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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/6975
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm writing a story targeted towards children in which the protagonist is a young girl. I find that in writing her dialog and the narrative, I'm producing a lot of very long sentences, to the point that an entire paragraph may be seven or eight lines long, but consisting of a single sentence. It feels stylistic to me, sort of relating to the youth and impetuousness of the main character. It's not that the entire thing is written this way; these very long sentences tend to occur at times where the character is upset, or very busy, or rushed, or has a lot going on. I wasn't thinking about it specifically when I was writing them, they just came out naturally as I wrote, but I think they are meant to convey the mood a bit.

Or am I just rationalizing poor writing?

**A few examples:**

In context, the main character ("Antimony") is upset and thinking about other times she was upset:

> And once in the kitchen, when Antimony devised what she thought would be a very clever recipe for a cake which she wanted to make for her mother's birthday, where instead of using baking powder, she would use paprika so the cake would be all red and beautiful, and instead of eggs and milk, she would use eggs and orange juice because everyone knows that orange juice goes better with eggs than milk does.

A few lines later:

> And when the timer dinged and Antimony opened the oven and carefully pulled out the oven rack and saw what had happened, she cried because she had been so excited about her clever recipe, and because she wanted so badly to surprise her mother with a nice birthday cake, and because it had taken so much work and she was very tired and now she had nothing to show for it, and because anyway she didn't even have a present to give to her mother now.

An unrelated example:

> The work was good to focus on to keep her mind off her troubles---especially once she was done gathering the wood and no longer had to wander around so much---and in no time at all she had a small fire going, which turned into a bigger fire, and then an even bigger fire, and then a fire which was a bit too large and she had to poke at the logs with a long stick to move them about the right way so that it would settle down.

Original score: 10