I'm reading Noah Lukeman's A Dash Of Style right now. He has an entire chapter about periods that fills my soul with rainbows. At the end of the chapter, there's a list of exercises one can try to improve their usage of the punctuation mark. He says:
Start a new novel (or short story), and let the opening sentence run at least one page long. Where does this lead you? How did you compensate? Did you find a new narration style? Did not stopping allow you more creative freedom? Can you apply this technique elsewhere in your writing?
Well, I've never written a sentence that long in my life, so I decided to stretch my writing muscles and give it a try. I've had a novella idea bouncing around in my head that's been distracting me from other writing projects, and I've discovered that the best thing to do with that sort of thing is to get as much of it out as possible before going back to other projects. It just works better for me that way. So here are my first two sentences. The first one is hard to follow and not heavily edited (let alone perfect) but I had a lot of fun writing them!
***
The red sandstone offered me a seat and a drawing board as I etched a picture into the stone with a coarse brown stick that bit into my hands with its sharp edges, and gave itself as a lookout to the valley, which was busy, as usual, with the cars that traced the same lines up and down Main Street and darted into the back roads and were pulled over by the black police cars with their flashing red and blue lights—they didn't use sirens, hardly ever, and that was good enough, since the sound always made my ears ring even after they'd died away—and sleepy as usual, paradoxical as it may seem, since the city was never really busy, not really busy in that urgent way that people were doing things that had to be done, that needed to be done, that must be done in order to survive, to exist, to cope with the every changing world; there was no need to be busy in that way, since the world didn't seem to touch the city, at least not in any way that really mattered; people didn't die in the valley save for natural causes, because everyone was too busy spying on their neighbors, showing off their new boats and sports cars, fatting up on elegant desserts or lard-soaked fast foods, playing golf in one of the city's three courses, shopping at the Wal-Mart or the CAL-Ranch or the Farmer's Market but never the little shops that made the city unique (and they were all dying out from the lack of customers anyway, and when they were gone the city would lose it's real soul and just become another town along the interstate where people only ever stop to fill up on gas, not even to run into the Denny's for lunch or the gas station to pick up a candybar), to be irked enough to pull the 12 gage out of the gun cabinet to mow down their neighbors, and you had to wonder about that, really, because the city's liquor store and two clubs (clubs, never bars, because the city considered itself too classy to abide them) were always busy enough to make at least a sixteenth of the adult population constantly drunk and if there were drunks there had to be angry drunks at some time or other, or at least you would think there would have to be, and angry drunks could, on occasion, remember where they kept their gun cabinet key, especially if it was on their key ring (and I wouldn't put it passed some of the avid hunters in the city to open and close their gun cabinets enough to keep the key with them, but at least they put their guns back after they'd used them), and find the damn 12 gage, or at least some sort of hand gun, and be able to take out a few people before the black police cars came with their flashing red and blue lights—and sirens this time, because a murder would merit sirens—or if they couldn't find an angry drunk, at least some sort of pimply teenager who thought the world was conspiring against him and was determined to take a few other pimply teenagers out with him before he beat the world to that great ultimate ending, that final adieu, that great curtain close that I've begun to believe I'll never see, angry drunks or no; and in truth I don't think the city really gave a damn about the rest of the world other than what they read in the World News section of the local newspaper, and even that section was so small you would have to pull out a magnifying glass to see it and a juicer to get anything out of it (sorry, that was hyperbole; I'm given to it sometimes, tragic as it is); and sometimes I had to wonder if the pretentious city down in the valley was really that big, or if the tiny world that was comprised of me, the stick, and the rock was really bigger, if the three of us together had more insight than the city with its population of 20,867 people (as according to the latest census), if the three of us together could do something real, something big, something devastating; in truth I knew I didn't need the rock or the stick, or even the fresh kid I'd taken under my wing who wasn't with me there on the cliff, to help me do something that would turn this city on it's head and scare the sleepy inhabitants to the alert of an angry mob. I could handle that on my own.
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