J. S. Jasko

Blog Post 3:
Pontifications on Craft

Posted by J. S. Jasko | October 4, 2024

Here’s a little secret for all you aspiring writers out there: Anyone can write a sentence. It’s true! The important thing is whether the sentence is a good sentence or a bad sentence written by an idiot. Take, for instance, the opening line of Mr. Weatherby Reads the Morning Paper, the awful and poorly reviewed new book by my literary rival, S. J. Sasko:
 
Mr. Weatherby was sitting in his favorite chair and reading the morning paper.
 
Now, this sentence might impress that guy who begs for pepperoni scraps outside your parents’ deli, but it certainly won’t win you any esteemed literary prizes. So what exactly sets off this muddled word trash from the finely crafted syntax of yours truly? To start with, it doesn’t even have any commas, and all good sentences have more commas than you could possibly want to count. Let’s take the same sentence and add a bit of panache, shall we?
 
Mr. Weatherby was sitting in his favorite leather armchair and reading the morning paper, his green eyes scanning the headlines of the day, when the bad shrimp he ate for dinner last night in a moment of weakness began its assault on the old man’s stomach.
 
Observe how these rich details bring the sentence to life now in a way that S. J. Sasko could never have managed. You can practically see the green of Mr. Weatherby’s eyes and feel the leather of his chair right there on the page! The sentence is getting better, but there are still only two commas and zero parenthetical asides to extend the overall length of the sentence in the interest of threatening readers with the possibility of having to start the whole thing over again after the slightest lapse in attention makes them lose their place. But it is not your fault that the world can no longer concentrate on a simple page-long sentence for five minutes before the urge to grab their phone and search for “funny tightrope-walker fails” becomes too strong. Our duty as writers is to educate them and provide a nice literary salve to this contagious poor-attention-span back rash:
 
Mr. Weatherby was sitting in his favorite leather armchair and reading the morning paper, his green eyes scanning the headlines of the day (that unwell grocer was sticking exotic fruits in people’s car exhausts again), when the bad shrimp he ate for dinner last night in a moment of weakness began its assault on the old man’s stomach (he knew he shouldn’t have eaten it, but his wife was so smug when advising him against eating shrimp from a gas station that he felt to the very core of his being that he had to commit to eating that shrimp—which was really rather gray, if he was being completely honest—or lose what little part of himself he was still desperately holding on to after twenty years of marriage).
 
Indeed! There’s nothing like a dash-enclosed observation within a parenthetical aside to really get your readers jonesing for more punctuation. We’re almost there now, but we have one last trick up the writerly sleeve of our writer’s blazer: the tender semicolon, which allows world-class writers to attach another sentence-length clause to the same one instead of just writing a second sentence and releasing readers from their syntactic stranglehold. Observe, then, the final form of our sentence coming to fruition:
 
Mr. Weatherby was sitting in his favorite leather armchair and reading the morning paper, his green eyes scanning the headlines of the day (that unwell grocer was sticking exotic fruits in people’s car exhausts again), when the bad shrimp he ate for dinner last night in a moment of weakness began its assault on the old man’s stomach (he knew he shouldn’t have eaten it, but his wife was so smug when advising him against eating shrimp from a gas station that he felt to the very core of his being that he now had to commit to eating that shrimp—which was really rather gray, if he was being completely honest—or lose what little part of himself he was still desperately holding on to after twenty years of marriage); by the time he realized what was happening, of course, it was much too late to prevent the reckoning that was already upon him, and when he leaped to his feet in alarm—he was wearing his late father’s moccasins, as he often did these days—his tiny dog, Old Dry Fur, who was sleeping on the carpet nearby and dreaming happy dog dreams, was blasted in the face by a powerful torrent of shrimp sludge that burst straight through the seat of Mr. Weatherby’s corduroys like a fire hose that only sprayed chunky brown water and didn’t really help to put out any fires (they don’t make corduroys like they used to, do they?), and it was precisely at this moment that Mrs. Weatherby arrived home with a fresh bowl of baba ghanoush from the corner store—which she planned to bring to her book club later that night—whereupon she took one look at her absolutely ruined living room and the moist dog and husband who resided there and said, “I told you not to eat that shrimp.”
 
And there you have it: an expertly crafted sentence with just the right amount of word girth. It leaves the reader hungry for more, and likely also hungry for baba ghanoush. What burning questions will the next sentence answer? For example, is there more to the story of Mr. Weatherby’s late father’s moccasins? Did he lovingly craft them with his own weathered hands during the war? And what book was Mrs. Weatherby reading for her book club, and did the participants all manage to read the book this time, or was it just like every other book club ever in existence? All this is possible and more, hopeful writers, with my secrets fastened firmly to your writer’s toolbelt and accompanying jean shorts.

The journey is now yours to take.
 
[Update: Several minutes after this blog post was published, all copies of S. J. Sasko’s Mr. Weatherby Reads the Morning Paper were pulled from store shelves when it became clear just how lacking his opening sentence truly was.]

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As a tenured professor in the important field of Internet Comments and Attention Ratios, I am well-versed in the inherent value of writing a comment on the internet that is longer than the article upon which I am commenting—the longer the comment, the more sweet nectar of attention one receives—and thus I can confirm, though no one asked me of course, that J. S. Jasko’s expert pontifications on our humble nomenclature of words are a resounding success that will embolden every academic’s pursuit of lengthening our labyrinthine language and the dream of having someone finally be impressed enough by my carefully constructed comments to join my mother and me at that nice Italian restaurant for linguini and candlelit lectures on their lexicon.

Posted by Prof. Look At Me on 10/4/24 at 7:30 a.m.

Get off my website.

Posted by J. S. Jasko on 10/4/24 at 8:01 a.m.

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