Book Review: Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon

Alternate title for the book: Why I Inordinately Love Long Sentences and Why You Should Too. 

As an introduction to my first book review let me just say that most of these book reviews will be incredible subjective to my point-of-view (POV). In my other blog about my various travels, I discipline myself away from first-person for practice in writing in the objective voice and as a challenge to the prevailing POV found in so much fiction and nonfiction writing these days. But I will not restrict myself here. So, please if I review a book scathingly or negatively, in no way should you take that to mean you won’t enjoy it. My tastes in literature are admittedly stilting, stuffy and sometimes odd. This book satisfies my challenge to read contemporary books; it was published in 2013.

Sometimes paragraphs are like lawns: lots of short
pieces make a better picture than one long piece. 

Summary: This book could be 1/3 less in length and be as effective, if not more. One could say the same for this book review.  

I received Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon for my birthday from my sister-in-law, who bought it off my Amazon wish-list. I relish an opportunity to learn more about the writing craft, since I carry with every piece I write, no formal writing instruction beyond basic college English classes. So this book came as a welcome gift. 

I read the first three chapters twice in order to get the most information and instruction possible out of the material, dutifully doing the “Next Steps” writing exercises that came at the end of the chapters. But then, this happened: 

“Cumulative sentences that start with a brief base clause and then start picking up new information, much as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill, fascinate me with their ability to add information that actually makes the sentence easier to read and more satisfying because it starts answering questions as quickly as an inquisitive reader might think of them, using each modifying phrase to clarify what has gone before, and to reduce the need for subsequent explanatory sentences, flying in the face of the received idea that cutting words rather than adding them is the most effective way to improve writing, reminding us that while in some cases, less is indeed more, in many cases, more is more, and more is what our writing needs.” 

My uncensored reaction: “I hate that sentence. By the end of it, I’ve forgotten what it was really about because of all the unneeded junk you put in it. The length of it calls unnecessary attention to its droning, not what you want to say by it.”  

That offending, gaseous sentiment is like a person who wants to do everything and won’t let anyone else contribute to a project, thus stifling the creative quality of the outcome.

An apt quote came to mind:

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. -Stephen Kings

Nor do good paragraphs give up all their secrets to one sentence. 

I endured through the subsequent wordy chapters, unable to give in to my desire to throw the book across the room, because once I start a book, no matter how bad or frustrating it is, I will most definitely finish it. 

The author went on to discuss, using many many unneeded words, the subjects of: cumulative syntax, coordinate, subordinate and mixed cumulative patterns, etc, suspense in sentences, balance, and rhythm.

A portion of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

All throughout his chapters, I noticed that I hated all the example sentences that he gave for his discussions, but when he quoted other authors’ long sentences (taken out of legitimate works), they seemed fine. The thing is, I think what he overlooks is that sentences rarely (unless you’re on Pinterest or some other frame-a-sentence-and-make-a-statement social media) occur by themselves in the wild pages of fiction and rarely in domesticated nonfiction. You don’t get only one sentence to express yourself (unless, of course, you are on Twitter).

I agree with Mr. Landon in a sense, that writers shouldn’t be afraid of long sentences; the rhythm, the cadence, the propositions, atmosphere and style they can convey are of the utmost value to any fiction writer, as a distinct tool in their pallet. But so are short sentences. 

He writes that short sentences, “seem(s) to me to introduce the reader to a mind that is amazingly unreflective, almost anesthetized or so focused on one purpose that it simply refuses to think about anything else or consider alternate points of view. That mind-set is great for Rambo, but I don’t think that’s the mind we most want to introduce to our readers, unless our goal is to intimidate them.” 

And I suppose I might agree with him if my goal was to stifle and limit an author’s tools of the trade. 

Mr. Brooks shouldn’t let short sentences intimidate him. Don’t be scared. Unlock the cage that lies around the first word of a sentence and the period, and your paragraphs will become more varied, mysterious, attractive, breathable and a lot less crowded. Short sentences convey, contrary to his opinion expressed in the book, more than intimidation, they are a way of painting a literary picture. They leave out things an author wants the reader to figure out for himself, leaving room for mystery, awe and surprise. They let the verbs and adjectives breath on their own. 

It’s like telling Seurat he should use more long strokes to paint his pictures. It’d be more pretty. 

Surely Brooks has read The Stranger by Albert Camus? The whole book is written curtly, with short sentences, which is how Camus builds that frustrating emotionally vacant atmosphere that has burned itself into my memory.

So, ultimately, Building Great Sentences is full of support for the opinion of the author: he likes to read long sentences. 

The Big BUT 

Along the way he uses and explains many parts of sentence structure, how sentences are built, how they convey propositions and ideas. And this is the most useful part of the book, the grammatical instruction on the sentence level. Because if you're going to use sentences as tools, you should know a little about how they work. I’m glad to add it to my collection of writing books. 

Despite my disgust at his inflated and verbose style of writing I find myself, at times, writing long sentences that unfold like origami. And then I go back and chop them up into smaller pieces.