Feb 27 2009
Writing Exercise: A Hundred Words
Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit, as in Rocketscientist’s writing exercise post this week. But sometimes what you want is a long sentence, and what matters is just keeping control of it.
I got this writing exercise from my creative writing professor about a year ago. At first, the concept looks simple. You have to write a sentence, a hundred or more words long, without at any point using the word “and”. Moreover, in doing so, you need to use proper grammar; run-on sentences don’t count.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? But it’s a lot harder than it sounds. If you aren’t paying close attention, that little ‘and’ will sneak in at every opportunity. And a hundred words is a long run for just one sentence; reading it out loud afterward will probably leave you out of breath, and in writing it it’s easy to forget where the sentence began before it finishes. It took me several tries when I first took a stab at it. It didn’t help that, since my prof didn’t like adverbs much, I was trying to avoid those as well. I finally got it when I was trying to describe a place that was coming up in game; these writing exercises are always good for something, right?
On cloudless nights above the meeting place of the Arthchwyl, the northern lights twine around each other, burning scarves of ethereal fire, knotting, stretching, twisting, undulating between the blazing pinpoints that perforate the black-silk sky; their lights draw only sparkles from the snow-plain save within the meeting place itself, a great amphitheater where snow dips to ice in order to throw back the vivid display in the sky, a jagged mixing bowl ringed by spires of glacial ice which cast not shadows but rainbows around them, along whose sides the scattered veils of light become an endless writhing knot of color.
A lot of techniques help with this exercise: listing is a favorite, as is careful adjective use. Extended similes or metaphors don’t hurt, either. Don’t forget the colon or semicolon bridge, if applicable.
Can you reach a hundred words without the dreaded ‘and’? What sorts of writing tricks help you to get there?
Have fun!
Now this is one I’d have to try. Might be a hard one for me though, unless I can use a comma every five words..LOL
One “writing trick” I use all the time — in fact I’m quite sure I overuse it, but it’s very dear to me — is the use of a present participle instead of “and”:
“She held out the Pens, tracing with them a symbol in the air; they left behind them a trail of fire as they passed, until in front of her there hung in the air a glowing fiery crest….”
I was going to look through my writing to see if I could find an already existing example of a 100-word sentence… the longest I’ve found so far is eighty-four, but I’ll keep trying!
Aha! Here’s a sentence that breaks the 100-word barrier. In the actual text it’s broken into two sentences, but the break comes in a place where it’s almost more natural to leave them joined — I think I was worried about the length.
(And yes, I’m afraid it is from my Sailor Moon fiction.)
“She was dressed in a plain, adult-sized ultramarine dress in readiness for her transformation; when she slipped off the bier, standing in front of them on the floor, they saw that she was taller even than her father, tall, slender, pale-skinned, beautiful; agonisingly beautiful, for her face was still Hotaru’s, the features perfectly formed, with a small nose, small mouth, wide-spaced black eyes; but it was Hotaru as she would look in another ten years, if so much sorrow could turn a person’s soul black so that their eyes shone with a kind of dark fire, passionate for the embrace of death.”
“Few could match the operatic impecunity of that master of the declaimed word, the celebrated vocalist Gumbo Gherkin - a man whose countenance was said to overmatch the stars in beauty, whose bearing was alike to that of a wondrous Sumerian deity in the green youth of the world, whose voice (O incredible voice!) called to the ear of the listener as the sirens called to Odysseus, tormenting him as he stood lashed to the mast of his ship; the only incongruity of this paragon was his name - a name like a miniature pickle of spicy green sourness amid the richly varied English trifle of his several graces.”
What’s funny is, when I wrote this I used “Find” just to make sure there weren’t any ands… and I found two, my eye skipped right over them.
100 words, pshaw. My record is 282, and my teacher told me it had to be a run-on, but it wasn’t. I love messing with ‘em. Let me see what I can come up with:
Whenever I have decided that I need to do something out of the ordinarily challenging, I begin by asking myself what it is that makes it so challenging, what, in fact, makes it outside my normal sphere, because, if I can figure out what the all of the difficulties are or how those difficulties change the way I do things, I can more readily address that challenges effectively without putting myself out or making my work suffer otherwise, something which can easily happen if one is completely focused on only a single aspect of a complicated work despite one’s careful but single-minded efforts.
(Word perfect counts that as 103)
Zombie! Welcome back!
All of these sentences look good; it’s great to see this kind of enthusiasm.
(Though, Stephanie, shouldn’t it be “addresses the challenges effectively”?)
Probably, I was messing with it give it a little more and probably missed it.