Goodreads Choice Awards Finalists 2025

The longest single paragraph in Machen’s “The White People” is over 5,600 words long. The ones…

striving-artist:


This isn’t really coherent, I’m just annoyed.


A heavily processed screengrab from Ao3 showing three paragraphs, the first two paragraphs are 15 lines long on a laptop screen. The third is at least 17, but is cut offALTa photo of a page from Hemmingway's Farewell to Arms. It reads: Those post-cards would be very fine in America; strange and myste-rious. This was a strange and mysterious war zone but I supposed it was quite well run and grim compared to other wars with the Aus-trians. The Austrian army was created to give Napoleon victories; any Napoleon. I wished we had a Napoleon, but instead we had Il Generale Cadorna, fat and prosperous and Vittorio Emmanuele, the tiny man with the long thin neck and the goat beard. Over on the right they had the Duke of Aosta. Maybe he was too good-looking to be a great general but he looked like a man. Lots of them would have liked him to be king. He looked like a king. He was the King's uncle and commanded the third army. We were in the second army. There were some British batteries up with the third army. I had met two gunners from that lot, in Milan. They were very nice and we had a big evening. They were big and shy and embarrassed and very appreciative together of anything that happened. I wish that I was with the British. It would have been much simpler. Still I would probably have been killed. Not in this ambulance business. Yes, even in the ambulance business. British ambulance drivers were killed sometimes. Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies. I wished to God it was over though. Maybe it would finish this sum-mer. Maybe the Austrians would crack. They had always cracked in other wars. What was the matter with this war? Everybody said the French were through. Rinaldi said that the French had mutinied and troops marched on Paris. I asked him what happened and he said, "Oh, they stopped them." I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz mountains.ALTA paragraph from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, it reads: On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting her , as here he is , with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be , as here they are , mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be , as are they not? , ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar,s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters, reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man,s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give , who does not often give , the warning, ,Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!ALT

First image is a very processed screengrab of a fic, which got under my skin. The next is a somewhat infamous paragraph from Hemmingway. Then there is a part of Dickens’ Bleak House.


I live in a glass house made of compound-complex sentences. But these reach a point, for me, of illegibility. I did a quick count of clauses in these, both dependent and independent. (I am certain my count is wrong bc I haven’t done this since seventh grade, but It’s closeish)


One paragraph from the fic has about 58 in 17 sentences, Hemmingway has 67 in 40 sentences, and Dickens has 56 in 5 fucking sentences. jfc Dickens. They’re all over 400 words.


Melville has a notorious paragraph that is a single sentence and is 471 words long. Machen has a paragraph (412 words) that is 15 sentences and 61 clauses, with 56 in just 12 of them. I just checked one from Austen cause we think of her as verbose, and it was 25 clauses in a 4 sentence paragraph, but… it didn’t feel oppressive to me.


The point, which I sort of lost track of as I stared at grammar rules, is that Paragraphs Matter and also Please Use Them. It doesn’t make you seem like a more mature writer to writer walls of text. Normally we talk about wall of text issues bc there isn’t an indent or a line after a paragraph to help your eye separate it, but its definitely this too.


I have always despised Hemmingway despite writing in a not-dissimilar style. He mixes sentence lengths, and intercuts with more casual commentary. I don’t enjoy his subject matter, but if the man ever used the return key, I’d have given him leeway. Since I had the text for Hemmingway, I went in and hit enter wherever I would tone shift or pause if I was reading it aloud. It became 11 paragraphs. I hate this section less now.



The longest single paragraph in Machen’s “The White People” is over 5,600 words long. The ones before and after it are also in the thousands. I have ‘read’ that book but I skimmed the fuck out of parts and feel NO guilt.

View more on Ari Bach's website »
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 04, 2025 16:22
No comments have been added yet.