Strangle that word dreams. You don't dream up a form and put the truth in it. The truth creates its own form. Form is necessity in the work of art. You know what you mean but you ain’t got the right words for it.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Letter to ‘A.’, 4 May 1957” (The Habit of Being)
I'll take a simple C to G and feel brand new about it.
—Allen Toussaint, “I’ll Take a Melody”
Here is what I want to do in this essay in the plainest possible terms: I want to help you attune yourself to the music of language. I want to get you to start thinking about sentences as sonic ecosystems rather than as Instacart deliveries of information. I want you to understand sound, style, and aesthetics as worthy means toward meaning and, still more, as sources of meaning in themselves. I hope to persuade you to regard every sentence you write—every single one—as both a problem and an opportunity, a challenge and therefore a proving ground: a crucible, a field of battle, a place to play—and play to win.
In his introduction to an anthology called New American Stories, editor Ben Marcus writes,
To be a fine story writer is to be an artist of language, someone who uses sentences to produce feeling. However simple that sounds, there is something extraordinary about it to me, given how few sentences that we encounter in our daily lives can manage to make us feel anything, to stir us toward revelation. The sentence, as a technology, is used for so many rote exchanges, so many basic communication requirements, that to rescue it from these necessary mundanities, to turn it into feeling, is to do something strenuous and heroic.
What might Marcus mean? Consider: Writing is unique among all art forms in that the medium of the art is also used—is mostly used—for a million other things, from weather reports and driver’s licenses and past-due notices and traffic signs and instruction manuals and marriage certificates and grocery store checkout line tabloids and the list of ingredients in the frozen burrito you’re standing in line to buy and all ten thousand emails that populate your inbox when you make the mistake of glancing at your phone. Painters don’t use brush and oils to text friends. Musicians don’t play concertos in emails to bosses. Weavers don’t use looms to check their socials. Dancers don’t pirouette to know the daily news. Yet you probably read and write a novel’s worth of words every week of your life without even trying, and a lot of that time without even paying full attention to what you’re taking in or putting out. Our lives force us to serve as dumping grounds and transfer stations for a lot of lazy, redundant, bureaucratic, ill-considered, unimportant, boring, or otherwise degraded language. No getting around that. In order, therefore, to try to make ourselves worthy of the strenuous heroism that transmutes mundanity into feeling, we have to start by getting all this shit out of our heads. We must unlearn everything we take for granted about what language is, what it can do, and what it could do.
The writer Garielle Lutz, one of my heroes, is a fanatic for language: a Jesuit priest or Jedi knight of the sentence. In her invaluable craft essay, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” she posits the sentence as “the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy.” Lutz prizes “narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.”
Perhaps you are neither Jesuit nor Jedi. That’s okay. I know that not all of us will want to write this way all of the time, and some of us may not want to write this way any of the time, but we all owe it to ourselves—to our readers and our own craft—to be aware that such devotion is possible, and that this ecstatic discipline, vision, and mastery can be ours. What follows are some sentences that make exemplary, exciting, unusual, sometimes counterintuitive use of language. I’m going to share what I admire about each one and demonstrate how, on a technical level, each writer achieves the given effect. These aren’t the only examples, they’re just some of my favorites. And to be clear: there are plenty of other perfectly good theoretical and practical approaches to writing, language, and composition. This is what has worked for me, and I ask you to take it as a starting rather than an ending point. Consider this an invitation to explore.
Here is a sentence I love and envy from a poem called “Governors on Sominex” by David Berman:
Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind.
The sentence is eleven words long. The syntax and diction are simple. And yet the central image is so resolutely original that I find myself surprised anew every time I read it. I’ve never heard hedges described as a “long limousine” before, but it feels right in an almost pre-intellectual way, and the more I sit with it, the more clearly I can see what the speaker is seeing. A trimmed hedgerow in front of a house might be boxy and low, and so might a limo—not in an identical way but similar enough to justify the image. As for Tampa, I’m not sure why he chose this locale, but he did, so maybe we start to see a Gulf Coast sunset, because what else could he mean by suggesting the sky is dying? Maybe you even get a sense of the speaker’s mood, if you think that “long limousine” is pretty close to “Long Black Limousine,” that is, a hearse, which is the name of an old country song: It’s an obscure reference, and I might be overreaching (though I am sure Berman knew the song) but whether there by design or coincidence, it smuggles death into the scene well before the sentence arrives at the word die.
Berman marries simplicity with strangeness, creating something that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Surprise gives way to recognition, and that shift is facilitated in part by the sounds of the words he chooses, specifically the repetition of the “l” sound in “long limousine” followed by the triplicate long i in sky, die, and behind. It’s also a finely weighted sentence. The eleven words contain sixteen syllables that split evenly (eight and eight) at the invisible line between the noun limousine and the indefinite article a, which is expressed in breath as the very slightest pause separating the sentence into discrete syntactical zones that we sense even without punctuation to guide us.
Here are two more sentences I love and envy. The first is the opening line of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”:
In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.
The second sentence is from the middle of Rebecca Schiff’s short story “Another Cake”:
My mother, my aunts, and I marched past the other mourners like we were getting our diplomas.
The sentences are stylistically distinctive. Each is in its own way a model of economy and verve. Each throws a curveball in terms of content, but you wouldn’t call either of them confusing. Both pay attention to sound and syntax, yielding unexpected use of familiar words and ideas.
Schiff’s narrator is making a grim joke at her father’s funeral. She is a powerfully observant and painfully self-aware character, which comes across in her constant, caustic wisecracking. The narrator’s psychology, her unique way of inhabiting and interpreting the world, is what the sentence is about, at least as much as it is about some people walking across a room. To take it a step further: This sentence is also about the letter m. Of the seventeen words in the sentence, mappears in five of the first eleven and again in the last, like a band reprising its hit for the encore. It is the logic of consonance itself that suggests the verb marched rather than the obvious walked, and then that choice in turn suggests the simile in the shocking yet perversely apt kicker. Diplomas! My god. Even in this solemn, devastating moment, the narrator is unable to stop herself from seeking out the just-right wrong thing to say. Her family has “graduated” into fatherlessness. They have earned their degrees in grief.
Lahiri’s first-person narrator could hardly be farther from Schiff’s. Lilia, the daughter of Indian immigrants to the United States, is remembering a Bangladeshi Muslim man she knew as a girl. Her parents would have him over to eat dinner and watch the news. Mr. Pirzada was looking for word of his hometown, Dacca, the site of heavy fighting during what would come to be known as Bangladesh’s War of Independence. Though the story is heart-wrenching, Lilia’s tone is always studiously calm, sometimes even a bit arch. You hear this in her choice of “Came to Dine” rather than, say, “Came Over for Dinner,” in “confections” rather than “candy,” and in the stiff “hopes of ascertaining” whether his wife and children are alive or dead. Lilia’s decorous, precise language is an assertion of control, a way of mitigating both the horror of war and the retrospective ignorance of childhood. The gulf between Lilia’s past and present understandings of the war, her parents, and Mr. Pirzada himself, are the central concern of the story. As a child, Lilia’s interest was wholly captured by the candy. Looking back, she knows far more about the geopolitics of the region, and realizes she may have been a sort of surrogate daughter for Mr. Pirzada. Lahiri’s restrained prose ironizes the pairing of confections and hopes, and in so doing establishes character, tone, and a sense of stakes by the end of the story’s opening sentence.
Now for a different sort of sentence, a far more complicated music. This sentence belongs to Garielle Lutz herself, from her story “The Smell of How the World Had Ground Itself onto Somebody Else.”
From what I gather, I had to have had the sense, sooner or later, to get up and have a look at the outline my body had pressed into the carpet during sleep—the clearing I had made by pushing aside clothes and food wrappers and newspapers and such—and it could not have resembled the shape of any of the familiar postures of convalescence, because I remember thinking there were still some people, two or three people—I kept adding them together differently—who could be counted on, if reached at the right time of the month, to say “I was just thinking about you,” and these were not the people I thought to call.
Nothing about this sentence is simple. It is 114 words long, the syntax is tortured, and though the speaker is meticulous about word choice and description, the words they choose and the form they’ve found make it hard to parse exactly what they’re saying. If it weren’t so clearly deliberate, you might think this sentence was a bad translation from a foreign language. Which, in a way, it is, only the foreign language here is also English—the English of the speaker’s highly distressed inner life, convoluted thought patterns, and profound alienation from the world around them. This sentence is an odd but good example of Flannery O’Connor’s dictum that “the truth creates its own form.” It is also a good reminder that O’Connor was not referring to universal truths but rather to the bespoke dynamic human truth of the individual artist, the individual work of art. Imagine a whole story—a whole book, several books—written in Lutz’s style. (These things exist.) There’s no way to skim this style of writing, no way to read for “what happens” because there is no separation between what happens in the story and what happens in your mind as you read it. The text becomes an event, and its meaning is the full range of your intellectual and emotional responses over the duration of your reading it: everything from confusion and repulsion and a desire to quit, to delight at the sheer daring and the welcome shock of unexpected identification. After all, who hasn’t felt at times like their own heart is written in a language nobody else can read?
A point of order. Even though this talk is on “the sentence,” and even though I am asking you to think about your sentences as self-contained “theaters of endeavor” in the sense that Lutz proposes, we know that sentences rarely occur on their own. Typically, we pack them into paragraphs which get gathered into scenes which are themselves grouped into stories, essays, memoirs, or novels. The sentence, then, however valuable in its own right, also serves as the primary building block of the voice, the style, the governing intelligence of the work itself. Put another way: Syntax sustained over time is style, and a style elevated to a worldview becomes an aesthetic.
Here are five sentences from Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, a novel written in 536 sections, any one of which would fit on an index card. This is section 4:
Three ex-husbands or whoever they were.
I’m sure they have their opinions.
I would say to them, “Peace, our timing was bad, the light was ugly, things didn’t work out.” I’d say, “Although you certainly were doing your all, now weren’t you.”
I would say, “Drink!”
Robison’s narrator is aggressive, wisecracking, unclear about basic details of her own life and unconcerned about that fact. She bounces along from sarcasm to pure fantasy—all those I woulds—and the section neither starts nor ends where one might expect it to, leaving the reader feeling as jostled and off-kilter as the character seems to be, which is emblematic of the novel and of Robison in general. Much of the pleasure of her sentences is in the way they juke and swerve, the fun you can feel her having as she careens around the page. This is radical minimalism. Robison’s whole section is forty-six words long, less than half the size of the single Lutz sentence we examined earlier. Because so much has been stripped away, what’s left is a jagged, rapid-fire associative logic that we might more readily affiliate with poetry than prose.
Here’s another version of poetic prose rhythm from a writer whose name sounds like “Mary Robison” but whose writing does not. This is Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Housekeeping is one of the most lyrical, lucid, comfortless, and sublime books I have ever read. This passage comes fairly late in the book. The narrator, Ruth, a teenage girl living in Northern Idaho, is alone in the woods in the winter, standing in the overgrown ruins of an abandoned house.