physical way to envision the trip: think of swimming along a river. Stroking, kicking, floating, you’d feel or see the water’s chills and warm plumes, its siltiness or clarity, when it burbles over pebbles or grows still, when it’s tangled with greenery, when it sparkles or flows through shade. Moving word-by-word through a story is analogous: we “see,” “hear,” “feel” what we read as we flow forward, line after line.
Fine for a metaphor, but how do writers create those primary sensations of speed or sluggishness, transparency or murk, that a reader meets in our medium? What actually are the elements of our medium? Most craft books say that the “elements of fiction” are character, plot, place, etc. But I want to go down to true elements, the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes. These gather to form words, which line up as sentences, which clump in paragraphs or crots (prose stanzas, stanza being Italian for “room”), everything flowing over white space. With all of this we create the medium, or texture, through which a reader moves.
Text and texture are joined at the feet, for both come from texere.
Although we first absorb printed letters or words as pictures, we also “hear” them: neural activity registering sound is about the same whether a word is read silently or aloud; a part of the brain called Broca’s area generates the “sound” of a word internally. So, reading, we see a picture and “hear” a sound, and in both cases we experience the word in time. (The sense of a word, its clarity or cascade of connotations, naturally also affects how long a word feels to us.) In English, the sounds of letters and syllables are so varied that their length isn’t as measurable as scored notes of music, but we still sense differences among them. The letter t is quicker than m; bit is quicker than bite. We see and hear the difference in length between tot and tomb, between tot and tomatillo. We might also see and hear commas, semicolons, question marks, periods—the tribe of punctuation—and the spaces between marks. All of these take portions of time. So, types of letters, lengths of words, friction or fluidity among them, repetition, pauses or liltings within our inner ear signaled by commas or question marks: these are our elementary particles, the visual, auditory, and temporal units with which we first design.
On to the sentence. Even a one-word sentence fragment can take surprising time and open up space in our minds, if that word is long or has long sounds, as of course does a very long sentence. Something fascinating about sentences is that when I’m in the thrall of one, I’m held in its temporal and spatial orbit; it begins and ends when it must, holding and directing me until ready to let me go. I move slowly through tricky syntax; luxurious language makes me linger; or I warily await a final word that will snap the whole into sense.
For more on sound and syntax, see Ellen Bryant Voigt’s beautiful Art of Syntax. Now, though, some examples. Look at this two-part paragraph in David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead.” The story’s about a boy sensing new things in himself on his thirteenth birthday—and learning alarming facts about time:
And dreams. For months past, there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, soft warmths and great fallings; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between trembling legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.
The first two words form not a sentence but a fragment (“there have been” is understood), yet the single word dreams lingers long in my mouth and skull. Then that 132-word sentence is fabulous as it meanders, flows, rushes, explodes, and finally stills in a pool of reflection. These two are different animals, ant and giant squid, each with its own motion and life span. So, a fundamental way to design narrative is to work with a range within our smallest units, from syllable to word to phrase, clause, and sentence, much as you’d plant a garden with different leaves: pixelated baby’s breath, spike of aloe, palm.
Another way to design on this level is to play with sentence patterns. You see and hear the boredom of a row of sentences starting with “the”; ditto when all sentences follow the same syntax: subject-verb, single clause. Here, by subtle contrast, is the opening of Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance”:
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
The first sentence is grammatically simple, with a single subject even if it takes two verbs: he poured . . . and looked. It also begins with a prepositional phrase rather than the subject. With two independent clauses, the second sentence is compound, a step more elaborate: the mattress was stripped, and the sheets lay beside two pillows. The third sentence, like the first, begins with a phrase but steps farther up the scale in being complex, with main and dependent clauses: things looked much the way they had. Next comes no sentence at all but a fragment repeating two phrases from the sentence above—his side, her side: the structure mirrors the split bed. Then we start back down the scale of single-compound-complex-fragment with another complex sentence: he considered this as he sipped. This is a crisp way to create texture via sentence variety, even in Carver’s spare prose. Just break down each of these sentences to be syntactically simple (and complete), in subject-verb formation, to feel the dulling effect:
He poured another drink in the kitchen. He looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped. The candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. They’d looked much like this in the bedroom. A nightstand and reading lamp had been on his side of the bed. A nightstand and reading lamp had been on her side.
There had been his side. There had been her side.
He considered this. He sipped the whiskey.
You lose a lot if you run from complex sentences with their depths, the way they pull one time zone or idea into the light and let another sink. Things looked much the way they had in the bedroom. That bedroom, that marriage, that love: all gone. What’s here now are relics on the lawn and this man at a window, looking.
A complex sentence can not only take longer to wade through but can almost be a mini-story. Here’s one from Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine:
From the men’s room came the roar of a flushed urinal, followed immediately by “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” whistled with infectious cheerfulness and lots of rococo tricks—most notably the difficult yodel-trill technique, used here on the “ee” of “dandy,” in which the whistler gets his lips to flip the sound binarily between the base tone and a higher pitch that is I think somewhere between a major third and a perfect fourth above it (why it is not a true harmonic but rather perceptibly out of tune has puzzled me often—something to do with the physics of pursed lips?): a display of virtuosity forgivable only in the men’s room, and not, as some of the salesmen seemed to think, in the relative silence of working areas, where people froze, hate exuding from suspended Razor Points, as the whistler passed.
This is its own cosmos! Truly designed—and look at that menu of punctuation. (Try writing a page-long sentence using every kind. And why not
