An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight, as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reaction within the glossy ice; as if the source of all blueness lies somewhere up here in the north—the core of it beneath one of those frozen fields; as if the blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down.
“The Hermit’s Story,” by Rick Bass
I want to stay a little longer with the long sentence (thank you, subscriber, for sending me this) because it’s been banished, stomped on, spit on, thanks to Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, with its admonishment, “Vigorous writing is concise.” (Rule 17) And then the moral overtone: “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” (V, Rule 6) Millions of copies later, saturating the minds of many, its final rule contains the whole: “prefer the standard to the offbeat.” (V, Rule 21)
Keep reading, though, and the authors acknowledge that the “best writers sometimes disregard” the book’s rules.
I want you to think again about the long sentence. I want you to know you can write one and lavish the reader with the “offbeat” and beautiful. As it unfolds at a pace that is not technological but the heartbeat of deep looking, the long sentence requires attention. It demands it. That concentration can rearrange the reader’s body, and coupled with style, the rearrangement is amplified by rhythm and more meaning.
One more twist to the offbeat: Bass’s 101-word sentence isn’t a complete sentence. There’s a subject, “ice storm,” but no verb, as if the narrator is astonished by what he sees and can’t finish the sentence. After the semicolon, we see the result of the ice storm via a modifying phrase: “the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight...” Bass uses balance, (the pairing of two), alliteration, and assonance (blue/moonlight; fields/sheets; ice/shine), making this clause melodic.
He stretches the sentence with three “as if” dependent clauses so we see, feel, and experience the blue. The first one, “as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reaction within the glossy ice,” is further elongated by using a correlative conjunction: not/but. Here, too, he uses balance, alliteration, and assonance (light/ice).
The second “as if” clause grows because of an em dash and a modifier that specifies where, exactly, in the north the blueness originates. More alliteration comes in with “frozen fields.”
The final “as if” is made longer by a series of prepositional phrases, “in some parts of the word,” “from the soil itself,” “after the sun goes down.” By the end of this opening sentence of the story, blue has become a “thing” an entity in the world.
(Bass, a friend of mine, lives in the far north, in Yaak, Montana, where there are many days of snow and ice. He fights for trees, grizzlies, wolves, and what Richard Powers calls “more-than-human-life”).
Ice and blueness are important to this short story. When you pull a reader beside you, put your arm around her, and say, take a look at this, will you? I mean, really look, the rumbling subtext is that the image holds meaning for the story.
Your Turn
Open with a subject but no verb.
Add a semicolon and give more details about the subject.
Now you’ll add three “as if” clauses that refer to some aspect of the subject. In Bass’s sentence, the clauses refer to blue, which was introduced after the first semicolon. The final two “as if” clauses are connected to the sentence via a semicolon.
Can you add balance like Bass does? “the vast fields and drifts of snow,” “shine and shimmer,” “the bending and absorption of light.”
Alliteration and assonance?
What else do you see?
Try it!
*written by a human
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books, www.ninaschuyler.com. You’ll find my book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and my new book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
I’d really love it if you preordered my novel, Afterword, which will be published in May 2023.
Preorder links:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/afterword-nina-schuyler/18618162?ean=9781955904704
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Hi Nina, as I've grown as a writer I've become a bit more minimalist, have cut adverbs and superfluous adjectives, and followed most of the preordained advice about what constitutes good writing -- though not in this sentence :-). All that said, I love long sweeping sentences when they're excecuted well, particularly if they increase and escalate tension in the context of the story.
I've come to think about using long sentences as "beat changes" throughout a story, to keep the reader on their toes, and to prevent the prose from becoming staid and complacent. I'm curious to hear your opinion on this, and how you incorporate long sentences into your own writing. Thanks for any insight!
Rick Bass is such a great writer! I am in awe of this sentence. It brings me back to my youth in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the mystery of northern light…and of the Northern Lights!