Writing Like The Dickens

A practice which I had recently begun, and will probably end all too soon, was to go to the local café and run down their list of coffees, trying each once and keeping a log of how good (or bad) it was. But, my fiancée is moving into a new apartment after this week, close enough to the college for me to run there for some coffee. Today’s brew is Canaan Conquest. I don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s cinnamon atop the foam, and it’s delicious. Highly recommended by me.

There is a stage in my writerly life that I might imagine happens to many young writers; certainly I’ve seen it other places. In composition classes, they might call them run-on sentences, because, typically, they run on and on and on. Now, there’s the grammatical run-on sentence, in which the subject changes between the first half and the latter half. That’s easier to catch by simply searching for how many subjects there are in a sentence. (Hint: there should only be one...)

What I’m talking about is a little more difficult, unless you read Dickens. These sentences are, strictly speaking, grammatically correct. They just employ copious amounts of commas, semi-colons, and colons in order for one sentence to run the entirety of a six or seven line paragraph. Dickens was the master of the aside. I envy him, in certain ways, for his ability to cram four facts into one everlasting yet grammatical sentence. I don’t have the specific example with me, but there was a paragraph in Oliver Twist in which the actual sentence of action was infused with no fewer than four asides. You could untangle it like bad knitting, with some work, and speak the sentence sans aside rather well. And it was about a fourth of the actual sentence.

What possible use might this serve today’s budding author? You gain a very critical command of commas, semi-colons, and colons; because, truly, commas and semi-colons are the most misused punctuation. Now, I could spend the time to work this out for you; however, there are plenty of books (not to mention Google) to help you out with that. My objective here is to remind people that writing is fun.

(I did see once, in a class, a bit of dialogue wherein the author abandoned the period point, and instead enclosed each sentence with quotations. Writing is fun, yes, and you can push boundaries; that’s excessive.)

So let your asides flow. Write as long a sentence as you can, and make sure its grammatically correct. Just, do everyone a favor: before you have anyone else read it, divide it up normally. Do the opposite, and write in as tiny of sentences as you can. Mix the two; write a humungous one followed by a stupidly short one. Have fun with it. Be subjectively flowery, then objectively terse. And, of course, have fun. You can’t have fun if you don’t have fun.

See you Wednesday.