60 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.

ometimes sentences just need to be

long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and

a full stop. Why, Malcolm Bowie asks, does Proust write such long,

vermiform sentences, always subdividing then reassembling, loath

to come to rest? Because, he says, they mimic the workings of desire

and the neurotic rereading of situations we make when we are in

love. Their denial and shaky restoration of meaning is “Eros become

visible.” Such sentences are like “all speculation, all mental efforts to

make headway, in a resistant medium, toward a desired goal.” They

withhold their end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself

neatly into subject, verb, and object.

A long sentence should exult in its own expansiveness, lovingly

extending its line of thought while being always clearly moving to

its close. It should create anticipation, not confusion, as it goes along.

The hard part is telling the difference between the two. I once heard

BETWEEN THE LINES

The High-Wire Act

In our attention-deficient era, sentences are generally getting

shorter. A long sentence can still dazzle, but there’s an art to not

losing your reader in the process. JOE MORAN explores how

to write long and legato without running out of breath.

S JOE MORAN is a professor of English

and Cultural History at Liverpool John

Moores University.

From First You Write a Sentence by Joe

Moran, to be published on August 13,

2019 by Penguin Books, an imprint of

Penguin Publishing Group, a division of

Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright ©

2019 by Joe Moran.