Good contemporary fiction shuns the ornate convoluted language of former eras. Today’s readers demand clarity and simplicity.
“You win.” Jacob said as he collapsed into a chair feeling his exhaustion for the first time looking at the woman with her dark mahogany colored hair pulled up into a tight bun.
It’s a syntactical mess of a sentence: too many modifying phrases are tacked onto one other. Just read it aloud to someone, and watch your listener’s face go blank with befuddlement….
Try to parse it: is it Jacob or the chair that is “feeling exhaustion?” Grammatically, who or what is “looking at the woman?” Some of the phrases don’t belong with the others conceptually: “with her mahogony colored hair, etc.” for example, has nothing to do with the sentence’s main thrust, Jacob’s acceptance of defeat.
You may be a master of sentence construction, like Henry James, but even so, try to staunch the urge to build such a teetering monstrosity. Instead, divide it:
“You win,” Jacob said as he collapsed into a chair, feeling his exhaustion for the first time. He looked at the woman with her dark mahogany colored hair pulled up into a tight bun.”
Now there are two discrete units of meaning:
1) (Jacob) collapsed, exhausted, in defeat.
2) He looked at the woman, noticing her hair.
No, it’s not great writing, but at least this version won’t get you laughed out of room.
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I wonder if our age dictates our natural inclination when it comes to sentence length. I am constantly writing very long, complex/compound sentences in first drafts and then revising them to shorter, multiple sentences.