Beautiful well-crafted sentences

My favourite sentence in all of literature! I get to quote it again. YAY!

Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Click to expand...

~ Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Actually, when I feel like a putz and I need an adrenalin rush, I read the WHOLE PARAGRAPH in which that sentence is anchored:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Click to expand...

Fucking caviar!!!!!

I don't really strive for that at all. The last thing I want is for a reader to stop being engaged with my story to admire how beautiful my sentence was. I've read some (many) books like you are describing, and enjoyed them, but that's just not my voice as a writer. If a reader could remember every detail of the story I told and not remember thing about how I wrote it, I'd be thrilled.

I have The Crack-Up (edited by Edmund Wilson) which has a plethora of jotted-down descriptive sentences written by F.Scott Fitzgerald. It's dog-earred now. It also has his letters and longer notes.

I love beautiful writing to death, but not many writers are able to pull it off. Two writer who I believe do pull it off wonderfully are Ray Bradbury and Gordon MacQuarrie.

I suspect we each have our own idea of what beautiful writing is, but to me, it's writing that makes me see vividly, and makes me think. It usually uses simple language, but strings the words together in a memorable way, and takes sudden, unexpected left turns into truth.

There's one opening passage by MacQuarrie that I always keep close at hand.

There is something about rain ... A night in summer when the clouds can swell no more and shrink from threatening battlements to ragged shreds over Wisconsin, I often get up from my chair, go to the big closet and speculate over the implements of trout fishing there. Indeed, there is something about rain. Especially a warm rain, spilled over a city or a network of trout streams, It kindles a spark. It presses a button. It is an urgent message from afar to any seeker of the holy grails of angflingdom-- trout.

There is a mild August rain sluicing down to the thirsty earth. There are the castellated clouds, fresh from the western prairie, borne on the hot, dry land wind. And there is your man of the creel and the rod and the sodden waders going to the window to peer out and plumb the mysteries of the rain and wonder about tomorrow.

It must be that eons ago, when the rain splashed down over the front of a cave door, the muscle-bound troglodyte within went to the opening and stretched out his hand, palm upward. Perhaps he even stood there a bit, as perfectly sane men will sometimes do. Perhaps that old sprig of Adam, restless by his fire in the dry cave, felt the friendliness of the rain. Perhaps--no trouter will deny it--he felt the drops on his matted head and wondered about tomorrow.

The rain can beckon a man of the noisy city and draw him to the door or window. Its attraction is so much greater if falls at night, when it is a whispering mystic from afar that seems to say "Get ready, my friend. I am just brushing by to settle the dust and wash away today's dead spent wings."


To me, this is the kind of writing I wish to do.

MookyMcD said:

I don't really strive for that at all. The last thing I want is for a reader to stop being engaged with my story to admire how beautiful my sentence was. I've read some (many) books like you are describing, and enjoyed them, but that's just not my voice as a writer. If a reader could remember every detail of the story I told and not remember thing about how I wrote it, I'd be thrilled.

Click to expand...

The funny things is, I pretty much believe this, as well, with one difference. While the reader is reading, I want him to see the story, to forget there are even words on the page. I want the writing to be invisible.

After the story is read, however, I want the reader to remember not only the story, but how beautifully it was written.

It's a tough trick to master, but it is, I think, possible to make the writing invisible while the story is being read, but have it remembered as beautiful after the story is finished.

Jamesaritchie said:

While the reader is reading, I want him to see the story, to forget there are even words on the page. I want the writing to be invisible.

Click to expand...

This really sums up good writing or beautifully crafted fiction. Not words that are pretty, but words that effectively get the meaning across to readers so they feel as if they are experiencing the stories themselves.

There isn't a book in front of them. There aren't any words. There's just a dragon named Smaug.

KTC said:

My favourite sentence in all of literature! I get to quote it again. YAY!

~ Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Actually, when I feel like a putz and I need an adrenalin rush, I read the WHOLE PARAGRAPH in which that sentence is anchored:



Fucking caviar!!!!!

Click to expand...

KTC, I'll see your Fitzgerald and raise you a Hemingway.

Opening paragraph from A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road was bare and white except for the leaves.

Click to expand...

If it were a song I'd put it on repeat. The rhythm gets me every time.

I have a shelf of them. And I like this thread.

Share some from your shelf?

I like this thread too.

I guess I would say William Gibson and Robert K Lewis. What I look for in good writing a beige poetry, rather than purple prose. In such a way that the writing itself is to the point, but without flowery or ornate flourish.

My current favorite is Hilary Mantel. Here, from Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell imagines his dead wife and daughters as falcons:

These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.

Click to expand...

I always think of this from Gregory Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister:

“The children loved to run in the sheds where the new tulips were being cultivated. I remember seeing them one morning. They were playing a game of hide and chase. They were oblivious of any imps in the shadows, or hairy-chinned spiders in the rafters. The children tore up and down the long corridors made by rows of rough tables supporting great artificial fields of flower. The new plants were abundant, ranks of spears poking up through the soil. You could barely see the blond heads of the children in a blur as they raced along.

It would have made a nice painting, were someone to choose something as lowly as that to study. Another story, a story written in oils rather than one painted on porcelain. But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children’s faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.”

Click to expand...

I don't look for specific sentences or paragraphs. I just reread one of the authors I love who tell a good story. That's what I want to do. If beautiful sentences happen to result, to me that's just a byproduct. As a matter of fact, some of the sentences I've written that I've loved the most have ended up on the 'cutting room floor'.

No specific books. But, for example, when I am stuck on a beginning/first page, I might grab a recent book I read to see how they did it and convince myself I'm just over-thinking things.

Kylabelle said:

Share some from your shelf?

I like this thread too.

Click to expand...

Oh, I beg your pardon. I forgot to. Here are some of my faves.

Vonnegut. The intro to Mother Night alone is a wonderland of chills, IMO, and it's not even my favorite of his books.

We didn’t get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will.

Click to expand...

That falls after:

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Click to expand...

And before this:

If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides.

There’s another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you’re dead you’re dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

Click to expand...

I apologize for Vonnegeeking, but the man could juxtapose.

So it goes.

At her best, Ursula K. LeGuin is the Hemingway of fantasy. Simple words with deft rhythms to paint a vivid picture.

I was in a parade. I walked just behind the gossiwors and just before the king. It was raining.

Rainclouds over dark towers, rain falling in deep streets, a dark storm-beaten city of stone, through which one vein of gold winds slowly. First come the merchants, potentates, and artists of the city Erhenrang, rank after rank, magnificently clothed, advancing through the rain as comfortably as fish through the sea.

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Click to expand...

There were two books that simply took my breath away; one I found when spending hours upon hours of my weekend in half price books trying to decide what to do with my birthday money. That's when I found The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente.

The other time was when I was perusing my grandmother's shelf and found Henry Wadforth Longfellow's Evangeline. I fell in love with both of those books instantly... from the way the sentence was crafted to the way it rang with a strange sort of music that was not made of any notes.

"Beautiful, well-crafted sentences" are not effective out of context. You can drop a rare orchid into a potful of good New Orleans gumbo, and it won't work.

caw

blacbird said:

"Beautiful, well-crafted sentences" are not effective out of context. You can drop a rare orchid into a potful of good New Orleans gumbo, and it won't work.

caw

Click to expand...

I worry that one day you might become grumpy, bird...

mccardey said:

I worry that one day you might become grumpy, bird...

Click to expand...

Too late.

Let me put it another way: All your sentences should be beautiful and well-crafted. And in harmony with each other. The Vonnegut excerpts provided by Giant Baby are excellent examples.

caw

blacbird said:

Too late.

Click to expand...

Got such a crush on you

Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.

Click to expand...

--To Reign in Hell by Steven Brust

It was then that I fell in love with Steven Brust and decided I really needed to try my hand at writing in a more serious capacity.

A work of fiction that I keep near my desk is Sea Glass by Anita Shreve. Not just a wonderful story, but beautifully written.

KTC said:

Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

Click to expand...

Love that sentence too!