The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner

Author:John Gardner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Authorship, Writing Skills, Reference, Composition & Creative Writing
ISBN: 9780679734031
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1986-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

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In the so-called periodic sentence, highly recommended by high-school English teachers, the most interesting or important thing in the sentence is pushed into the final slot, as in "Down the river, rolling and bellowing, came Mabel's cow." The natural superiority of the periodic sentence can be exaggerated, but it is a fact that an anticlimactic ending can ruin an otherwise perfectly good sentence, and almost invariably—except in comic writing—the "that" or "which" clause leads to anticlimax. (In New Yorker "super-realist" fiction, this stylistic flatness may be a virtue.)

Often the search for variety leads to another problem, the overloading of sentences and the loss of focus. Look at these sentences: "The dark waters of the Persian Gulf were very peaceful as the pinkish glow of pre-dawn light turned the horizon's gray clouds to shades of orchid and lavender. The clear, cool air breezed across the decks of the mammoth white ship as it moved almost silently through the water." In a somewhat frantic attempt to get gusto, the writer packs his sentence like a Japanese commuter train. Perhaps a great writer might get away with this (in prose fiction Dylan Thomas and Lawrence Durrell have tried it), but it seems not too likely. As a rule, if a sentence has three syntatic slots, as in

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