Concision fever

Short sentences and concision are essential elements of good Web writing. As a writer obsessed with concision – wishing to downsize any text to one powerful word – I’m mentally rewriting every long phrase I see.

Recently, I was doing so with the opening phrase of “Fever”*, a captivating Canadian short story from Sharon Butala:

“Cecilia had slept well the first part of the night, but later she was dimly aware of a restlessness on Colin’s part that kept pulling her up from the dreamless depths of her heavy sleep to a pale awareness of something being not right.”

I really liked that description, but I thought the phrase could easily be subdivided without losing its effectiveness. So I mentally rewrote it this way:

“Cecilia had slept well the first part of the night, but later became dimly aware of a restlessness on Colin’s part. That restlessness kept pulling her up from her dreamless depths to a pale awareness of something being wrong.”

I searched for a way to improve the second sentence by using a synonym for “restlessness”.  However, I was unable to find one. I was curious to hear the author’s point of view on this, so I wrote to Sharon Butala. I felt very privileged to get a response:

Well, first, I like long sentences and that is why I write them. I would never shorten that sentence on my own, nor apparently, would either of my editors, as neither asked me to break it up. And the phrase, “something not right,” I think is more interesting, and also closer to Cecilia’s truth, than “something wrong” would be. In English that is a pretty mundane phrase.

Dandy Marcel Proust wrote a lot of those, so I think she’s right. And yes, “being wrong” doesn’t convey the same idea as “something being not right”.

Could Web writing, designed for a broader and impatient readership, include a few long and eloquent sentences? I think it depends on their rhythm. In Sharon’s case, the length might even enhance the idea of “restlessness”. This precise portion that I find long – “that kept pulling her up from the dreamless depths of her heavy sleep” – may be the best way to express the idea of tossing and turning, of restlessness.

* The Penguin book of Canadian short stories, Penguin Canada, Toronto, 2007, pp. 248-261.