contains those "See Spot run!" sentences.
        Let's perform an experiment. You, dear reader, are the experimental animal. Here, put this collar on. Comfortable? Okay. Try not to scratch. Now, select a chunk of your writing, an article or a story. (Not a recipe or a poem, now!) Then, using the "Search and Replace" function of your word-grinder, insert a "line break" after every period, exclamation point, question mark or quotation mark that ends a sentence. The first few sentences of my column then run as
  
Remember Spot?
  
Sure.
  
He ran.
  
Dick ran.
  
Jane ran.
  
We saw.
  
        Neat. Compact. Now, if you've done this with a piece of your work, will it look like my example or will there be sentences of greatly varying lengths? Print it out and turn the paper so that the start of the sentences is at the bottom. Now we have a picket fence of sentences. Is it a picket fence like the one in the Currier and Ives icky cottage scenes? Or does it look like a badly pruned Spanish broom?
        No hard rules, here. There are accomplished writers who use many small sentences, and some who use many very long ones. Too many "shorties," however well done, give the reader a vague sense that they are, well, trivial. In contrast, the "longies" seem ponderous. But there is a rhythm in reading. Johnny One-Note writers need to lure the reader to participate, if subliminally, in the rhythm that is in the writer's mind.
        Back when word-count limits weren't so tight it was traditional for a writer to spend a page or so in vivid descriptions of the venue and the main characters. Some editors who are not readers ask the writer to emulate the excellence of a Lovecraft. Well, read them. You often have to grind through a long stretch before things start to happen. Then there is this,
  
"In a hole there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
   
One sentence of seven words, one of forty-two. And the venue is established. Or look at this,
  
"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not crumb of dirt anywhere. not a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are all dead. Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy."
        Yup. Seven, eleven, ten, eight. Not really
a lumpy fence. Each idea sits in its own tiny sentence; Miller could do that, he broke a
  

 "Susie let herself in. They were on a key basis now. 'Hi, Collie! How's our pal?'"
  
        Four, seven, two, three. I see the cat. The cat sees me. The cat doesn't care. I made a diagram to see how nice a fence it was. Except for my long and contorted sentences explaining the science of the situation, an explanation that I didn't have the skill to bring out in the dialogue, almost my entire story was composed of short sentences, varying from four to ten words. The editors to whom I had submitted it all saw the cat and sent her home.
        Before you start counting the words in your sentences, try reading the piece aloud.  If you can't hear a rhythm - sharps and flats, semiquavers and whole notes - then the reader won't either. He's no more tone-deaf than you.
        One little trick I use when a story seems fog-bound is to snip it into, not sentences, but mere phrases. Let's look at yours. Did you say several things about a character? Try sticking them together in different ways - pairs or triplets. Don't worry about the connectives. Just see if the raw thoughts might belong together.
        Okay, now we have some high pickets. Do we have a too-long sentence that says he was tall and wore old-fashioned clothes? You might find places where he can separately be tall and be dated? Maybe he is tall and walks purposefully. That's a logical twinning. You can always put the old-fashioned clothing elsewhere. Maybe, as he speaks, if he does, you can link his formal speech with his clothing image.
        Clauses are the Lego blocks of our craft. Long after we tire of building the standard choo-choo station with them, the blocks are still good for making a space shuttle or a Jeep or a flemsilpucker. The same is true with clauses, phrases, ideas. If you have just finished a piece of work and race to get it into the morning post, we can hope the Bad Witch of Bulwer-Lytton trips you on the way and the papers blow out of your hand. Your work deserves better. Pull its chitterlings apart and reassemble them until the prose is clear and nobody any longer sees the cat. Like this:
        "Dick and his sister laughed at Spot's antics. He raced first to Dick, then to Jane as though they were pylons in some canine Test Match. It was definitely a canine sport.  Puff sat and stared at the scene with her usual feline hauteur."
        Eight, eighteen, six, twelve. Not too bad. Sure, it does involve some words and concepts which may be beyond the budding reader, but most kids, if stories interest them, will work through even advanced literature, inventing meanings for the words they don't know. Or, Heaven forfend, they may get an adult involved. Adults and kids used to have reading experiences with read, paper-and-ink books. Batteries not included.
        Me? Read to a kid? Or worse, listen while he lisps his way through a story? There are few occupations more important to the world. And you just might learn something about writing. Listen to that youthful sing-song and hear a rhythm. They're singing our song!
 

Remember Spot? Sure. He ran. Dick ran. Jane ran. We saw. But do you remember Puff? She just sat and watched, bemused, as Dick and Jane and Spot ran. Cats just don't run because everyone does.
        Why do we immediately recognize this as childhood literature? Well, it

 lot of rules. A less-known writer wouldn't dare that sort of thing.
  
       As I look over my rejected stories,I find many that have this sort of "rhythm." Like this ill-starred star-story,