How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  The reader is told in advance what is going to happen: the words will paint a picture, adding detail to detail. At first the picture is sketchy, even imprecise; we just see “immensely tall trees,” and then the trees are given a name, but not all of them. Ford wants the scene to be more suggestive than photographic, and so the trees he gives us are less and less in focus and they recede as we look upward at their “towering.” “[F]eathering away up” is a stroke of genius; it describes by making its object more indistinct and more distant. By the time it arrives, “the mistiness” attributed to the trees as something they attract and somehow produce (“the mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night”) is spreading over the entire picture; it extends to the two sitting on the bench, who are seen in silhouette because the light emanates from a distant source (from the casino). What exactly is happening? We strain to see, and our straining has its counterpart in the sentence where a woman in black—impossible to see in the mistiness—is “peeping,” that is, prying and spying as we are, a stance that would seem to bear a threat until we realize that what she can’t quite see is a threat to her, for she peeps “with fear.”

  The economy of the sentence—it packs so much in—is remarkable; the apparent ease of it is deceptive. But we can at least imitate Ford’s form even if we cannot approach his achievement. Begin with a scene you might want to portray, say, a cocktail party in June, and then choose the first detail: “the agitated conversations”; which can then be filled in a bit, but just a bit: “mostly on politics”; and then comes the first present participle: “ebbing and flowing in intensity with passions surprising to those who voiced them.” Now return to a static mode of description: “the music in the background incongruously soft and light”; and then put in the reader’s surrogate observer: “the children listening in shadows on the staircase wondering who these people, so familiar to them as parents, uncles, doctors, and shopkeepers every day, could possibly be.” Or, in sum:

  The agitated conversations, mostly on politics, ebbing and flowing in intensity with passions surprising to those who voiced them, the music in the background incongruously soft and light, the children listening in shadows on the staircase wondering who these people, so familiar to them as parents, uncles, doctors, and shopkeepers, could possibly be.

  As always, it is a matter of identifying the form: here a succession of phrases strung together in the mode of apposition—each presenting itself as an equivalent of or an addition to what precedes it—with no attempt to subordinate one to another. As with the other exercises we have entertained, you can do this forever, and when it comes time to do it for real—to put this style in the service of a point you passionately want to make or an idea you want to champion—you will be ready.

  If Ford is a bit daunting, here is a sentence in the additive style from a high-level thriller, The Likeness (2007), by Tana French. French’s protagonist-narrator is living with four housemates in a scene of heightened emotional intimacy. She is summing up their life together:

  Cherry blossom falling soft on the drive, quiet smell of old books, firelight sparkling on snow-crystalled windowpanes at Christmastime and nothing would ever change, only the five of us moving through this walled garden, neverending.

  Phrases powered by present participles (“falling,” “sparkling,” “moving”) succeed one another to create the still but moving picture this style is so good at. Halfway through, the sentence comments explicitly on the message its form has been delivering—“nothing would ever change”—before continuing on to a final participle, “neverending,” which names the impossible aspiration of both the prose and the speaker. Pretty good, and again, it can be imitated. Just imagine a scene of contentment and repose, say, sitting in a restaurant after a hard day’s work, and then string together a few participial phrases: “Music playing softly in the background, the smell of steaks sizzling on the grill, waiters being attentive to our every wish”; sum up the essence of the pleasure: “and no one calling or e-mailing”; and then finish it: “only the two of us drinking in each other’s eyes”; finally the word that names and extends the moment: “loving.” Now play with it a little by inserting a meta-comment after “wish”: “oh how I remember it”; and stick in a quick shift in tense and narrative mode: “she could almost taste it”; and, behold, you have something that is at least gesturing in the direction of Ford territory:

  Music playing softly in the background, the smell of steaks sizzling on the grill, waiters being attentive to our every wish, oh how I remember it, no one calling or e-mailing, only the two of us drinking in each other’s eyes, she could almost taste it, loving.

  The exercise is quite different from the one asking you to turn a three-word sentence into a hundred-word monster, but the principle is the same: have command of the repertoire of formal components and then build something out of it, and then do it again and again, until you can do it on demand. And as you work hard to acquire the skill, always keep beside you sentences produced by those who are virtuosi in the art.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Satiric Style: The Return of Content

  Of course those who are virtuosi in the art aren’t just doing finger exercises, practicing scales until they can play them with eyes closed. They’ve already done that as a preliminary to writing in the service of an intention, and that intention will be substantive, a matter of content—the intention to praise or blame or reveal or complicate or exhort or rejoice or ponder or meditate or lament or anatomize or deconstruct (pardon the word) or “justify the ways of God to Man.” While formal devices are limited in number, contents are not; a book surveying or anatomizing them would go on forever (as, for example, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, written over many decades, threatens to). So I’m arbitrarily going to choose one kind of content to serve as a bridge between the largely formal part of this book, the how-to-write part, and the more relaxed part, the how-to-read-and-appreciate part.

  I choose satire, the art in which “human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit.” That is a dictionary definition, and there are more sophisticated ones available in the literature, but it will do. It places satire somewhere between direct brutal invective and mild sarcasm. Satire is less direct than the former and more cutting than the latter. It doesn’t quite come out and say what it is saying, and what it is saying is often devastating. It is a mode of writing characterized by great control of tone over the length of sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes entire volumes. Satire is obviously a content category—its content is cynicism, dyspepsia, disgust, anger—but there’s a lot of formal skill in writing satire, so our training in forms will continue.

  Masters of satire and satiric wit write sentences that deliver their sting in stages; just when the reader thinks he knows what point has been made and at whose expense, the thing opens up to claim its victim or victims more intensely. Here is an example from J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962). Austin is cautioning readers not to be impatient with the slow unfolding of his argument:

  And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation.

  The sentence begins with a simple statement of an imperative: avoid oversimplification. The style is serious, even sober, flat. Things get more complicated in the sentence’s second stage; the key is the relative clause “which one might be tempted.” Suddenly the stakes are higher. Before we know what the temptation is, we know that “one” should not yield to it, and we want not to be that one. When the temptation is named—to call oversimplification the disease of philosophers—we can relax, because the spotlight has been taken away from us and turned on philosophers, who must take care not to oversimplify, a fault to which they are apparently susceptible. But then we are drawn back in by the third stage, which snaps out at both readers and philosophers. Yielding to the temptation, we learn, would be wrong not because to do so would be unkind to philosophe
rs, but because it would not be unkind enough. The phrase “occupational disease” implies a distinction between the activity of philosophizing and a hazard that sometime accompanies it; but the word “occupation” removes the distinction; oversimplifying is what philosophers do, which means that the philosopher who is now warning us against oversimplifying is probably oversimplifying at this very moment. No one escapes the sentence unscathed.

  Is there a formula here? Yes. You begin with a mild, even anodyne, statement: “It’s important not to be late”; and then you add something that heightens the mood and sharpens the tone—“which is a black mark on the records of employees”—before the threat is made more explicit: “and even more so on the records of ex-employers.” Not as snappy and whiplike as Austin’s sentence, but in the ballpark.

  The task of imitation would be harder, but certainly not impossible, if its object were this sentence from Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891). A speaker named Ernest is explaining why he dislikes memoirs:

  They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering, which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feel perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

  Memoir writers get hit twice. First they are said to be fabricators; they don’t have any memories and they are just making them up. Or (and this is worse) they do have memories but what they remember is not worth reading about, is entirely without interest. And this, paradoxically, turns out to be their great value for the audience that is the sentence’s real object of criticism. As the sentence makes its turn, Wilde slows down the pace so that the reader is in position to receive its final two clauses. The syntactical logic requires only the “which is”; “however” and “no doubt” are there largely to allow a pause like the moment when a roller coaster is poised at the top of its arc. To be sure, they do some work; “however” signals, somewhat unnecessarily, that the sentence’s harsh judgment on memoir writing is going to be ameliorated if not reversed (in fact, it’s going to get harsher); “no doubt” tells us that we should be as certain as the speaker is about the observation he will make. This certainty of conviction is conveyed also by the word “true,” which nicely, and without fuss, dismisses the alternative explanations of the genre’s popularity; hundreds of cultural critics are thus dispatched with a casual verbal flick. Then comes the “as” clause, which reports, apparently without emotion, the damning fact about the English public, of which Wilde’s readers are presumably members. The phrase “perfectly at its ease” is perfectly deadly. On a literal level it means merely that the English public reads without undue anxiety; but this apparently neutral account of the public’s posture is at the same time an indictment of its shallowness. Anything satisfies it, especially if what it reads makes no demands on an intelligence its mediocrity does not possess. What an economy of venom and disdain! (There is more economy, equal venom, but less subtlety in a sentence from Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” [1889] that makes a similar point: “Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”)

  The trick in writing sentences like these is to open with a deadpan observation that gives no clue to the nasty turn the performance will soon take. You don’t have to be an Austin or a Wilde to do it. Here is a quite nice specimen from Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner, Ava Gardner: “Love Is Nothing” (2006). Server is relating the courtship (if that is the word) of the earth goddess from North Carolina by Artie Shaw, the much-married and fiercely intellectual Jewish clarinet player (their coupling was an earlier version of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe). The basis of the relationship was that he talked and she listened:

  One evening, in the middle of a discussion of the mathematics of Chopin or nuclear fusion or something, he had looked at her and abruptly told her that she was in all ways the most perfect woman he had ever met and further that he would marry her in a minute if he hadn’t already done that too many times, which in its perfectly Shavian way contained at the same time a boast (“Artie Shaw took it for granted that everyone was panting to marry Artie Shaw”), a put-down (he didn’t think enough of her to marry her), and a great compliment (he spoke as a connoisseur of perfect women).

  The sentence goes off its initially quiet rails with the phrase “or something,” which is at once a tribute to the breadth of Shaw’s knowledge—there were a million other things he could have discoursed on—and a hit at his compulsion to display it. “[A]bruptly” tells its own story: Shaw doesn’t bother with any preliminaries; the shift from seminar mode to compliment (kind of ) mode is instantaneous. Chopin’s perfection and Gardner’s share the same category: glories Artie Shaw is able to appreciate. He also manages, as Server observes, to turn a confession (I’ve been married too many times) into a self-advertisement. Had the sentence stopped with “times,” it would have been quite a piece of work, but Server gives it a second act by turning the spotlight on himself and his analytical abilities. He explicates his own reporting of a moment of which he alone seems to be the source (was he there?) and, in a series of parenthetical interruptions that slow things down so that we can watch him, he explicates his own explication, lest the reader be without his authoritative direction for even a moment. Artie Shaw has nothing on him.

  Server’s sentence, like Austin’s and Wilde’s, foregrounds the mechanics by which it launches its multidirected missiles; we are given time to see and appreciate what’s happening. But a supreme sentence in the mode, written by Jonathan Swift (the English are particularly good at this), affords no such easy handles. It is, if you will pardon a very bad pun, all too swift:

  Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.

  This famous sentence from the ninth section of A Tale of a Tub (1704) follows Swift’s observation that “in most corporeal beings, which have fallen under my cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In.” Our sentence is offered as proof of this pronouncement. The power of the sentence comes from the disparity between its surface tone—calm, detached—and the horror beneath it. The sentence is itself an emblem of the lesson it teaches. “Last week I saw a woman” is perfectly conversational. We’ve all seen a woman, haven’t we? That is the question the sentence proceeds to answer, first with the bombshell word “flayed,” which would seem to disturb, if not destroy, the flat-footedness of “Last week I saw.” But the disturbance is not registered by the speaker, who strolls right past it to express an incredulity he assumes the reader will share. By saying “you will hardly believe,” the speaker puts his arm around the reader’s shoulder and claims him as someone who sees things as he does. What they are both said to see and hardly believe is a woman whose “person” has been altered by having had her skin removed. The effect of this deadpan, clinical response to a surgical dissection depends on the ambiguity of “person,” which can refer either to someone’s outside (he hid it on his person) or to someone’s interior qualities (what kind of person is she?). For the speaker, there is no disjunction between the two; the person is his or her surface, and if this is so, the removing of one surface should reveal another equally pleasing, and then another, until there remain no layers to peel off. He is surprised, and expects us to be too, when the removal of the surface—of the appearances of things—reveals something disagreeable beneath. The moral of the incident for him is the one he began with. Stay on the surface, don’t look into things too closely, be content with “the Superficies,” and you will be rewarded with “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the Possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” This is the state into which we are invited by the sentence, and the measure of our resistance—the extent to which we recoil from the speaker’s awful equanimity and refuse to become fools or knaves—is the measure of Swift’s satiric success.

  The form Swift depl
oys is fairly simple. Put together two mildly affirmed assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate: “This morning I awoke after twenty minutes of sleep and it is amazing how tired I was.” “Last night I ate six whole pizzas and you would hardly believe how sick I was.” “Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became.” Why are these imitations so lame, aside from the fact that I, not Swift, wrote them? It is because nothing is at stake; their subject matter is trivial; there is nothing behind them; they are little more than a trick. Swift’s sentence is certainly a trick, but it is dead serious; and behind it is a constellation of concerns about the Church, sectarian disputes, politics, education, literature, the ancients and the moderns, and much more. I know I said at the beginning of this book that it is not the thought that counts; but of course it is, ultimately. The forms on which I have placed so much ( justifiable) emphasis are there for a reason they do not themselves point to; they are there for the elaboration, illumination, and powerful expression of content.

  CHAPTER 8

  First Sentences

  This is obviously true of first sentences. If I say to you, “Go write a first sentence,” you will say, “A first sentence of what?” The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows. First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them and are in a sense last sentences (a separate category we shall get to soon). First sentences have what I call “an angle of lean”; they lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate. First sentences thus have content in prospect, and because they do, “first sentence” is at once a formal category and a category of substance; its members cannot stand alone, and we cannot read them, as we have read some of the sentences we have encountered, as self-contained, formal artifacts. Even the simplest first sentence is on its toes, beckoning us to the next sentence and the next and the next, promising us insights, complications, crises, and, sometimes, resolutions. There can be no formula for writing a first sentence, for the promise it holds out is unique to the imagined world it introduces, and of imagined worlds there is no end. From here on in there will be no more exercises in imitation. How can you imitate a sentence’s opening out to all that lies before it?