Growing sentences
I linked to this in Off-Topic, but it’s worthy of some attention on the front page as well. Jason Kottke reposted a set of instructions by James Tanner for turning any normal sentence into a David Foster Wallace super-sentence.
Since screenwriting is an art of brevity, it’s a nice change of pace to see just how overstuffed a sentence one can write.
Following Tanner’s instruction, we start with a simple 10-word sentence:
John wanted to play ball, but he sat on the couch.
1. Use them in a compound sentence:
John said he wanted to play ball, but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames.
2. Add rhythm with a dependent clause:
When asked by his sister, John said he wanted to play ball, but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames.
3. Elaborate using a complete sentence as interrupting modifier:
When asked by his sister, John said he wanted to play ball — he told her where to find his mitt — but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames.
4. Append an absolute construction or two:
When asked by his sister, John said he wanted to play ball — he told her where to find his mitt — but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames, his left foot resting on the ottoman, toes flexing at the most perilous virtual encounters.
5. Paralell-o-rize your structure (turn one noun into two):
When asked by his sister, John said he wanted to play ball — he told her where to find his mitt and shoes — but instead he sat on the couch and played videogames, his left foot resting on the ottoman, calf and toes flexing at the most perilous virtual encounters.
6. Adjectival phrases: lots of them. (Note: apprx. 50% will include the word ‘little’):
When asked by his little sister, a ginger-haired cherub with little butterflies on her jean shorts, John said he wanted to play some ball — he told her where to find his well-oiled mitt and second-best athletic shoes — but instead he sat on the faded orange couch and played videogames, his left foot resting on the ottoman, calf and hairy toes flexing at the most thrilling and/or perilous virtual encounters.
7. Throw in an adverb or two (never more than one third the number of adjectives
When asked by his little sister, a ginger-haired cherub with little butterflies on her jean shorts, John said he wanted to play some ball — he told her where to find his well-oiled mitt and, specifically, his second-best athletic shoes — but instead he sat on the faded orange couch and played videogames, his left foot resting on the ottoman, calf and hairy toes flexing at the most thrillingly perilous and/or maddeningly difficult virtual encounters.
8. Elaboration — mostly unnecessary. Here you’ll turn nouns phrases into longer noun phrases; verbs phrases into longer verb phrases. This is largely a matter of synonyms and prepositions. Don’t be afraid to be vague! Ideally, these elaborations will contribute to voice — for example, ‘had a hand in’ is longer than ‘helped’, but still kinda voice-y — but that’s just gravy. The goal here is word count.
When asked by his little sister Bella, a ginger-haired suburban cherub with two make-believe horses and little yellow butterflies on her jean shorts, John definitely said he wanted to play some ball — he told her where to find his well-oiled mitt and, specifically, his second-best athletic shoes — yet seemed unaware that the white New Mexico sun was crossing the sky and sinking below the foothills as he sat on the faded orange velvet couch and played videogames, his left foot resting on a month-old magazine which was in turn resting on the ottoman, his calf and hairy toes flexing at the most thrillingly perilous and/or maddeningly difficult showdowns with level bosses and their virtual henchmen.
9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’? Ahem:
When asked by his little sister Bella, a ginger-haired suburban cherub with two make-believe Lipizzaners and little yellow lepidopterae on her Old Navy jean shorts, John definitely said he wanted to play some ball — he told her where to find his well-oiled Nokona mitt and, specifically, his second-best athletic shoes (the Nikes) — yet seemed unaware that Albuquerque’s ghost-white sun was charting its ecliptic path across the sky and sinking below the foothills as he sat on the faded orange velvet couch and played Fallout 3, his left heel resting on the face of Kristen Stewart, who graced the cover of a month-old Entertainment Weekly which was in turn resting on Pottery Barn’s cheapest ottoman, John’s calf and hairy toes flexing at the most thrillingly perilous and/or maddeningly difficult showdowns with the Super Mutants of Vault 87 in pursuit of the Geck, a device he wasn’t sure he even wanted.
Thus, 10 words become 151. And absurd, but that’s the fun.
Some sample sentences to try on your own.
Mary’s car would not start. Her sister was not surprised.
Tom liked cheese. Eating too cheese much hurt his stomach.
The lawn was brown. Tom didn’t know how to fix it.
If you decide to try it for yourself, post the final product, or leave a link in the comments if you’re showing your work.
Articles
March 19th, 2009 at 10:52 am
I couldn’t resist taking this challenge. I used my link to Kottke as my starting point.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:57 am
For those unfamiliar with Wallace’s work – the nonfiction is better. Read “Consider The Lobster and other Essays.” His essays were as imaginative as his fiction, but more compelling (and more grounded, naturally). And shorter.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:16 am
This reminds me of the annual Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, namely writing the worst fake opening sentence of the worst fake novel imaginable.
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
March 19th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Well done, John. My favorite part was the appearance of “a ginger-haired cherub with little butterflies on her jean shorts” and I was sad to see it dissected in later steps.
You definitely raised the bar. I can’t wait to post my final version.
March 19th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Due to the fact that I feel like this trivial lexicographic pursuit is a game of prolixity, it was with a great sense of eagerness and artificiality that I must use this format to tell you of a time that I once did just this before, in which I pointlessly expanded an absolutely meaningless drivel-like sentence into a weapon of verbosity and confusion–although I did so without ever using the finely laid-out instructions that you so kindly decided to use for yourself in the above post–simply for the sole reason that I had the urge, for the collective sakes of my multitude of geeky and awkward online friends–at least the few literate ones–and those people who choose to read my Live Journal profile, with much pretentiousness, I must graciously admit, to prove the immense length of my intelligence and my abilities lying deep within the realm of delicate word play, impeccable grammar, and sound sentence structure, to what came to be a most satisfyingly tasteful result, much like that which one, and by one I mean a normal, and by normal I mean a decent, and by decent I mean an honest and well-to-do, human being would have on a hot and sticky, yet slightly windy from the northwestern direction, summer’s day, when one proceeds to don their Billabong bathing suit and Daffy Duck water wings for a delightfully delicious dip in the deep end of an expensive in-ground swimming pool, or when a grand chess master discovers a brand new move for the first time, though such a thing may not be certain, or like the upcoming instance in which I most precisely state to, and then inquire of, you Mr. August: “it’s your turn now, so can you beat the above sentence I just created of exactly 305 words?”
March 19th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Shakespeare asked me for an extra skewer, so he wouldn’t be spinning in his grave.
March 19th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Brevity is the soul of wit
March 19th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Who was make-believing the horses..? Were they actually pictured, or just objects of the narrator’s mind? I have no idea why this has stuck with me. On the bright-side, I’ve memorized 151 words of pure absurdity!
March 19th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Mary’s rust-bucket of a car – the old four-seated Chevy Nova of a bygone generation, manufactured in a forgotten plant somewhere on the outskirts of Detroit, had sat in the long ago paved driveway leaking Valvoline mixture W-62 oil and fumes for too many revolutions of the moon across the face of the Earth – would not start, the little spark plugs within the great beast firing madly into the three cylinder engine with the stressed frustration of age, and yet, when accusingly confronted by this statement of truth, her glammed up, overweight step-sister, strands of spiked pink hair flying in all directions, her breasts undulating freely without a bra beneath her charcoal grey thrift store sweater with small holes forming at the right shoulder was not surprised, another spoonful of crudely formed sugar cakes idly brought to her cracked lips and waiting gums by her disproportionately spindly digits while a silent chuckle sent ripples over her protruding mounds of cellulite above her designer jeans she felt justified in wearing after finding out the CEO of the company had given to charities at the peak of respectability, despite their upper-middle class price and the undeniable fact they were hand stitched by the tiniest of hands in a country lost to everyone save the few who bothered to study such things in the recesses of academia.
You can see my work at: http://monsterbeard.tumblr.com/post/88029141/wallace
March 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Eschew obfuscation.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Honor demands that I now do the obvious thing, and say that DFW did not, to my ear, choose this style in order to produce excessively mannered prose, but rather, so that he could more precisely convey his meaning. E.g.:
What had happened was that B.U.’s best defensive tackle — a 180-kilo future pro who had no teeth and liked to color — practicing Special Teams punt-rushes, not only blocked B.U.’s varsity punter’s kick but committed a serious mental error and kept coming and crashed into the little padless guy while the punter’s cleated foot was still up over his head, falling on him in a beefy heap and snapping everything from femur to tarsus in the punter’s leg with a dreadful high-caliber snap. Two Pep majorettes and a waterboy fainted from the sound of the punter’s screams alone. The blocked punt’s ball caromed hard off the defensive tackle’s helmet and bounced crazily and rolled untended all the way back to the shadow of the south tunnel, where Orin had turned to watch the punter writhe and the lineman rise with a finger in his mouth and guilty expression. The Defensive Line Coach disconnected his headset and dashed out and began blowing his whistle at the lineman at extremely close range, over and over, as the huge tackle started to cry and hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Sorry, due to too much twittering, I doubt I’m able to write more than 140 characters at once anymore.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Funny, the other day in law class, we were being told about how a lawyer managed to right a sentence that was over a thousand words long. I’m not quite sure how someone can do that by accident…
It’s a bit sad, though, my reaction was to try to see how long a sentence I could manage. At the moment I’m at 500 words and still going (I had to get back to work so I postponed the exercise), but it was mostly just tacking on more stuff with “…and then…and then…” This way seems cooler. :) Not that I plan to do that when I actually become a lawyer (or, hopefully, a writer).
March 20th, 2009 at 8:37 am
-snowinhell- did you mean “right a sentence that was over a thousand words wrong” or “write a sentence that was over a thousand words long?”
March 21st, 2009 at 6:48 am
Mary’s Nissan rumbled in response to the key she shoved in the beast’s below-steering eye but it wasn’t prepared to be awakened from its slumber, lazing as it was in the early spring sun, so she tried cursing – which didn’t surprise Susan, her older sister by a minute and sixteen seconds because her ouija board, Norma the turbaned lady at the Midtown Circus and Mary’s own history, with cars and men, had already told her that in the face of an uncooperative man or motor, Mary’s response was always swearing.
March 21st, 2009 at 7:06 am
Since we’re analyzing sentences:
Tom liked cheese. Eating too cheese much hurt his stomach.
Could go: Tom liked cheese. Eating too much cheese hurt his stomach.
Or: Tom liked cheese. Eating cheese too much hurt his stomach.
But the way it is now doesn’t make any sense.
I do like cheese, by the way.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:01 am
Two cheese, please.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:26 pm
-Fred- “Write a sentence that was over a thousand words long.” Sorry.
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:54 am
LOL dear lord, I couldn’t even read #7 or later! Hilarious, though.
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I awoke, my still-tired eyelids creeping open to take in the ethereal beauty and otherworldly disorienting brightness of the shining morning sunlight penetrating the thin greenish-blue curtains – hanging directly above my current place of slumber – in sheets of brilliant golden luminosity that one such as myself does not often enough think to take the time to appreciate and thank God for such a wonderful gift of radiance on a quiet, lazy Saturday morning around nine-twenty-seven in the calendar month that we have come to be known as June, with the lovely sing-song chirping of indigenous birds that floats above the less pleasant clang and clatter of everyday city life, with myriad impatient commuters struggling to arrive at their final destination, whether it be their home to lay their tired, work-worn bodies down on their beds for a restful eight hours of necessary regeneration for carrying the ever-present weight of yet another hard night’s work, or the opposite: business men in freshly starched white-collar suits, a fresh cup of burn-inducing, over-priced java sitting at a near boil in the closest cup holder, the shaven and shorn driver incessantly drumming each of his fingers on the apex of the steering wheel, stuck in the gridlock of sport utility vehicles and eighteen-wheeler tractor trailer trucks responsible for transporting their goods to various places of business around the city and the surrounding area, not a single car or bus or vehicle in general moving more than an inch or several at a time,
I could keep going. I just got kinda bored.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
but you could also make the initial sentence shorter: “John wanted to play ball, but sat on the couch.” (Take out the word “he” to make it a true 10-worder).
March 24th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Tom chewed his half unwrapped goat imitation cheese in delightful glee and stared at the waning hand of the second clock on the left of the right clock with the broken cuckoo replacement, as if it were cheering him on to a race beside the parade of aging cheese makers over who would get the sexy lady-like figure of a cardboard cut in to an ad of got milk-cheesiness, relapsing mind then wandered for another second then got lost in the time continuum of second seconds throwing his rhythm off point enough to destroy the glory of the last bite of the tongue and make his surgically repaired esophagus expand in anticipation of the magic transformation of food going down and vomit coming up.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:54 am
“Since screenwriting is an art of brevity, it’s a nice change of pace to see just how overstuffed a sentence one can write.”
I sooo wish I had read this blog entry of yours earlier, John! Believe it or not, it actually is useful writing advice relevant to a particular kind of writing gig!
See, I just got finished writing an adaptation of a screenplay into novelization form, and, dude, using this method would have saved me so much time! ;D LOL
Maybe I’ll try it on the next one.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
aww crap i think mine can be divided into 2.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Now all that’s missing are footnotes.
March 31st, 2009 at 8:57 am
The lawn was brown. Tom didn’t know how to fix it.
The lawn that was incessantly rejected a proper mowing and through long ages of no sign of the owner’s interest became truly and without any denial dead – which manifested itself in every blade turning from a lively and beautiful green color to a broodingly grayish hue of brown – desperately needed revitalization, and although it was the subject of every other dinner conversation, most of which led to and culminated with heated debates, nothing was really done about it, mostly due to the disarming type of argument Tom used to explain his lack of action – namely that even though he was a schooled and professionally trained gardener adorned with various medals won at botanic festival tournaments in lawn care-taking all over the country and being tutored by the most revered Alan Titchmarsh, he, to be quite frank, didn’t know, had not the least idea, what could be done to make the grass more vigorous, let being aware of a way how to ultimately better or fix it.
169 and could go on.