Writing for Style: The Freight Train Part 2

Richard Lanham, in Analyzing Prose (2003), called a succession of compound written structures a running style—sentences that appear to spill from the mind as a "rambling, associative syntax of conversation."

And, in The New Oxford Guide to Writing (1988), Thomas Kane characterized the running style as the "freight-train style". Kane said the freight-train style was useful when you wish to link a series of events, ideas, impressions, feelings, or perceptions as immediately as possible, without judging their relative value or imposing a logical structure upon them.

This style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a film, guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a continuous experience. The freight-train style, then, brings experiences closely together and can achieve a high degree of fluidity.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens uses the running (or freight-train) style to give an impression of the contradictions of the time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The freight train style can be effective in short bursts, but its limitations lie in its lack of subtlety. Thomas Kane comments that the downside of the freight-train style is that it implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major; others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on.

The only writer I know who can sustain the freight train style is Roddy Doyle. In his hands it conveys passion, excitement, complexity, and the pull of fate. It can be spectacular.

From A Star Called Henry:

(My Mother) walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he'd found inside an open door somewhere back the way he'd come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she'd made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn't see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.