Ahem... here 'tis;
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces, the distance serving to blend all into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain, still a weeks ride to the south.
I can think of a couple of improvements but wanted to see how you would handle the run-on-ness of this sentence. thanks.
[This message has been edited by DRaney (edited January 02, 2011).]
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces, the distance serving to blend all into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain, still a weeks ride to the south.
Grammar questions are often posted here. Not sure about sentence critiquing.
I don't think the sentence length is a problem, but the sentence is abstract and confusing. What's a westering sun? Myriad polish surfaces is awkward and I don't know what the polished surfaces are. I can't exactly picture how the distance serves to blend all.
I think simpler, concrete descriptions would do you well. Also, I think you are shifting from an omnisicient to a third person viewpoint within this sentence.
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces, the distance serving to blend all into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain, still a weeks ride to the south.
Not adjusting for any descriptive wording, here's my take on it.
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city reflecting back to them from a myriad of polished surfaces. The distance, from their perspective, served to blend it all into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain still a weeks ride to the south.
I would change westering to westerly or west facing, western, west side, west falling, mid-afternoon, late, or any other way to indicate that the sun was blaring down from the west - but not westering. I'm not even sure if it's a word.
But... yeah.
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces
Is fine as a standalone sentence. It only gets confusing because of what comes after this. I might suggest something like this:
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces. Still a weeks ride to the south, the city's buildings blended into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain.
I think this is a bit less convoluted, dropping the use of 'the distance' which is implied by the 'weeks ride'. You can trust the reader to get the implication of the effects of distance without explicitly stating it. Without the explicit statement, the second sentence's flow is improved.
Also, regarding point of view, I don't think you violate any POV from this if you are in the point of view of the 'they' presumably mentioned in the context. If the city's surfaces appear to be blended, it is precisely because we are in their POV that it appears that way.
[This message has been edited by Osiris (edited January 02, 2011).]
The westering sun shone upon the face of the distant city, reflecting from myriad polished surfaces as a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain still a week's ride to the south.
Respectfully,
Dr. Bob
[This message has been edited by History (edited January 02, 2011).]
My suggestion: the sentence is trying to pack too much information in, which doesn't all need to be in one sentence. Let it breathe by expanding into multiple sentences, not trying to contract it further.
Start with your concept and build up from it.
I'd do something like: They saw the city, still a week's ride to the south, as a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain; the westering sun shone full strength on the face of the city, reflecting back from the myriad polished surfaces.
quote:
Don't tell me the moon is shing; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
I am not a developed writer, but I have read a ton and I think even the greats write poor sentences. I really think this part of the story needs to be shown through a narrative voice closer to the characters. The myriad polished surfaces would be unknown from someone so far away. All the character would catch is maybe a brief glint of light if he was moving and perhaps he could speculate that it is the city he is traveling to.
Also, I am still confused on the westering sun. Doesn't it just mean a sun moving westward (ie what the sun always does)? Or does it mean a sun that is near setting in the western sky, in which its luminence upon the city would be severely lessened?
Anyway, take my comments with a grain of salt. I once posted a short story intro and was told by one person it was the best intro he ever read followed by two other people telling me how terrible it was :-)
Westering- definition unknown, used as a writing ploy to get the reader looking the other way while I try to slip my pet skunk into the library. 
Great suggestions from everyone, thanks. dr
Writing needs dynamic range. It has rhythm that should vary from passage to passage. Tension should increase and decrease, and so should sentence length, otherwise the story becomes monotonous. Those who tend to run on are well advised to write in brief sentences to cure that habit, but unless you have Hemingway's skill with short sentences it is best not to follow that advice too slavishly.
To write action, you must not just master action, but stillness as well. Short, staccato sentences serve action very well by avoiding piling action upon action into an incomprehensible mush. They can also capture that sensation of time stretching, although excessive stage management in an action scene is usually a bad idea.
In stillness you layer impression upon impression, which can be done with either short or long sentences, but either way this requires some rhetorical skill.
Your sentence is meant to capture a moment of stillness, as is often needed before some action commences. Such stillness might be in the suspense before the door is opened to reveal the horror behind, or as in this case that moment when a traveler takes in the immensity of the wasteland he is about to cross. So I think it is appropriate to employ a longer, more legato attack here, linking each impression by sound and structure.
If you choose to do this with a longer, grammatically complex sentence, you must *still* pare down unnecessary features, and choose your words carefully. Thus:
quote:
The westering sun shone full strength against the face of the city, reflecting back to them from myriad polished surfaces, the distance serving to blend all into a single shimmering point of light against the dark mountain, still a weeks ride to the south.
might become something like
quote:
The city, still a week's ride south, shone in the setting sun, countless sparkling surfaces blending into a single spark shimmering against the black backdrop of the mountain beyond.
I have no particular objection to "westering", which is clearly chosen to give an antique patina to the sentence, but I chose "setting" instead for rhetorical reasons. It reinforces the stream of initial sibilants that give the sentence its rhythm: city,still,south,shone,setting,sun, sparking,surfaces... I interrupt that rhythm by switching to plosives when I move from describing the city to describing the mountain (black backdrop beyond).
Giving an antique gloss to a sentence is an art at which Tolkien excelled, by the way. As a philologist he knew that English syntax was more flexible in the past than today, and as the Hobbits travel from nineteenth century Shire to the medieval wild, the characters they meet are more likely to use old words and inverted sentences. Early critics were so put off by this hifalutin' style they failed to notice how selectively he applied this technique. In the wild, the only two characters who speak with fluent modernity are deceivers: Smaug the dragon and Saruman the traitor.
With respect to the plausibility of the imagery here, I think this is a plausible scene if the traveler is about to cross a rugged desert. The desert's aridity accounts for the clarity of the impression the distant city makes. The ruggedness of the terrain and the inadvisability of traveling mid-day account for the length of the journey.