The Imperfect Sentence in Rhythmic Paragraphs

People of the Books

Literature as more than "acquaintance with letters"

(Merton College Library Image from Wikipedia)

Writing about writing in a blog entry titled "The Perfect Sentence," novelist Olen Steinhauer observes:

"You can think of it this way: in poetry, one worries about the individual word. In shorts, about the sentence. Then in novels it becomes the paragraph."

By the expression "In shorts," Olen's not referring to some odd predilection for writing while clad only in his underwear but to the literary 'fact' that writers composing short stories concentrate on the sentence.

Though we'd doubtless find exceptions to Olen's observation, he speaks of what he knows. From his own experience as a writer, Olen explains:

"[S]ome time ago I stopped worshipping the sentence as a perfect, self-contained structure. At some point it was no longer important to get my whole meaning out before the full-stop. I also decided that it wasn't important to get the meaning, or resonance, of a story into its opening sentence, because novels (unlike, say, short stories) have another hundred thousand words following that opening, and one of the most important things is to get the rhythm right."

Two points may still need some clarification. On the one hand, Olen suggests that the sentence is less important in a novel than in a short story simply because a novel is longer. On the other hand, he implies that the more significant reason for the difference lies in the novel's rhythm.

I think that he means the rhythm of a novel's paragraphs:

"I've stopped thinking of sentences as packages of complete thought. For me, paragraphs are a more useful tool for explicating a concept, thought or idea."

The length the novel and the rhythm of its paragraphs are not unrelated, of course, but they're potentially separable. If length alone were the causal factor and rhythm a function of length, then we might expect to find a similar difference between lyric and epic poetry. Maybe we do, to some extent, but anyone who has attempted to read Paradise Lost, for example, has experienced firsthand Milton's attention to words despite the length of his poem.

Perhaps if Milton had written in stanzas, he'd have paid less attention to words and more attention to the larger units -- or if he'd written in rhymed verse, he'd have composed with the rhyme scheme guiding his poetic construction. Possibly the blank verse that he chose allowed him more "ancient liberty" to focus on precisely the exact word that he wanted at each point in his poem.

As the Logos himself said, albeit making a somewhat different point: "gracious was that word which clos'd / Thy sovran sentence" (Paradise Lost 3.144-145).

See? The second person of the Godhead has spoken. It's the word, not the sentence.