An Ode to Wordiness
In a world where the common advice is to simplify your writing, author Marguerite Welch pens an ode to wordiness.
Rummaging through a used bookstore is a little like going on a blind date. You just never know what’s going to turn up. And so it was last month when I discovered a well “used,” brown-paged copy of Toni Morison’s The Bluest Eye. While not familiar with the whole of Morrison’s oeuvre, having read Beloved was enough to make me grab it off the shelf. And oh, the poetry, beginning with the first line: “Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.” Then, a couple of days later, comes the synchronicity of Nina Schuyler’s comments on her Stunning Sentences Blog where she quotes Morrison on the primacy of language and poetry in writing: “It’s all we got. Don’t shrink it.”
Like many aspiring writers, I have attended a plethora of writers’ conferences in the past couple of years where the current dictum seems to be “keep it simple.” Be it novel, short story, poem, memoir, blog, essay, Instagram post, or shopping list, kill the frill. Slay the lengthy sentences. Amputate the paragraphs. Write for clarity. Start with a gripping first sentence, proceed with a fast-paced plot, not too many characters and a bang up conclusion. Life is short. We all have way too much to read. So, cut it to the quick if you want to accumulate a meaningful number of likes or followers or just random readers.
All seemingly very sensible advice but the poet in me rebels. What about the rhythm and cadence of sentences, the surprise of the unexpected word, the pile on of detail that can make a paragraph move with the pace of a racehorse or mope like a tired child. It's words, beautiful words spilling down the page in a waterfall of vivid details that propel this reader—the joyfulness, the surprise, the inventiveness, the “Oh gosh, I wish I’d written that” of it. Not to be cliché, but think the richness of Middlemarch, a well underlined copy of which sits among the tottering pile of books read and unread on my bedside table. The intricacy of those sentences make you want to read them aloud.
“As he threw down his book, stretched his legs toward the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable after-glow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence—seems, as it were to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength—Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his profession.”
This sentence pulls at your coat tails and demands you slow down for a much richer ride than “Lydgate relaxed by the fire.”
Or consider the following from The Bluest Eye:
“Although she was the ninth of eleven children and lived on a ridge of red Alabama clay seven miles from the nearest road, the complete indifference with which a rusty nail was met when it punched clear through her foot during her second year of life saved Pauline Williams from total anonymity.”
in which Morrison paints a complete world, saturated with pain, in a 50-word sentence.
I can’t say I’m a writing “authority,” just an old scribbler and passionate reader, but it occurs to me that it would be mighty boring if we all wrote according to the same rules. So, no skimping folks. Give us your all. Pour it on. As Toni says: “Don’t shrink it.”
Check out Marguerite Welch's Borrowed Child here:
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