How the The Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe at tor.com, The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad at Lightspeed, and Writing Very Long Sentences
How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly at tor.com
How the Crown Prince of Jupiter, or, the Full Fruit of Love’s Fully Folly is live at tor.com! I love this story a great deal—it started when I was exhausted from writing novels and gave myself permission to write anything I wanted, without plans or structures. I think that the final story retains some of that joy and playfulness (even if the ending, well—)
I’m going to avoid the urge to talk more about the story as I’d like to let it speak for itself. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.
(I’m writing this ahead of time, so if that URL doesn’t work, it’s because the story hasn’t posted yet.)
The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad in Lightspeed
The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad is coming out tomorrow at Lightspeed Magazine. (That link won’t work yet; it should go live at midnight tonight.)
It’s a very strange story, even by my standards, surrealistic science fiction in the form of a prophetic warning, based on the Jewish prophets and incredibly obscure Romantic poetry.
It’s part of an ongoing aesthetic movement I’ve been making towards writing “weird Judaica” (along with, for examples, Just Enough Rain and A True and Certain Proof of the Messianic Age, with two lemmas) but I think it stands on its own as a piece of weird science fiction.
Thoughts on Writing Long Sentences, with an example
Writing advice books are quite typically full of techniques for trimming your sentences: everything from eliminating adjectives and adverbs to cutting the first or last clauses. If you tend to write sentences that are overly long*, these are, I assume, helpful techniques. But if you, like me, tend to write short and have to add words later, these techniques and approaches are counter-productive at best.
(* Of course, there is no single “correct” length for a sentence. Everything is dependent on your voice, style, and the role the sentence is playing in the paragraph, the scene, and the story as a whole. But sometimes you will want to expand a sentence, so I thought I’d showcase some techniques for that.)
Speaking for myself, I often find that in my revision process I need to take a sentence that is too short, too spare, or too blunt and expand it—adding context, description, stylistic flourishes, and so on.
Since, at least in my reading, there is very little advice out there about how to grow and expand sentences, I thought I would provide a worked example. Now, for the purposes of the example, this is a somewhat extreme case (I’m going to take the sentence from four words to one hundred and eighty words). Further, this isn’t actually from a real story, so I won’t be able to illustrate it in the context context of a paragraph, scene, or chapter. Nonetheless I hope it gives you some ideas about how to grow large sentences, how to structure them so that they’re easy to read, and some of the reasons you might want to use one.
This is an incredibly shallow discussion of the topic, limited to one sentence, without discussing the broader use of long sentences, ambiguity, and flexibility to weave a story structure. The whole topic is (characteristically) complex and interlacing, and would probably take a whole book to describe.
Let’s start with a very simple declarative sentence.
There was a dragon.
A perfectly fine sentence for what it is, but it’s lacking any context. There are several ways to develop this (one could change the verb into an active one, to give active context, one could establish a time, etc.) In this case, though, I decide that what matters is the physical location. Where was there a dragon? So let’s add a location to our sentence.
Over the hill there was a dragon.
That’s better, but it lacks immediacy, which makes it lack punch. We can fix that with one more word.
Just over the hill there was a dragon.
Now the dragon isn’t just over the hill somewhere. It’s just over the hill, which makes it considerably more imminent and considerably more threatening. But it’s still fairly contextless. Currently this narration is omniscient, pulled back from judgement. That can be fine, of course! But in this case I want to add more immediacy, so I’m going to add more context, particularly, the context of an observer.
Just over the hill from Rachel there was a dragon.
Good! Now we know that Rachel is right here, and there’s a dragon right there, and that’s fairly tense. But Rachel is completely neutral right now. We don’t have reason to care about her; we don’t have access to her thoughts or feelings. Let’s give some context to that by framing the observation inside of her viewpoint, rather than omnisciently.
Rachel knew that just over the hill there was a dragon.
But of course this opens the question of why does she know? If the dragon is just over the hill, she probably can’t see it directly. Giving a sensory impression helps.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew that just over the hill there was a dragon.
Great! Now we have a character, we have some internality, we have some action. But Rachel is still fairly flat as a character. Let’s add some characterization, using a parenthetical phrase.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over the hill there was a dragon.
There’s a cool thing about this parenthetical where the insistence that she knows paradoxically adds doubt to her perceptions. When her observation is uncommented on, it seems neutral, and thus the reader is likely to accept it. When the narrative insists on it, though, the reader is going to be more skeptical. It’s a cool voice effect. Let’s add some more to that phrase to make it hit harder.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew, as sure as she knew anything!—that just over the hill there was a dragon.
(A brief sidebar: I chose to add “as sure as she knew anything” because it is a fairly common phrase. Often writing advice is to cut out all common phrases from your writing. Which can be good advice, particularly if you’re using them unconsciously. But in this case the sentence is already getting somewhat long, and I want to make sure that the reader has a place to rest. If every part of a long sentence is some novel juxtaposition or unique description, that quickly becomes confusing for the reader. Adding in some more expected phrases give the reader a place to rest their attention, and thus makes the sentence easier to follow.)
Right now, the hill is pretty flat in this sentence. There are several approaches to dealing with that, including just letting it be flat. Not every part of a sentence has to pop. But let’s say that I want to make the hill a bit more specific.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew, as sure as she knew anything!—that just over that hill there was a dragon.
Now, despite the fact that there is no additional description of the hill, just by changing the article, the hill now feels more specific, closer, more threatening. It would be perfectly fine to leave it there, of course, but let’s say that having done that, I would like to add some more specifity to this hill, and give Rachel some more contextual relationship to it.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children—there was a dragon.
(Sidebar: I’ve reduced the first parenthetical because I added a much longer one immediately after, and two long parentheticals in a row is wearying. Don’t worry, though! I’ve saved the cut text in a side document. It’ll be back later.)
Now we know a lot more about the situation! Rachel is near her home, or at least near where she grew up. She has a particular history with this place. Currently, though, the memory is somewhat general. Let’s expand on it, adding specific events.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill—that just over that hill there was a dragon.
Now that’s a scene! Note also that I’ve added some repetition at the end of the long parenthetical. This sort of repetition allows the reader to re-center themselves after a long divergence from the sentence. It also, paradoxically, makes the sentence read faster: we’re now fully immersed in Rachel’s train of thought, and so the repetition comes off not as redundant, but as panicked and rushed.
But this scene lacks a lot of specific detail. There’s room to flesh out Isaac and Rachel’s characters here, if we want to. Obviously we don’t have to, but let’s do it anyway.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over the hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill and when she got to the bottom his face was snow-white and his breath was quiet and she screamed for help as loud as she could and afterwards, at the hospital with his broken ankle, she had felt so guilty that she promised him her ice cream for the year and even after a whole year of ice creams she hadn't resented it, not even once—that just over that hill there was a dragon.
(Normally I would be adding this in several stages—you can probably see the steps that I’d take—but this discussion is already running long, so here’s the full backstory at once.)
This is great! We have gone from a completely inert sentence to an interwoven fabric—a character in a specific context to her, her specific perceptions and assumptions, her relationship to her childhood friend (a brother, maybe?), an insight into who she is as a person.
But, at this point, the length of the sentence is pretty wearying. We want to give the reader some more places to rest. Plus, with such a long parenthetical, we need an even longer repeated section to bring us back to the present. So let’s add in a few repetitions and common phrases, including the one we cut earlier, to speed up the sentence and give it more of a rhythm. While we’re at it, we can expand a bit on Rachel’s voice and characterization.
Rachel saw a sudden burst of steam and she knew—she knew!—that just over that hill—that specific hill, the hill where they had played as a children, where they had gone up in the winters to sled on her mother's old baking sheets, where that one day, after they had both turned eight, when Isaac had said he was still older than her and she had gotten so mad—so mad!—and pushed him and he'd rolled all the way down the hill and when she got to the bottom his face was snow-white and his breath was quiet and she screamed for help as loud as she could and afterwards, at the hospital with his broken ankle, she had felt so guilty that she promised him her ice cream for the year—the whole year!—and even after a whole year of ice creams she hadn't resented it, not even once—she saw that burst of steam and she knew, as certain as she knew anything, that just over that hill there was a dragon.
Now that’s a long sentence! It hits a lot of points, provides a lot of context, and reads fairly smoothly.
Note that we expanded this sentence almost entirely “to the left,” which is to say that that the core sentence there was a dragon comes right at the end. We could also expand the sentence “to the right,” expounding on the dragon’s appearance, Rachel’s opinions about dragons in general or this dragon in particular, or the context of Rachel looking for it. But this sentence is already one hundred and eighty words long. It’s unlikely that we could support both expansions without exhausting the reader, so I’ve chosen to showcase this approach.
Anyway, I hope that this is helpful or at least interesting! If you have any other approaches to expanding sentences, I’d love to hear them in the comments!
Forthcoming Work
Unless I have some breaking news before then, this will be my last newsletter until December, when To my daughter, in the dark of the moon will be published in Lightspeed. Despite the story being only 750 words long, it actually showcases some of the sentence-expansion techniques I talk about above!
First of all, I just want to say, I’m a big fan. I think you’re the best speculative short fiction writer out there, and I’m looking forward to reading your novels. I love that you are sharing your craft insights here as well as your career news. And thank you for this topic in particular. I tend to write short sentences and color in the details later, so, it was helpful to watch you go through the process. It was also just fun following along as you played with the parenthetical, adjusted the rhythm, and brought us all back to the dragon.
I love this level of craft analysis, and it inspired me pull a book that has been sitting lonely on my shelf: “25 Great Sentences, and How They Got That Way” by Geraldine Woods. It’s starts off with Virginia Woolf—a good place to start—and a deep analysis of a sentence from “Mrs. Dalloway”. Woods used this example to introduce—for me, anyway, you may be familiar with the term—the concept of “pocket” sentences. You begin and end the sentence with a strong declaration like—in your example—“there’s a dragon over the hill”, or—in Woolf’s example—“The war is over!” The declarations form the pocket, and then you tuck inside this pocket … well, whatever contents you like: memories of a childhood friend in your dragon-facing protagonists’ case, memories of society women grieving their casualties of war, in Mrs. Dalloway’s case.
Good stuff.
Thanks again. Looking forward to seeing what you have for us in December. Have a productive and fun November.
I love this so much. I have ordered “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction”. Thank YOU for the recommendation.
Another thought related to the “pocket”: the contents can threaten the integrity of the container. The stitches of Mrs. Dalloway’s pocket are torn by the reality that the war is by no means over for the women grieving their dead sons, however much Mrs. D wants to believe it is over. I’m not sure how much this concept applies to Le Guin’s theory. Looking forward to finding out.
Best to you.
--David