How to write a sentence
Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.
Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature. But take a writer who couldn’t be further from his self-conscious showmanship – William Trevor – and listen to a sentence early in his story “A Day”. “It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman.” Here, the barely perceptible aural effect is all about sequence. Mrs Lethwes may be the subject of the sentence but Trevor weighs her down under the qualifying weight of time before she ever appears to then discover her fate. He does this over and over in the story. The reader may never notice it but when we talk about Trevor’s elegiac tone, this is what we mean. Not simply that he writes sad stories but that the pathology of his characters has been worked down in to the rhythm of his sentences.
Read The Art of Good Writing by Adam Haslett in FT.
We remember how our lit professor introduced us to the James Joyce story The Boarding House (from Dubliners). Read the first line: ‘Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter.’ Note the rhythm: Chop-chop chop-chop-chop chop-chop chop-chop.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 24th, 2011 at 00:05
I have Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Got it from a rummage bin. I love it.
January 24th, 2011 at 11:34
My view is that Strunk and White’s minimalist rules are appropriate — even mandatory — for young writers (not just fiction writers, but all kinds — journalists, reporters, even business people) still in high school or university.
As the novice writer gains more experience in writing (and in life), he or she also acquires more knowledge about the world (and about himself or herself) and also acquires more self-confidence to write more elaborately (but one hopes still appropriately so), in seeming violation of Strunk and White.
Then at some point, perhaps not long before nor long after mid-career, the by-now experienced writer might find that he or she has reverted back to (something close to) the minimalism advocated by Strunk and White — but now with sentences enriched by experience and maturity, as evidenced by, among others, vocabulary, nuance, even a curious turn of phrase, which he or she was incapable of writing in his or her youth.
JZ, I wonder if you or your other correspondents here have a view on this — or is this far too self-evident to be worth discussing?
January 24th, 2011 at 22:15
hahahaha I’m so guilty of this. I don’t think I can write a proper sentence to save my life.
January 24th, 2011 at 23:30
If you can’t do this instinctively, like an NBA player dribbling or shooting a basketball, then you haven’t found your voice, and it’s useless trying to be a “stylist.”
January 25th, 2011 at 11:32
On the matter of “instinctiveness,” I don’t believe that the ability to write well is inborn — it is a skill, and like all skills can be learned.
Part of the learning process is indeed finding one’s voice, as well as evolving one’s writing style.
The only real determinant therefore is how hard one is willing to work to learn how to write well.