Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the efficient, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Books, it appears, should be neat and streamlined. Language shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good story. There is a craving for easily relatable and sympathetic characters. Among critics and reviewers, the plain style is more likely to be praised than the elaborate or sprawling. Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent. Drab prose is everywhere.

Yet so many of the most esteemed writers – the ones we return to again and again – are of the baroque school. It is hard, for instance, not to be bowled over by the improvisatory verve of Saul Bellow’s sentences. They are vital and inclusive, teeming with life. This is Bellow’s Augie March recounting how he fell in love with books:

I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else — that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding.

And who can be indifferent to the impressionistic metaphoricity of Virginia Woolf’s prose, where things “quiver,” “tremble” “melt” and “overflow,” constantly threatening to exceed themselves? Take Woolf’s depiction of one of Clarissa Dalloway’s lucid epiphanies in “Mrs. Dalloway”:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge, like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores.

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As a reader I feel energized by writers who give us life at its fullest expression. For instance, I sit up straight at the sudden bursts of vividness that rupture the calm surface of domesticity in Christina Stead’s novels. In her classic “The Man Who Loved Children,” Stead doesn’t simply state that Henny, one of the main characters, is discontented with her marriage, but instead pulls off a bracing description of how “every room” in her house has become:

… a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.

And I cannot help but marvel at Angela Carter’s crammed sentences and how, for all their weight and violent grandeur, they sustain a kind of perpetual motion. Take this single line from “Nights at the Circus” where Carter gives us the startling view from a trans-Siberian train:

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky.

Of recent years, David Foster Wallace is perhaps the most impressive writer when it comes to stretching the sentence beyond its seeming limits. His prose can be so obsessively sensitive to detail, especially to texture – often to a forensic degree, breaking things down into their minutest components and then zooming in hard – that it leaves the reader feeling both exhilarated and exhausted. In one of the greatest passages from “Infinite Jest,” a book made up of great passages, he almost spells out his own method:

Everything came at too many frames per second. Everything had too many aspects. But it wasn’t disorienting. The intensity wasn’t unmanageable. It was just intense and vivid. It wasn’t like being high, but it was still very: lucid. The world seemed suddenly almost edible, there for the ingesting.

And then there is Vladimir Nabokov – perhaps the ultimate practitioner of the baroque style in 20th-century fiction. A Nabokov sentence presents life at its most particular and qualified, and therefore at its most consequential and charged. Yet even his apparently simple and inane sentences are quickened by an irrepressible alliteration and assonance:

A silver-and-sable skybab squirrel sat sampling a cone on the back of a bench.

Not every sentence, however, can or should stretch its seams. Not every thought, not every subject, warrants a maximalist approach (a point I have attempted to explore in my own fiction through parody). The elaborate has to be earned and justified, lest excess become a tyranny of style, whereby the prose levels out into an unhelpful equivalence of so many adjectives, adverbs, phrases and images. Proliferation shouldn’t come at the expense of distinction. Bare prose, in the right places, can be equally intense or vivid. The writers quoted above, on the whole, understood this. They recognized the vital importance of modulation. Without variation, stylistic excess risks evasion. That is to say it risks degenerating into a frantic inattentiveness, simply flitting from one thing to the next, never allowing itself to persevere within the more complex and challenging demands of being.

An embellished style can also be a lazy and imprecise style, taking us further away from the subject at hand rather than magnifying it; and linguistic profusion can be a mask for a privation of feeling or experience. As a young writer I know I risk being guilty of these sins myself. But for expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the correct term after all. Life, they seem to say, is rarely transparent, and therefore neither are their sentences. More than this, their sentences do not merely reflect reality in any passive or apathetic sense, but actively work to create their own multiple realities. This is not to conflate their styles. They are fiercely individualistic writers. Excess serves very different functions for each of them, whether as an expression of wonder, adaptability, individuality, free will; or as a means of self-fashioning; even as a survival tactic. But whatever it embodies or performs, the sentence in their hands is expansive rather than constrictive. They demonstrate to us, again and again, that sentences are made up of multiple units – from the clause to the phrase to the individual word to the punctuation mark – and that each of these units can be its own little world, its own site of possibility. When the units are made to work in unison, the sentence becomes a powerful space of transformation and particularity that transcends any straightforward declarative utterance.

Above all else, language should be generous and liberating, and these writers remind us of the pure pleasure to be found in the free play and musicality of words. Their sentences sing rather than grumble or shout, and we are all the richer for them.

Ben Masters is the author of the novel “Noughties.”