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Managing Fictional Narrative Flow - Prose Style
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 9
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It gets a little more involved if the sentence has more to it, but nonetheless, the same rule applies: Kevin, angry that the cat peed in the potted plant again, put on his heavy work boots, wound up and kicked the screeching, hissing cat.
Subject phrase: Kevin, angry that the cat peed in the potted plant again,
Verb phrase: put on his heavy work boots, wound up and kicked
Object phrase: the screeching, hissing cat.
John Gardner goes through a slightly more complicated example in The Art of Fiction. He observes that it is usually only possible to "load up" only two of the three syntactical phrases without causing the sentence to lose focus. The addition of "screeching, hissing" to the object phrase, for example, might be overloading the sentence. There certainly isn't much more you could add to the phrase without really muddling the sentence.
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