The beauty of long sentences in your memoir

 

Last week we began looking at your memoir’s sentences: The way you write them can enhance your readers’ (a) enjoyment and (b) their understanding of your memoir’s message.

Specifically, we considered writing short sentences and sentence fragments for impact and punch. (Click on “Sentences are a little like purses” if you missed it.)

While those can be effective, you’ll want to vary your sentence lengths—combine short with long sentences—throughout your piece.  

Here Gregory Ciotti comments on both short and long sentences: “The stamina of a long sentence can build a tense, winding climb to the climax; like a roller coaster slowly ascending to the summit. In contrast, the economical short sentence is best suited to drive home a revelation.

“In every instance, a short sentence brings momentum to a halt; the interruption must be used to make a statement with teeth. Repetition weakens impact, so you’ll only have a handful of opportunities in each piece. Make them count.” (Gregory Ciotti; emphasis mine)

“There’ll always be a place for the short sentence,” Pico Iyer says, praising “compressed wisdom” and “elegant conciseness,” but he also says, “The long sentence opens up the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut.”

Iyer describes a well-crafted long sentence as “ . . . the collection of clauses . . . many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions. . . .”

“I cherish [famous writer] Thomas Pynchon’s prose . . . not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared contemplate. . . . 

“The promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around. . . .

“When I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ swells with clause after biblical clause . . . I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world.” (Pico Iyer, “The WritingLife: The point of the long and winding sentence,” Special to the Los Angeles Times; emphasis mine)

Next week, we’ll look at long sentences again. Between now and then, look over your rough drafts and experiment with writing both short and long sentences. (Click here to review our recent post about writing short sentences.)

Set your writing aside for a few days and then read it aloud.

Be alert to how your sentences sound.

How do the strings of words feel to your lips and in your mouth? And in your ears and your brain? Your heart?

Reading aloud will help you discern when a sentence is clunky and awkward.

Rework those sentences so your readers will get your point, your meaning, your significance.