WordPress Daily Prompt: page 82 of the nearest book

It is important to be pithy

The prompt: Open your nearest book to page 82. Take the third full sentence on the page, and work it into a post somehow.

The book: The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R Tolkein

No, answered Frodo, coming back to himself, out of darkness, and finding to his surprise that it was not dark, and that out of the window he could see a sunlit garden.

Whoo. An interesting sentence to start a blog post on, but actually, a pretty easy one, because I had been thinking about this a lot in my recent transcription: the complexity of my language. Tolkien writes, well, complex sentence structure, and obviously didn’t worry about how many commas were in his sentences or how long his paragraphs went. Some of his ideas go on and on and on — sentences that in any English Lit class I’ve taken would have been edited to a third of their length – forever ruining the magnificent tale he wove around Middle Earth.

I struggle with this myself (not to compare myself to Tolkien, but he IS  a hero of mine), because I want to be clear and pithy, but I also want to be true to the writing of this character, which since the beginning of the series, has had a very formal voice.

How do you balance that in your writing? The ‘natural voice’ in the story and worry of tiring your reader out with a sentence that is longer than a tweet?

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