Life & Wisdom Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon is pitching a theory of prose that doubles as a rebuke to the baggy, self-indulgent sentence. “Short, sharply focused” isn’t just about speed; it’s about control. He’s describing writing that behaves like good cinema: hard cuts, clean framing, no dead air. Each sentence should land with the completeness of a “whole scene,” meaning it carries its own setting, action, and implication, then hands the reader off to the next beat without apology.

The subtext is craft masquerading as austerity. Sturgeon, a science-fiction writer working in an era when genre fiction was often dismissed as pulp, is quietly arguing for seriousness through discipline. If every sentence can be a scene, the work stops being “mere” storytelling and becomes engineered experience. That’s also a defensive move: when you’re writing about the speculative, you can’t afford mush. You have to earn the reader’s belief line by line.

There’s wit in the exaggeration, too. A “whole scene” per sentence is an impossible standard, which is exactly why it’s useful. It forces compression: verbs that do real labor, nouns with texture, details chosen for maximum narrative voltage. The intent isn’t to ban long sentences; it’s to ban lazy ones. Sturgeon is telling writers to stop asking readers to carry the weight of meaning. Build it into the sentence, let it play on the page, then cut to the next shot.