Syntax as Style
I have had the pleasure of taking Vicki Lane’s workshops for novelists. Since Vicki is a hard taskmaster and incisive copy editor, I’m learning all over again how much effort and critical thinking goes into writing twenty page of prose. She points out when I’m wordy, when I’ve not shown what characters are doing as they speak, when I’ve summarized something that should be given more attention, and when I’ve dwelt on something that would be best left out or summarized. She also fidgets with syntax, shifting words around, moving phrases later in sentences, correcting word usage. Her edits are humbling because she’s right. Even with painstaking rewriting of pages in a scene, pages I’m sure are fine, she manages to show where I need to pay attention to what I’ve written.
This criticism of my work gives me pause. I wonder how anyone can ever write as perfectly as some of those I admire. In rereading David Copperfield, I’m amazed how Dickens can bring a character to life, knowing, as he does, how much time to give over to description of the scene and of the character and how much time to give over to dialogue so the whole works as one unit. In Vicki’s class, she’s commenting on letting us into a scene as a camera would capture it in a movie. That is easier said than done.
There are a lot of bad movies out there. I saw the movie Doctor Zhivago the other night, remembering how captivating it was to me as a young man, a junior in college, as aspiring poet. I expected to be as enchanted again. Instead, I was appalled by the number of times Doctor Zhivago would look out a window of a house, a train, or cottage, staring at the white snow, the full moon, the miles of forest, the field of yellow daffodils without saying a word. The theme music would play in the background. Because he was a poet, we were expected to imagine that his look, the serene stare with a faint grin meant he was having a poetic moment, which, as I viewed it some fifty years later, seem to be a poor cliché, almost stupid, having nothing to do with the hard work involved in serious writing. Yet, contrary as the movie was to my own sensibilities right now, I wouldn’t call Doctor Zhivago a bad movie. It one that spoke to me once when I wanted more than anything to write.
As a twenty year old who wanted to be a poet, I imagined that, indeed, that’s how it was–or could be– for me staring our of my second-story rooming house at the January snow, thinking great thoughts, believing if I stared long and hard enough wonderful poems would leap into my mind and into my journal. At seventy-four years old, I can go back to those journals and reenter the mind of that young poet. The journals, dogeared, are on my shelves. I can attest that they have little material that would impress Doctor Zhivago. If he was a real poet, one who had achieved national fame, he’d be asking the younger me to work more, read more, think and feel more. And so I have over the years. He’d be like Vicki Lane and tell me I had more work to do. Each word had to be exact. Write it!
As I read other writers in the class, as I give suggestions to them, I’m telling them the same thing. They have more work to do. Writing is not just getting the words on the page. It’s finding how best they fit together dramatically, musically, syntactically. When I read other writers, I’m impressed with their ideas, the way they can tell a story. But often I’m caught short by how the magic of a sentence, the way the verbs drive it forward, the manner in which the nouns ground it in reality, is missing. I tell them that’s something most of us weren’t taught. At best, we pick it up by reading good literature, by looking at how Fitzgerald can turn a sentence into visual music. But I also suggest that they read, as I have, some teachers who have taught how to create a beautiful sentence. I pass this list onto you. It might help you as much as it has helped me.
Syntax As Style or How to Write a Beautiful Sentence
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
—Ernest Hemingway
Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphic Press LLC, 2006
This book has been a bible for me. She shows how different types of sentences provide their own dramatical force. She goes from simple sentences to more complex structures, using great writers to show how a periodic sentence can, by itself, quite separate from the content, can create suspense. She shows how the simple use of verb phrases or noun phrases can build up detail and drama in a sentence. She shows how a cumulative sentence can, with the artful use of free modifiers, pack a sentence with information while actively engaging the reader with information. She shows how to use openers and closers in sentences, how to use free modifiers to break up sentences, giving more variety to the prose. You find out how, with parallelism, a sentence can contain the world. You find how sentences are the musical phrases in prose.
Brooks Landon: Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read. New York, A Penguin Group, 2013. On line: A Plume Book
In Landon’s book, building on what Tufte has done, he shows how he taught writers to write well. He demonstrates how to take flaccid prose and liven it up, using cumulative sentences. He also provides you with exercises to build your sentence muscles.
Harry R. Norden Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999
This very practical book, my second bible on sentence writing, taking the ideas of Tufte and Landon, that shows how to make artful sentences using free modifiers—absolutes (the must for any professional writers), appositives, participle phrases, adjectives out of order—not only gives wonderful writing exercises along with the images and examples to back them up, but also invites you to stretch your sentence muscles. He calls the use of free modifiers as image grammar because, by their nature, they give imagistic vitality to your writing. They are the reservoir that a writer can draw on when a writing instructor tells them to use detail, to show, not tell. The use of free modifiers is the well spring of professional writers.
Jeff Anderson Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2007
Taking Norden’s ideas, Anderson shows how to develop your sentence muscles by walking you through some exercises, giving examples as he does. Very practical.
Jeff Anderson. Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005.
His first book opened my eyes to what I could do in my writing as well as how to teach the use of artful sentences to my students.
