentence Length and Complex Syntax. We’re thinking hard about not so much what a sentence is and more about what it’s doing.
As Le Guin states, “in a narrative, the chief duty of a sentence is to lead to the next sentence” (20). So, we don’t have to get nit-picky about the different types of speech that need to be included or what constitutes a fragment or anything of that in-the-weeds stuff. Those things are helpful to know, but Le Guin wants to spend more time discussing the sentence’s purpose.
Perhaps it’s useful to think about writing as word engineering. Writers are constructing a story, and we complete a final (note: not necessarily polished) structure by building one coherent sentence after another after another. In my previous blog post dealing with Chapter 2, we spent time considering the importance of grammar because grammar lends itself as tools that can help you achieve coherency. Now, we need to look further at rhythm and syntax.
There’s a glossary in the back of Steering the Craft, and it’s super nice that Le Guin just tucked it in there for us because sometimes, sometimes, the technical terms writers (or English teachers) can throw around have definitions that are a little fuzzy to us. There’s no shame in needing a refresh on meaning, so I flipped back to peek at syntax.
As defined by The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, syntax is “the arrangement of words (in their appropriate forms) by which their connexion and relation in a sentence are shown” (140). There are times when you don’t have to think terribly hard about how you’re ordering words and you know precisely what you need to convey and how to convey it; there are other times when you really have to consider what one arrangement compared to another may do for the meaning you’re trying to impart. Paying attention to syntax is vital.
If writing is word engineering, “there’s one best way for the parts of a sentence to fit together, and your job as a writer is to find it” (21). It’s not always easy nor straightforward, and Le Guin draws out these major pitfalls: Misplacement (poorly executed syntax), Danglers (unclear modification), and Conjunctivitis (stringing too many sentences together using conjunctions).
Regarding Conjunctivitis, a big takeaway is considering the style you craft sentences in and their length. You want to strike a balance between simple yet not infantile as well as writing beautifully yet not with words that are distractingly ornamental. Of course, this is all dependent on the voice of your piece and what you’re going for, but, in general, this is the goal Le Guin encourages: “The optimum is variety” (24). Not all your sentences should be short staccatos. Not all your sentences should be filled with flowery speech. Pay attention—read your writing out loud to pick up on things in a multi-sensory way—to the cadence of your sentences.
The examples she gives from literature are pulled from Jane Austen (Mansfield ParkI), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse), and do you know what really sticks out to me after reading the chosen excerpts? All of them are so very different from one another. There are many iterations and variations for crafting your words, giving them rhythm, and maintaining coherency.
Le Guin also throws in some considerations about paragraphs since what do you get when you create one sentence after another after another? Eventually, you have to decide how paragraphs are going to function, technically, in your work. With this, too, there’s many ways to go about it. There are no hard and fast rules about how many sentences need to be in a complete paragraph nor how many paragraphs you should have in one chapter. You have to think about them strategically still, though, because they lend themselves structurally to what you’re piecing together and are absolutely key to the architectural integrity of your story; they show connections and separate flow of the narrative (34).
So much of writing is remembering you are engineering your own word project. You are constructing your own thing, so it will have your touch upon it. The endless decision making is yours. At the end of the day, you don’t need great style to tell a great story. You need to make sure you have the correct tools (grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.), and you need to use them. The biggest decision you have to make is whether or not you’re going to do that. From there, it’s a matter of finding time to get to work.
And, speaking of, Le Guin has another writing exercise for us from this chapter. It’s a two-parter, and here’s what it’s about:
EXERCISE TWO: SHORT AND LONG
Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each must have a subject and a verb.
Should you need an idea for how to get started, Le Guin suggests writing some kind of tense, intense action—like a thief entering a room where someone’s sleeping.
Part Two: Write a half page to a page of narrative up to 350 words, that is all one sentence.
Should you need an idea for how to get started, you should consider that a very long sentence is suited to powerful, gathering emotion and to sweeping a lot of characters together. You might try some family memory, fictional or real, such as a key moment at dinner table or at a hospital bed.
Keep in mind her guidelines for how to do one of these exercises:
You get 30 minutes to write. No more than that. She suggests setting a timer, getting focused, and getting it done. The quickness of it all is meant to keep you from over-deliberating or carrying on too long.
Don’t worry about having a finished product by the end of those 30 minutes. The point of these exercises is to practice, not to whip up your next fully-formed short story.
Give yourself time before critiquing or editing what you’ve written. Le Guin suggests not looking at your exercise piece until a day later, at the earliest. Only after there’s been some space should you look at it with revision and editing in mind.
As always, if you complete these exercises and want to share them with me, I’d be more than happy to peek at them. Best of luck with them, happy writing, and catch ya next week for Chapter 4!