Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal III(a)

It was the best of weekends. It was the worst of weekends.

You see, I have a vice. A peccadillo, a weakness, if you will. I'm a slut for sentence fragments. You may have noticed if you've skimmed my work elsewhere around Vocal. But since we're working for more control through practice in this little endeavour of ours... here I am.

Beating my skull in against the high wall of the Bastard Tongue.

Exercise Three: Short and Long

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.

Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin

And so, off I go.

A gold star for the person who can spot all the problems.

When I sat down to write this post, I took another look at the exercise, and realised I'd been distracted by the word count. Remembering from last week that I undertake most of my grammar by ear, it occurred to me to double-check. Taking a quick stroll through the dusty copy of the Oxford A-Z of Grammar and Punctuation by John Seely that is always eyeballing me from the lineup on my desk, but never opened, I found the introduction on parts of a sentence most enlightening. And not a little embarrassing.

Straight out of the gate we're in trouble, aren't we.

Though not to her own ears. Spot the verb. Oh wait! -Sigh- Bones rattling sabre-like. I was so proud of that one! Only to realise I've truncated the sentence so much I've left rattling to dangle there, uselessly, just out of reach of life as a verb. Some of the sentences are too long anyway. And I'm over the word count. My god! Why call yourself a writer at all!

What followed next was something like having my brain surgically reorganised with a corkscrew.

And yet, it was the most fun I've had in weeks. Feel free to chip in if you know what's wrong with me, or if you have this affliction too:

Anyway, here's what came of it all:

While I was carving away at the thing sentence by sentence, I worried I was going to cut its heart out. Instead, what happened was a distillation. The strangeness I intended not only stayed present, but grew stronger. It wasn't diluted by the rigidity of the form imposed by the exercise, but reinforced by the complementary strangeness of this rhythm: the staccato beats of the shortened sentences. The workarounds I needed to find to preserve the meaning I wanted while still making each one a full sentence. The task didn't just make me cut words. It made me find new ones.

Look, it's still too long and I think if you count all the sentences one is eight words. And there's maybe a dependent clause hiding in there somewhere I think. But we can all agree it's way cooler right?!

Since my brain got itself turned into string cheese this time, I'm calling it early and saying goodbye here. Maybe I'll see you at the next one.

xx