Love love love cumulative sentences! Years ago when I was searching for all things cumulative sentences, I happened across Brooks Landon, Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His book Building Great Sentences includes 15 Chapters with titles like "How Sentences Grow" (Chapter 4), "Degrees of Suspensiveness" (Chapter 11), and "Balanced Series and Serial Balances" (Chapter 12). Now, following Nina Schuyler's Stunning Sentences on her Substack, I'm prompted weekly to improve "all things cumulative." Thank's Nina!
I really love cumulative sentences, too, because you can build so much rhythm and sound, and at the same time the details burrow deeper into character. The caution is to make sure that the added details are not duplicative but add more precision. I'll have to get Landon's book! Thank you!
Such an interesting sentence, describing a person and a nation at once. I think I read the short story version of The Things They Carried, but not the novel, not yet, but thanks for moving it up my list. I was really impressed with “Going After Cacciato,” about a soldier who kept deserting, because he no longer believed the Vietnam War was a good idea, and his platoon kept going after him and bringing him back. The story ends when they finally let him go: Cacciato had always wanted to see Paris and, since he can’t go back across the Pacific, he decides to walk overland through Laos, Burma, and India, across western Asia to the Bosporus and from there to France. No one knows whether he’ll make it, but they hope he does, and they imagine him hobnobbing with writers and artists in Parisian cafes while they are still trying to stay alive and intact in the endless war. What a writer!
You're so kind to listen to the podcast. I appreciate it, truly. Yes--how do you create a character that has no body, no gestures, no facial expressions? The answer is voice and then backstory. Grace Paley is a master at voice.
I’ve only read a little bit of Paley, but it was fabulous. Also fabulous to hear you talking! I have to listen again when I’m not also listening to an intelligent and loquacious five-year-old!
Love love love cumulative sentences! Years ago when I was searching for all things cumulative sentences, I happened across Brooks Landon, Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His book Building Great Sentences includes 15 Chapters with titles like "How Sentences Grow" (Chapter 4), "Degrees of Suspensiveness" (Chapter 11), and "Balanced Series and Serial Balances" (Chapter 12). Now, following Nina Schuyler's Stunning Sentences on her Substack, I'm prompted weekly to improve "all things cumulative." Thank's Nina!
I really love cumulative sentences, too, because you can build so much rhythm and sound, and at the same time the details burrow deeper into character. The caution is to make sure that the added details are not duplicative but add more precision. I'll have to get Landon's book! Thank you!
Sounds like a great book, thank you!!
Such an interesting sentence, describing a person and a nation at once. I think I read the short story version of The Things They Carried, but not the novel, not yet, but thanks for moving it up my list. I was really impressed with “Going After Cacciato,” about a soldier who kept deserting, because he no longer believed the Vietnam War was a good idea, and his platoon kept going after him and bringing him back. The story ends when they finally let him go: Cacciato had always wanted to see Paris and, since he can’t go back across the Pacific, he decides to walk overland through Laos, Burma, and India, across western Asia to the Bosporus and from there to France. No one knows whether he’ll make it, but they hope he does, and they imagine him hobnobbing with writers and artists in Parisian cafes while they are still trying to stay alive and intact in the endless war. What a writer!
I loved Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato"! Another novel that haunts me.
Oh, that story became a novel also? ☺️ Good to know!
Listening to you and Dallas right now. Grace Paley!! Love her!!!
You're so kind to listen to the podcast. I appreciate it, truly. Yes--how do you create a character that has no body, no gestures, no facial expressions? The answer is voice and then backstory. Grace Paley is a master at voice.
I’ve only read a little bit of Paley, but it was fabulous. Also fabulous to hear you talking! I have to listen again when I’m not also listening to an intelligent and loquacious five-year-old!