I recently posted about Leslie Charteris and his Simon Templar books. I have now finished Sharon Kettering’s biography of Charles d’Albert, and I have started reading Enter the Saint. I’m enjoying it, but one thought crossed my mind in the first few pages: ‘when is this sentence going to end?’. The sentence in question contained 136 words.
I think the first article I read about creative writing advised keeping sentences short. I believe the article was in my landlady’s Guardian, when I was working in Reading, just after leaving university. The writer held up Ian Fleming as an example of keeping sentences short and punchy. I’ve done some research. I counted the words in the first ten sentences of a few books.
Leslie Charteris’s Enter the Saint averages 48.8 words per sentence. Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale averages 18.5. So Fleming’s sentences are certainly punchier. Next I looked at Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Her average was 15.7, closer to Fleming that Charteris. I also mentioned Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy in a post recently, so I thought I’d look at that. She averaged 7.1, less than half Fleming’s average.
In order to check whether is’s a question of fashion, I looked at a couple of older classics: Pride and Prejudice, and Great Expectations. They averaged 15.4 and 48.7 respectively. Leslie Charteris and Charles Dickens seem to be of similar mind concerning sentence length.
One thing that I noticed with all authors is that they mix it up. Nobody has consistently long or short sentences. Sentence length is varied to suit the story. As BBC Bitesize say, short sentences speed up the pace of the story, and long sentences slow it down. Adjust sentence length to suit the action, or inaction of the moment. Writersrelief use Ernest Hemingway as an example of a master of both short and long sentences suited to the scene.
I haven’t yet made a similar analysis of my writing in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures. Perhaps that will be my next post. Or I could just bite the musket ball and start writing Book 5.