The Elastic Sentence
on singing, shaping, declaring, framing, and dissolving
Note to readers: I will be teaching a five-day in-person workshop called “Taking Flight” on behalf of Maine Media this coming September. In late February, I’ll be teaching a two-hour Zoom master class on writing the personal, through Cleaver.
My craft posts, such as the one that follows, reflect my new thinking (as economically as I can share it) about the shape of stories, the essence of the universal, the inventive possibilities of memoir, and the power of sentences. These ideas surface as I read new books and return to favorite old ones, write the prose poems and essays of The Hush and the Howl, and prepare for the launch of my first novel for adults, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, a book that is, in fact a hybrid of fact and fiction, remembering and imagination.
Phew. Now onto the sentence.
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Sentence: a set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses.
There it is, all we need to know, straight from Oxford Languages.
We can write our stories now, our poems, our thank-you notes. We can be writers, launched.
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Perhaps we shall use our sentences to sing, to make of assonance (echoed vowel sounds), consonance (repeating consonant sounds), syllabic management, and successive subordinate phrases a song. Here is Niall Williams in Time of the Child doing just that:
“After the holy hectic of Sunday morning, the country had settled back into its natural hush: backsides to the rain, in an attitude of absolute unconcern, the herd of Crowley’s cattle, composed, complete.”
Here’s Samantha Harvey, in Orbital, making her own music:
“In their clean-shaven and androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the birthday bunting, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness.”
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Or your imagined/retold world is so exceedingly vivid that your sentences will seem to hold the very shape of the things you are describing—their phrases and sounds widening or narrowing or thrusting forward or twisting or curving or doing many such things at once. J. Richard Osborn, whose debut novel, Not Long Ago Persons Found, is due out from Bellevue Literary Press in June of this year, is exquisitely good at just these kinds of sentences.
The shape of a river: “At water level, wind flowed up the valley from the ocean, or sometimes it went the opposite way, the air, either way, shaped by the same curves as the river, the air carrying pollen and light seeds and insects, the river carrying heavier seeds and fish and their eggs and more other forms of life than we could see on land.”
The shape of birds in flight: “In another place, a large flock of small birds lofted suddenly from trees on the bank, an undulating, reshaping swarm of birds, black, then white, then black as they turned their backs or chests toward us. The cloud of them lengthened, curved, burst, then blobbed together densely again as they circled right above our heads, wings whirring, then landed in other trees, across the water, on the opposite bank.”
These long sentences are gorgeously counterbalanced by the quick staccato of Osborn’s dialogue-rich scenes, for example:
“My interrogator looked up again.
“‘You did find his family,’ he said.
“‘As I told you, no.’
“‘You found people who knew his family.’
“‘As I told you, no.’”
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Or your characters are in a hurry, or your mood is get-to-the-point, or your scene is fast evolving and things are getting tense. You need to declare. Don’t confuse the declarative sentence with the boring, familiar one. Yael van der Wouden certainly does not. From The Safekeep: