Moonsong
New Member
Lately I've been reading through a lovely edition of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian yarns, and I've been astonished by his extraordinarily abundant prose style. Take these two sentences, for example, from The Pool of the Black One:
'Had Zaporavo known he was being compared, even though unconsciously, with a man before the mast, he would have been speechless with amazed anger. But he was engrossed with his broodings, which had become blacker and grimmer as the years crawled by, and with his vague grandiose dreams; and with the girl whose possession was a bitter pleasure, just as all his pleasures were.'
Holy mackerel! I find the ripping pace of the story-telling he's doing here incredible. I feel like he just did more in two sentences than I often do with several entire PAGES.
Perhaps this kind of breakneck speed is a relic of the pulp era in which Howard (and Lovecraft - recall that the two were something like friends!) wrote. In any case, I find myself trying out something similar in my own work now, if just to develop my ability for economic storytelling.
Who else is doing something similar? Trying to pack in as much as possible into the tight containers of their sentences? And who has encountered the same problem I have, which is a burdensome density, wherein the sentence drags itself down - instead of tearing along like Howard's?
'Had Zaporavo known he was being compared, even though unconsciously, with a man before the mast, he would have been speechless with amazed anger. But he was engrossed with his broodings, which had become blacker and grimmer as the years crawled by, and with his vague grandiose dreams; and with the girl whose possession was a bitter pleasure, just as all his pleasures were.'
Holy mackerel! I find the ripping pace of the story-telling he's doing here incredible. I feel like he just did more in two sentences than I often do with several entire PAGES.
Perhaps this kind of breakneck speed is a relic of the pulp era in which Howard (and Lovecraft - recall that the two were something like friends!) wrote. In any case, I find myself trying out something similar in my own work now, if just to develop my ability for economic storytelling.
Who else is doing something similar? Trying to pack in as much as possible into the tight containers of their sentences? And who has encountered the same problem I have, which is a burdensome density, wherein the sentence drags itself down - instead of tearing along like Howard's?
Myth Weaver
