The quiet art of the and…and…and sentence

You know when you’re reading a novel and the protagonist pours himself a glass of wine and the liquid is dark, heavy and inviting, but when he brings the glass to his lips his fingers tremble and the glass slips from his grasp and falls to the floor and the wine soaks into the carpet and he weeps? That’s the and…and…and sentence right there, unfurling for as long as the author has the nerve to keep adding to it.

The and…and…and sentence is a tricky beast. When used without thinking, a piece of writing can come across as amateurish, the author unimaginative, the sentences (like the one above) reaching for a gravitas that simply isn’t there. In the right hands applying the right touch, though, it can elevate a passage, making it urgent, poetic, desperate, despondent or something else entirely. So what’s the secret behind using it properly?

Be sparing

When you find a writing crutch, it can be tempting to lean on it for all it’s worth. The problem is that if you rely on and…and…and too much, you run the risk of diluting its impact. For an example of this, see the Jack Kerouac novel Big Sur, which contains entire chapters linked only by ellipses, run-on sentences and and…and…and. It’s a bit much.

In his short novel Old Man, William Faulkner uses it only when his protagonist, a convict, is in mortal peril:

‘And he saw the machine gun, the blunt thick muzzle slant and drop the probe toward him and he still screaming in his hoarse crow’s voice, “I want to surrender! Cant you hear me?” continuing to scream even as he whirled and plunged splashing, ducking, went completely under and heard the bullets going thuck-thuck-thuck on the water above him and he scrabbling still on the bottom.’

In this passage, the relentless pace of the ‘ands’ is used to demonstrate that events are moving well beyond the convict’s control. With each additional element, Faulkner reduces the convict from a man with a voice to an animal scrabbling in the dirt for survival. In actual fact, this isn’t a million miles away from a passage Kerouac might write. The difference is that Faulkner doesn’t return to and…and…and again until many chapters later when the convict is about to lose control once more — this time due to his new home being forcefully taken from him. The construction appears only sparingly, so when we do find a sentence containing it, we know things are about to move up a gear.

Use monosyllabic words

When building an and…and…and sentence, it’s a good idea to keep your vocabulary choice relatively simple so the reader doesn’t lose the thread. One writer who was famous for doing this was Mr Hemingway. In the opening 126 words to A Farewell to Arms, he uses ‘and’ a total of 14 times; only a single word, ‘afterward’, is more than two syllables in length. Here’s a slightly less well-known passage of his, taken from ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’:

‘They drew up close and he could see the plunging hugeness of the bull, and the dust in his sparsely haired hide, the wide boss of horn, and his outstretched, wide-nostrilled muzzle, and he was raising his rifle when Wilson shouted, ‘Not from the car, you fool’ and he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson, while the brakes clamped on and the car skidded, and Wilson was out on one side and he on the other, and then he was shooting at the bull as he moved away.’

This is actually only part of the sentence; in its entirety it’s more than half a page long. What’s immediately noticeable here is how monosyllabic the words around the ‘ands’ are. It creates a staccato effect that drives the reader on, urging them to follow the sentence to its conclusion. Despite its length, the entire passage remains clear, comprehensible: Macomber is hunting an animal with a man named Wilson. The reader knows exactly where they are in the sentence at any time; they don’t have to grapple with complex terminology or florid prose, nor are they waylaid by lengthy relative clauses. They are right there in the car next to Macomber, feeling his fear and exhilaration as he closes in on the kill.

Keep some distance between each clause

The more you let the individual clauses breathe, the less likely the reader will notice you’re using and….and…and, and the more they’ll become lost in the sentence as a whole as it flows down the page. John Steinbeck often uses this tactic in The Grapes of Wrath to rail against social injustice:

‘And a homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land is a crime against the thin children.’

Here, the sentence starts with an ‘and’, and contains three clauses in total. The first clause is by far the longest at 34 words, while the second is 12 words and the third 11. Steinbeck front-loads the sentence, setting out his hypothetical scenario, before dialling it back with each subsequent clause as he drives home his point. The effect is hard-hitting without being preachy or repetitive, and a relatively complex argument on economic gain vs. morality is summed up in a single sentence thanks to his use of and…and…and.

Of course, there are always exceptions to maintaining distance. Here is one:

‘The boy was stumbling he was so tired and the man picked him up and swung him onto his shoulders and they went on.’

No prizes for guessing this is Cormac McCarthy. His prose consists primarily of brief, blunt, yet poetic sentences that are either left to stand alone or that are linked together with and…and…and. The sentence above reads almost like a telegram, yet it reveals much about the two characters. There is the boy, who, despite having endured so many horrors in his short life and been forced to grow up quickly, is still the same as any other child — when he’s tired, he wants his father to carry him. And there is the man, who takes every obstacle in stride and keeps going because he has to. The way McCarthy avoids breaking the sentence up into four separate ones enables him to convey a sense of fatigue, desperation and persistence, all in one.

It’s quite the challenge to try to use and…and…and without coming across as either derivative or clumsy. Then again: if you don’t try you’ll never manage it.

(Note: I couldn’t find any examples of women writers using ‘and…and...and’. I thought of Lucia Berlin or Lydia Davis, but their sentences rarely grow so long. Maybe, based on the examples above, it’s a white guy thing).

Chart / June

A confession: despite all my best intentions and the conviction that I would not get carried away with myself in the wake of having a novel published….I got carried away. I allowed myself to be swept up in the wind of hubris and ended up wasting two months on writing dead-in-the-water pitches. How? Because I wrote an 165,000-word story, which I cut down to 132,000 over subsequent drafts, and I believed this was a reasonable size for my Serious Novel. I thought – just because I’d sold a few copies of a sci-fi book and seen it in a couple of brick-and-mortar stores – that I could go to literary agents and say “hey, look, you don’t know me at all, but I have this difficult-to-sell satirical thriller which is at least 10,000 words over the upper limit for such novels”, and they would respond with “Wonderful, Grant, sign here”.

This has not happened. I want to say ‘unsurprisingly’, but until the middle of May, this came as a surprise to me. I was 100% convinced this was a reasonable expectation on my part. Seriously. Unknown writer, 550 pages, satire. I only understood how unrealistic this was when I received 11 query rejections in a row stating “Yeah, we can’t sell this (in the current market)” or “I don’t have any contacts for this”.

What was I thinking? I suppose I wasn’t. I was plotting too far ahead, and I overlooked the fact that you only get to do stuff like this if you have a track record to fall back on. I do not. And so: I have spent the past month cutting and cutting and cutting. And I am still cutting. It’s therapeutic. Every word I delete is a reminder that I am no way near as good at this as I sometimes think I am and that taut & twisty is better than prodigious & prolix. And at some point I’ll be finished with it and I can move on.

MUSIC! FOR THE SUMMER SOLSTICE LOVERS AMONG US

1. Nick Drake - One Of These Things First

2. Perfume Genius - Leave

3. Pretty Things - Sickle Clowns

4. Tony Allen - Koko Dance

5. keiyaA - I! Gits! Weary!

6. Rosie Lowe - Birdsong

7. Janet Jackson - He Doesn’t Know I’m Alive

BENNY AND THE JETS

5 in 5: lessons learned about writing

It was approximately this time five years ago when I was ambushed by a minor breakdown following yet another 11-hour day working for peanuts at a translation agency. Like a confident French marshal during the early days of the Napoleonic Wars, the breakdown had been amassing its forces for some time, and when it struck, it tore a hole through my paltry defences and sent me spinning to the sofa, where I was to remain for some hours. After the screams had ceased and the smoke cleared, I was left with a single word echoing in my head: Quit. I did so the next day, and I’m still pretty certain it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

What I’m not so certain about was my next decision: to write for myself instead of translating other people’s words. Actually, it wasn’t even a decision; it was a need. Have I enjoyed it? Sort of. Does it frustrate me? Constantly. Can I do without it? No, unfortunately not. I shape my entire life around it. It influences the way I structure my day, how I speak and listen to people, what entertainment I consume, whether I feel halfway satisfied or like a fraud in the evening. It has been responsible for my greatest sense of achievement—seeing my novel on a bookstore shelf—and my lowest ebbs. Five years in, I still don’t feel qualified to talk about writing in any capacity beyond offering the broadest of sketches. But I’d like to mark the occasion, if only for myself, by offering five lessons I’ve learned about writing.

I will never be satisfied and will always beat myself up

This one is hardly a newsflash. It may be endemic to all people who create something they believe in both 100% and 0% and tend towards the self-critical rather than the self-aggrandising. I did hope, though, that at some point my level of satisfaction at my work might increase from ‘modicum’ to ‘pinch’ (or maybe a punch). Alas not. It’s funny, because up until the moment a piece is published, I can declare to myself that ‘this is the best I can do and the best it will be’. The moment after publication is when my other set of eyes automatically takes over and I can only see poor word choices, verbose description, repetition, similes that don’t work (like the Napoleonic one above) and clunky dialogue. By that point, though, it’s too late to take the work back and attack it with a red pen. But then I suppose this is for the best: if I always saw what I wrote through my other set of eyes, I wouldn’t have the confidence to throw something out there in the world. And in a way it’s good to be this critical, because it means I’ll hopefully never release the literary equivalent of Be Here Now.

Having your book published is not fun

Getting By the Feet of Men published turned my hair grey. Not all of it, just some at the sides. Chalk it up to discovering a typo in the epigraph in the weeks leading up to publication, fighting for every single review, worrying about sales and hating the cover I was saddled with. There’s very little to enjoy about any of the promotion side of it. And even though my sales figures were way better than I ever expected them to be, realising how many hours had been required to sell a few hundred copies was pretty sobering. What the whole foray into the world of publishing taught me, though, is to enjoy the time when I’m sitting at my desk, bringing a story to life. Because that’s pretty much as good as it gets. The rest is crazy amount of behind-the-scenes work and disappointment and factors beyond your control.

I think I’ve found a writing style that works for me

I didn’t realise this until the first reviews came in for By the Feet of Men, but over the past five years I’ve developed a writing style, and the best way I can summarise it is: storyboard prose. By this I mean when I write scenes I visualise them as movie storyboards and then describe what I see in as few words as possible. I was recommended to do this ten years ago by a guy I used to work with in Amsterdam; I gave him a long, messy chapter of a terrible novel I was writing at the time, and he ripped it to threads before rewriting one scene using the storyboard method. It was all the more impressive given he was (and probably still is) Dutch, and wrote in a far clearer, sparser way than I did. His advice has remained with me ever since, and my writing has gradually shaped itself around the format. I’m not saying it’s instantly recognisable (Pricesque? Prician? Maybe I should change my last name), but it at least gives me something to work with.

The short story format is brutal

Here’s how many short stories I’ve written each year since I started doing it ‘professionally’:

2015: 17 stories

2016: 28 stories

2017: 18 stories

2018: 13 stories

2019: 11 stories

2020: 2 stories

Since that heady peak in 2016, when I was churning out approximately one short story every two weeks, the amount has fallen year on year to a stunning low in the first half of 2020. This isn’t due to laziness, though: it’s because I don’t think the amount of effort that I put into the short story is balanced out by the payoff if (and that’s a big if) it gets published.

A typical cycle for me would be this: I spend a week or two writing the story, then put it aside for a few weeks, revise it, put it aside for another few weeks, then revise it once more. Then I send it off to a publication calling for submissions, hear nothing for six months, before ultimately receiving either an acceptance or (more likely) a rejection. If it’s accepted, I wait another three to six months until the short story is published – online, in print or both – and a handful of people read it. And then it’s gone, into the ether, never to be read again.

That’s a great deal of energy I could be putting into something more worthwhile, which is why, starting in 2018, I switched my focus to writing essays. For whatever reason, essays seem to be read and green-lit quicker by online publications and there’s usually no fee to submit them. Plus, I have the feeling that the marketplace for creative nonfiction, critical analysis, personal essays and so on is much less crowded than for short stories – each of the five I wrote last year quickly found a home. Of course, this might just mean I’m not very good at writing short stories.

Realising which formats work for me has taken the edge of desperation out of my fingers when I sit down and replaced it with a dash of assurance. Now, instead of asking myself, ‘How am I going to get this published?’, I think ‘this is what I want to say’.

And finally…the fear of failure doesn’t go away

My greatest fear at present—within the context of writing, that is—is that I won’t be able to find a home for my next novel, Mekong Lights. After a year of promotion and sales and reviews for By the Feet of Men, I’m back to querying agents and receiving either rejections or no response at all. What if it doesn’t get picked up? That’s two full years of effort for nothing and I’ll be a failure. Or, at least, that’s how I think each time I open up an email containing the line “Not one for me, I’m afraid”. But that’s not true. Yes, I will have ‘failed’ to sell the novel and yes, realising nobody is interested in reading what I’ve written is a miserable feeling, but that doesn’t make the endeavour itself a failure. It most certainly isn’t a waste of time, because if nothing else it was two years of practice. I juggled with more perspectives, tackled a more complex plot, tried my hand at social commentary, loosened up a little with my dialogue. Most importantly of all, I enjoyed it while I was writing it and, like I said above, that’s pretty much the most a writer can hope for. Or maybe it isn’t; maybe five years is too soon to be drawing any conclusions. I’ll check back in in 2025 and let you know.

yep.