The Good, the Bad, and the Editor

So last time, I proposed a new exercise, as a paragraph-level addendum to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. I suggested re-punctuating a paragraph into long and short sentences, and then doing it again with some bad and good prose. Let’s start with the latter, because I’m feeling a bit more inspired (but not very, as you’ll see).

I begin, not exactly with a paragraph, but with what amounts to a paragraph-level block. Brace yourself for some bad prose:

A new image appeared—the cavern’s damp wall, dancing with the rippling reflections of the illuminated lagoon. On the wall, a shadow appeared… the shadow of a man… standing in the cavern.

But the man’s head was misshapen… badly.

Instead of a nose, the man had a long beak… as if he were half bird.

When he spoke, his voice was muffled… and he spoke with an eerie eloquence… a measured cadence… as if he were the narrator in some kind of classical chorus. (Dan Brown, Inferno — no, I haven’t read it; I just found this as one of many examples on a Google search for appalling Dan Brown prose)

The first thing is to deal with all those stupid ellipses, and then collapse it to one straightforward paragraph of ordinary-bad prose:

A new image appeared—the cavern’s damp wall, dancing with the rippling reflections of the illuminated lagoon. On the wall, a shadow appeared, the shadow of a man standing in the cavern. But the man’s head was badly misshapen. Instead of a nose, the man had a long beak, as if he were half bird. When he spoke, his voice was muffled, and he spoke with an eerie eloquence, a measured cadence, as if he were the narrator in some kind of classical chorus.

Let’s go for short sentences, then long:

A new image appeared: the cavern’s damp wall. It danced with the rippling reflections of the illuminated lagoon. On the wall, a shadow appeared. A man stood in the cavern. But the man’s head was badly misshapen. Instead of a nose, the man had a long beak, as if he were half bird. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. He spoke with an eerie eloquence, a measured cadence. He sounded like the narrator in some kind of classical chorus.

A new image: the cavern’s damp wall, dancing with the rippling reflections of the illuminated lagoon, on which appeared the misshapen shadow of a beaked, bird-like man, standing in the cavern; he spoke, his voice muffled yet eerily eloquent, with a measured cadence, as though he were the narrator in a classical chorus.

Now let’s do the same thing with some good prose:

She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her. 

It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room. (John Crowley, Little, Big)

Short:

She was not much in his mind as he walked. She hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her. The room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often. Sometimes he looked with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness. So he looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins. There she was, and her shy sister behind her.

It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor. It was the room whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard. It was the room whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.

Long:

She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her; looked in on that room in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows—that very room.

So what do I learn from this? Not all that much, honestly. I’m disappointed.

Dan Brown’s prose is really terrible, and very difficult to salvage. Breaking it into short sentences mostly just reveals that the long sentences are short sentences weirdly punctuated, as though Brown were using ellipses and such to make his short sentences appear long without having to keep them coherently structured. To revise the thing into a single long sentence, I had to remove a huge amount of repetition: at a simple level, “appeared” appears twice; at a more complex one, the description of the bird-man shadow is puffed up with repetitive nothing, using a lot of space to say very little. When I turned it into a single sentence, I got rid of almost a third of the words and more than half the lines. The result is not a particularly good piece of writing—it’s just not dreadful.

As to Crowley, I gained nothing except a greater appreciation of his deft use of long and short sentences. The short-sentence version is a little clunky and repetitive, but not awful; the long-sentence version is fine, but I’m forced to insert a parallelism (the looking-in bit getting me from the first to the second original paragraph) that distracts from the image. And let’s be honest, separating out the last phrase with an em-dash instead of leaving the original short sentence is cheating.

Out of interest, could I swap styles here? Just as a parodic exercise….

Upon the cavern’s damp wall appeared a reflection, an image of uncertain origin, rippling and dancing in the lagoon’s light: a grotesque man, head beaked and bird-like, his shadow cast by some obscure and imperceptible Form. He spoke, his voice muffled yet eerily eloquent, with the measured cadence of a classical chorus.

And…

He wasn’t thinking about her much… not now. For two years he had thought about her a lot, conjuring up images—the room where he met her… the fear he felt then… the happiness he felt now. 

He thought about George Mouse showing him things in that room. He saw a glass, a pipe, and George’s two tall cousins, Alice and Sophie. 

When he met her, it was in the Mouse townhouse… the third-floor library… the patched, mullioned windows… the dark rug with white, worn pathways… as if he were an explorer hunting out tracks in the jungle.

It was that room.

Ugh. I can’t do this any more. Next time, I’ll get back to Le Guin’s exercises. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a shower.