Tom's Life Bits

You've loaded an old revision of the document! If you save it, you will create a new version with this data.

===== How To's New sgathering & Storytelling Writing Tools =====

//by Roy Peter Clark//\\
Published Mar. 27, 2014 2:48 pm\\

The editors of American Scholar have chosen “Ten Best Sentences” from
literature, and readers have suggested many more. They threw in an eleventh
for good measure. This lovely feature caught me in the middle of a new book
project, “Art of X-ray Reading,” in which I take classic passages such as these
and look beneath the surface of the text. If I can see the machinery working
down there, I can reveal it to writers, who can then add to their toolboxes.

With respect and gratitude to American Scholar, I offer brief interpretations
below on how and why these sentences work:

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once
pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of
this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood
nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder.\\
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

This sentence is near the end of the novel, a buildup to its more famous
conclusion. It begins with something we can “see,” vanished trees. There is a
quick tension between the natural order and the artificial one, a kind of
exploitation of the land that is as much part of our cultural heritage as the Myth
of the West and Manifest Destiny. “Vanished” is a great word. “The Great
Gatsby” sounds like the name of a magician, and he at times vanishes from
sight, especially after the narrator sees him for the first time gazing out at
Daisy’s dock. What amazes me about this sentence is how abstract it is. Long
sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this
one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end,
“his capacity for wonder.”

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in
the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.\\
—James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Why these are the ‘Ten Best Sentences’This sentence also comes near the end of the novel, but is not the very end. It
has the feel of an anthem, a secular credo, coming from Stephen Dedalus, who,
in imitation of Joyce himself, feels the need to leave Ireland to find his true soul.
The poet is a maker, of course, like a blacksmith, and the mythological
character Dedalus is a craftsman who built the labyrinth and constructed a set
of wings for his son Icarus. The wax in those wings melted when Icarus flew too
close to the sun. He plunged into the sea to his death. This is where the
magic of a single word comes into play: “forge.” For the narrator it means to
strengthen metal in fire. But it also means to fake, to counterfeit, perhaps a
gentle tug at Stephen’s hubris.

This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its
bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited
refugees—partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they
would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of
coolness and life, and the estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their
quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also
partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic
urge to hide under leaves.\\
//—John Hersey, “Hiroshima”//\\

Great writers fear not the long sentence, and here is proof. If a short sentence
speaks a gospel truth, then a long one takes us on a kind of journey. This is
best done when subject and verb come at the beginning, as in this example,
with the subordinate elements branching to the right. There is room here for an
inventory of Japanese cultural preferences, but the real target is that final
phrase, an “atavistic urge to hide under leaves,” even in the shadow of the most
destructive technology ever created, the atomic bomb.

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just
circles and circles of sorrow.\\
//—Toni Morrison, “Sula”//\\

I did not know this sentence, but I love it. It expresses a kind of synesthesia, a
mixing of the senses, in which a sound can also be experienced as a shape. 
Add to this effect the alliteration of “loud” and “long,” and the concentric
movement of sound in “circles and circles of sorrow,” and we have something
truly memorable.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in
our turn?

—Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”

Who could not admire a sentence with such a clear demarcation beginning,
middle, and end? Thank you, commas. Only a single word – “neighbor” – has
more than one syllable. Austen gives us 19 words that add up to 66 letters, an
astonishing efficiency of fewer than four letters per word. But this math is
invisible to the meaning. She begins by asking what at first seems like ametaphysical question: “for what do we live.” The social commentary that
follows brings us crashing down to earth in a phrase, and carries us home with
a delicious sense of revenge, a kind of sophisticated punch line.

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the
market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people
seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring
of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people
had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.\\

—Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”\\

Didion wrote a New Yorker essay on Hemingway that included a brilliant close
reading of the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. There is something
suggestive of that passage here, a march of time constructed from the
repetition of the smallest words: the, it, and. Then comes a wonderful dropping
off, as in a steep waterfall, as meaning flows down a stream of optimism with
phrases like “sense of high social purpose” and “spring of brave hopes and
national promise,” only to fall off the edge and crash upon the boulders of “it
was not.” Not once but twice.

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.\\
—Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”\\

Donald Murray used to preach the 2-3-1 rule of emphasis. Place the least
emphatic words in the middle. The second most important go at the
beginning. The most important nails the meaning at the end. Hemingway
offers a version of that here. A metaphor of flowing water is framed by two
abstractions Anger and Obligation. That fact that the metaphor is drawn from
the action of the narrative makes it more effective.

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is
not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man
to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be
equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of
their pockets.\\
—Charles Dickens, ”Nicholas Nickleby”\\

Older sentences feel more ornate. Long gone from our diction is the
“euphuistic” style of long intricately balanced sentences that showed off the
brilliance of the writer, but asked too much of the reader. But in Dickens the
sentence as argument feels just right. In short, it says that poor men cannot
hope for justice. It does so by an act of civic demythology, hitting the target
again with the memorable final phrase “the furniture of their pockets.”
In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions,
a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always
there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and
directness and hard labor.
Again we see how a longer sentence can flow from the work done near the
beginning: “he was like America itself.” Such a simile always evokes an instant
question from the reader: “How was he like America itself?” (How hot is it,
Johnny?) The answer combines description and allegory. He is a living
microcosm of American strength and weakness. In an unusual turn, the most
interesting element rests in the middle with “a roll of fat jiggling at his belly.”
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.\\
—Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita”\\

This sentence has the ring of familiarity to it, perhaps Nabokov’s riff on King
Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” Lolita
may have more “best sentences” than any work on this list, but I’m not sure
this is one of them. I worry about any sentence that uses an adverb for a
crutch. “Cruel” is not enough for Humbert Humbert. He must magnify the cruelty
with a word – atrociously — that denotes wickedness and cruelty. It’s not the
child’s fault she is adored and yet this makes her an atrocity. Now that I have
thought it through, it sounds exactly like Humber’s self-delusions after all. 
Perfect.

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the
yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of
exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.\\
—Truman Capote, ”In Cold Blood”

We used to call this a “periodic” sentence, that is, one in which the main action
occurs at the period. The Brits have a better name for that mark of
punctuation: the full stop. Any word that comes right before it gets special
attention. That effect is magnified by the boxcar alignment of those opening
similes, along with the shift from things we can see to something more abstract
– drama. Which never stopped there, of course. Until it did.

Tags: American Scholar , Writing tips and techniques

Edit summary

Note: By editing this page you agree to license your content under the following license: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International