What Makes a Sentence Work?

How does a sentence, a string of words, hold a reader’s interest and compel a reader to keep turning the pages?

In the hope of finding an answer, I pulled a book off my shelf at random and opened it (to a random page) and selected a few sentences, just to see what I might be able to learn about the construction of sentences. Here they are:

“Rachel catches a whiff of toothpaste and onions. Izzy is a big, bulky man with wild gray eyebrows. His hands are broad, grayish from cement, and still strong-looking, although it’s been almost twenty years since he has worked as a stonemason.” (from Norma Fox Mazer’s After the Rain, page 38)

What do you notice about these sentences? Would you say they're compelling? Do the sentences work? Do you want to read more of the story after reading them?

Let's take a look at the first sentence: "Rachel catches a whiff of toothpaste and onions."

It doesn’t seem earth-shatteringly important, does it? And yet the unusual combination of aromas—toothpaste and onions—piques the reader’s imagination. The combination is kind of odd, isn’t it? A unique juxtaposition of smells that you don’t smell every day.

What else is unique? Not just the smells, but we have a character—Rachel—who notices this unusual combination of smells. And the act of noticing these smells is framed as “catching a whiff.” Why not simply say “Rachel smelled toothpaste and onions.” What does “catching a whiff” do for the reader? It’s a compelling expression, I suspect, because the act of smelling is described as an active rather than passive act. Rachel doesn’t sit back and let the smells come to her. She catches them. Like catching butterflies. Or lightening bugs.

So, this first sentence paints an interesting portrait, and we read on, curious about what we’ll find next.

In the second sentence we see how Mazer continues her skilled crafting of sentences. She keeps each sentence short. She uses a minimum number of words to create maximum effect: “Izzy is a big, bulky man with wild gray eyebrows.”

Again, we aren’t given anything earth shattering, per se, in terms of details, are we? But the details are offered in a way that makes for an interesting picture: a big, bulky man and wild gray eyebrows. The repetition of the “b” sounds in big and bulky. The echo of Izzy and the “y” sound in bulky. The echo of the “g” sound in big and in gray.

Six words. But we have a strong picture of Izzy in our minds. It’s a picture that is as clear as if he is standing in front of us. And we are now curious about him. We know he is big. Not just big but bulky. How does his bulkiness change our view of big? And what about his eyebrows? Not just gray but wild gray. As if the man himself has something of this wildness about him. Again, Mazer has intrigued the reader with her descriptions.

And then comes the third sentence, which happens to be much longer than the first two, but Mazer has earned the reader’s trust with the first two sentences. We trust the author’s vision of the world, and we understand that the descriptive words that Mazer has selected not only serve as descriptors but as ways of understanding the story, the characters, and the underlying plot.

So, perhaps, this is one of the keys to understanding how a sentence works: it can operate on multiple levels simultaneously.

Let’s take a look at the third sentence: “His hands are broad, grayish from cement, and still strong-looking, although it’s been almost twenty years since he has worked as a stonemason.”  

Here we are given a more detailed description of Izzy, with the focus on his hands, and the description gives us a deeper understanding of him and of his life, which involved working as a stonemason with cement. His hands are a workman’s hands, and they are still strong, even though Izzy hasn’t worked for almost twenty years.

They are hands that are “broad, grayish” and “strong-looking.” These details build on the earlier details that we were given, adding to the picture in our mind of Izzy with his wild gray eyebrows. And they create a kind of bond between Izzy and the reader, as well as a kind of sympathy for a man who has worked and aged and is now gray and a little wild still.

And we feel a bit of the same feelings that Rachel feels toward him. And the reason we feel these emotions is because of the way that Mazer has crafted these sentences.

What is it about any sentence that compels you to keep reading the story?

Word choice, pacing, emotional weight, sentence length and rhythm of the words… these are only some of the reasons why a sentence might work (or fail to work).

Do you have an author whose work you admire? Why not take a look at a few of his or her sentences and see if you can explain why the sentences work so well.

If you get a chance, share your favorite sentence in the comment section, and remember to include a brief explanation of why you think the sentence works.

Thanks, as always, for stopping by.

My Writing Process Blog Tour

One of my favorite writers and illustrators, Michelle Edwards, was kind enough to invite me to join the My Writing Process Blog Tour. Michelle has written and illustrated numerous books for children, including the National Jewish Book Award winner, Chicken Man. If you enjoy knitting, you might like to pick up her book on knitting for adults, A Knitter's Home Companion, an illustrated collection of stories, knitting patterns, and recipes. To find out more about her work, visit her website: www.michelledwards.com. And if you want to check out her tour post, which appeared last week, click here: http://michelledwards.com/blog/2014/6/23/my-writing-process-blog-tour

You’ll find my answers to the tour’s four questions below, as well as links to the author who I’ve tagged and whose responses will appear on the blog tour next week.

1. What am I working on?

Pffffssssssssssssssttttttttttt. Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of air escaping from the chamber of my heart where stories-in-progress are kept, leaving them limp and flat and earthbound. It’s the sound that I hear whenever I answer this question, a question that drains the enthusiasm and energy out of my pen, and leaves me stranded, empty-handed, wishing that I’d kept my mouth shut instead of answering the question.

The first time anyone asked me this question, I made the mistake of answering, and the story that I was working on turned to dust. The second time someone asked me the question, the same thing happened. In time I stopped responding to the question and politely switched the subject, which is, of course, what I’m doing now. I’ve learned not to respond to the question.

Writing, I’ve learned, requires silence in order for a story to grow. As soon as I open a door and start talking about a story, revealing its secret—even when I don’t yet know its secret—the story ends up deflated, much like a punctured balloon, and all my energy for that project rushes out the door, too. That’s why I don’t tell anyone what I’m working on. I need to keep it a secret, and that means not telling my wife, my brother, my critique partners, and certainly not strangers until the work is done or almost done.

But I can tell you what I’ve been working on for the past few years since the projects are almost ready to share: a YA novel about a high school runner who moves to Florida and discovers the kind of racial prejudice that he thought ended with the Civil War, and a book for adults about yoga that delves into the link between meditation and yoga. I’m working on a MG novel, as well, but that’s all I can say about it without puncturing the balloon and hearing that sound (Pffffsssssssttttt) again.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?


How does any writer’s work differ from another writer’s work? Each of us writes in our own unique, idiosyncratic way, making our work distinctly our own in the same way our fingerprints are our own, or in the same way that snowflakes possess unique qualities and characteristics that make them different from one another. Every writer uses the same twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Yet each of us manages to convey an entirely different world based on our perspectives, our backgrounds, our prejudices, our tics and habits and preferences.

Until I went to Vermont College (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) for an MFA, I used to write whatever an editor asked me to write. If an editor needed a book on a certain baseball player, I wrote it. If another editor asked for an adventure story, I wrote that, too. If an editor requested a nonfiction book about American explorers, I did the research and came up with a book. These were the first books that I published. They taught me a lot about writing for children. But they didn’t teach me how to write stories that came from my heart. I didn’t learn how to tap into my own emotional core until I studied with the amazing teachers at VCFA, including Jackie Woodson, Graham Salisbury, Norma Fox Mazer, and Marion Dane Bauer, who were the most supportive and nurturing mentors any writer could ask for.

Each of these teachers wrote about the world from a different perspective, yet they taught me the the same lesson: the importance of writing from the heart. Maybe that’s what distinguishes my work from the work of other writers, although I think that any writer, if he wants to reach a reader’s heart, has to open his heart, too. If I’ve done my job as a writer, then the stories that I write will reflect what's in my heart. My vision. My prejudices. My desires. My assumptions. My way of looking at the world. I guess that’s what makes my work different from another writer’s work. And it’s what makes another writer’s work different from mine.

3. Why do I write what I do?


I write what I’m compelled to write. Sometimes I hear a voice, or I wake up from a dream with a faint memory of an image, or I simply want to see where my pen will lead me. Sometimes the words lead to a young adult novel, sometimes to a short story, sometimes to a piece for adults about yoga or writing or meditation. Usually, when I start out, I don’t know in advance where the words will lead. I listen for a voice. And when I hear it, I try to capture it on paper, to get it from inside my head onto the page so that others can hear it on the page and enjoy reading what I hope will be a good story.

4. How does your writing process work?

Here’s how it works: I have my own rituals that I follow before sitting down at my desk at roughly the same time every morning. I’ll go for a walk before breakfast. I’ll make a pot of coffee. I’ll read the morning newspaper’s headlines and comics (Zits is my favorite). And then I’ll go into my office and open up my laptop and begin working.

Some days the writing comes smoothly, others it’s a stormy process. I can’t tell ahead of time what kind of day it will be until I sit down and start. Often, I’ll start the day reading a poem to help me re-enter the space where words come from. Or I’ll fold laundry and the action of using my hands to fold somehow gives my mind a chance to relax and work its way into a story. The same is true for washing the breakfast dishes. These daily, mundane chores help me think about stories without actually writing so that when I get to my desk in the morning I’m ready to begin.

I find it helps to have a number of projects to work on. One of my teachers at Vermont College—I think it was Sharon Darrow—suggested that writing is a lot like riding horses. If a horse falters in midstream, it's helpful to have another horse in reserve to jump onto so I can keep writing. It's also helpful to remember that I can always climb back on the horse that faltered and ride it again further downstream.

* * * * * 

I’ve asked Ann Angel, a writer who I met at Vermont College years ago and whose career has blossomed in many directions since we got our degrees, to share her writing process on the tour next week.

Ann Angel is the author of Janis Joplin, Rise Up Singing (Abrams 2010), winner of the American Library Associations' 2010 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award. The book also made Booklist's 2011 Top Ten Biographies for Youth and the 2011 Top Ten Arts Books list. It is a 2011 CCBC Choice Book and received an SCBWI Crystal Kite Award and more. Ann has also written young adult fiction and nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed books Such A Pretty Face: Short Stories about Beauty (Abrams, 2007) and Robert Cormier: Writer of the Chocolate War (Enslow, 2007). In fall, 2013, Ann's biographies of famous adoptees, Adopted Like Me, My Book of Adopted Heroes, was released by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, and her upcoming anthology, Secret Selves, Short Stories About the Secrets We Keep and Share (Candlewick, 2015) will introduce readers to fifteen authors who reveal secrets their characters have tried to lock away. She posts on her blog http://annangelwriter.com/blog/ and contributes to another blog, The Pirate Tree http://www.thepiratetree.com . For more info, take a look at her website: http://annangelwriter.com/index.html

A Passion for Truth

Norma Fox Mazer (1931 - 2009) was my teacher and friend, and I remember her irrepressible enthusiasm as she helped me sort through the tangled mess of manuscript pages that I’d share with her every month as part of the student-teacher pact that we’d agreed to when I was her student at Vermont College. She was a writer, after all, who thought nothing of rewriting passages multiple times and often remained unsatisfied with her words until the twentieth, thirtieth, or--dare I say?--fortieth draft.

I’d signed on to work with Norma for the semester not because of her amazing reputation as an award-winning writer of young adult novels and short stories and not because I’d heard how she was a master of plot, but because of the way that she had responded to excerpts from student manuscripts in the workshop that she led one summer and which I was lucky enough to find myself a part of.

Norma may have looked petite and delicate, almost fragile in a schoolgirlish way, but she was lithe and strong and always overflowing with an inexhaustible source of energy. Her mind was as sharp as a Misono UX Chef’s knife, and she was quicker to get to the heart of a story’s problem than any writer I’d ever met. Moreover, she was tenacious–even zealous, I might say–in describing what she saw as flaws in a story. And though it took me a while to understand that her tenaciousness wasn’t inspired by mean-spiritedness or spite or self-satisfaction but rather from her love of stories and for getting the story right, I learned eventually over the months that we worked together that her tenacious analysis was simply her way of showing her faith in the story and in the writer’s ability to succeed in telling it.

Her comments weren’t always easy to hear, especially if they were directed at you and your story. That’s because Norma was a firm believer in telling the absolute truth and not holding back any part of the truth for fear of hurting a writer’s feelings. What she saw in a story–its strengths, its weaknesses–she was compelled as a writer to say, and I think she felt that to say anything less would have meant betraying her vision or being less than honest. It would have meant compromising the integrity of her thoughts and her vision. For her it was simply unthinkable to say anything less than the truth. To do so would have meant shortchanging not only the writer of the story but her own sense of herself.

After working for weeks with Norma one-on-one and receiving her comments on my work in the form of six and seven page single-spaced letters, I began describing her responses to my friends and colleagues as “excruciatingly honest.” She refused to hold anything back. She cut through the brush with her Misono mind and focused with her laser vision on the story, seeing through the words to the underlying structure (or lack of structure), analyzing its strengths and weaknesses in ways that allowed me to see, as well. It was as if I had acquired x-ray vision, too, and could view my story’s shortcomings through her eyes without feeling that I’d failed. This was another one of Norma’s gifts. She could urge writers to keep working toward a goal that they couldn’t see, and, yet, because she believed in its existence and had faith that the writer would eventually discover it themselves, the writer could keep writing, keep working on the story, searching for new routes through the underbrush to reach its heart. Her faith fed my own so that I never felt abandoned or alone in my search.

It was her style of responding to my stories–her excruciating honesty–that taught me that I couldn’t hold anything back in the writing process, couldn’t pretend or shave the truth to save someone’s feelings (even if those feelings were my own). At first, such excruciating honesty seemed heartless, almost cruel. But over time I discovered something about honesty and courage as these qualities related to writing and life. Norma taught me--as I’m sure she taught her other students--what it meant to tell the truth unabashedly and straightforwardly. And she helped me find the courage to keep searching for that truth, even when it seemed on some days forever beyond my grasp, just out of reach.

When it comes time for you to review your own work or the work of other writers, I urge you to remember Norma. I think she would say that you owe your work nothing short of total and complete honesty. Excruciating honesty. It’s the only way that you’ll find your path–your true path– into the heart of your story. Her words echo in my mind (and heart) today, and, even though she’s gone, it feels like we’re still swimming together, her joy in writing--her passion for words and stories and truth--still helping me stay afloat.

For more on Norma Fox Mazer, visit:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/730049873.html
http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2006/06/one-writers-process-norma-fox-mazer.html
http://normafoxmazer.net/

One Writer's Process: Norma Fox Mazer

For more than thirty-five years, Norma Fox Mazer's many short stories and novels (After the Rain, Taking Terri Mueller, When She Was Good, Goodnight, Maman, What I Believe, and more) have captured the hearts of readers around the world.

Winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award, a National Book Award finalist, and twice the recipient of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (for books deemed of such exceptional quality that they might sit on the same shelf as Alice in Wonderland), Mazer's work is widely known for its expertly crafted structure and taut, mesmerizing prose.

In addition to her devotion to writing, Mazer's an extraordinary teacher of writing, as well. A member of the faculty of Vermont College's MFA in Writing for Children, she has also taught at the National Book Foundation's Summer Writing Camp to help young writers learn their craft.

Recently, she was kind enough to share these thoughts on writing:

Wordswimmer: If writing is like swimming, how do you get into the water each day?

NFM: To stay with the metaphor (which, inevitably, will break down at some point), if the water is cold... if I'm in a tough spot, for example... I'll tend to tread water for a while, go back over yesterday's work and approach the new work that way. Even if the water is temperate, I might do that in order to pull myself back into the there (that is, the world I'm creating).

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat... for short work? For longer work?

NFM: Love of the doing... of writing, of creating. Even when it's difficult and I hate it, I love it.

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells?

NFM: I don't have dry spells. I learned long ago that only fear would stop me. For instance, fear of the dry spell, fear of the work, fear of not being able to do it, not being up to it, not being good enough, and so on. And while I have all these fears to some degree still after so many years of writing (especially the fear of not being a good enough writer), I know that they are only fears. I know that they disappear when I begin work. I know that the key to writing is to write... and that everything can be revised (thank the goddess!) ...and revised and revised and revised. Revision is transformation. My ugly frog of a piece of writing can be transformed into the beautiful--ok, good looking--prince, if I keep at it long enough.

Wordswimmer: What's the hardest part of swimming?

NFM: No metaphor here. The hardest part of writing, I believe, is thinking. Thinking through the story, then following through on strengthening the structure. Thinking hard enough and truthfully enough to know where you've fallen into a sinkhole (we're in the water again) and where you're not stroking vigorously enough and where you need to float.

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

NFM: Oh, never swim entirely alone, please! Always have someone on the shore. Someone you can call out to. Actually, sometimes all you need is another person to listen to your problems. At least, I find that talking about a problem, I often find the solution without the other person having to say much more than "Uh huh" to register interest. If another person isn't handy, then writing about the problem is effective. But, sometimes, there's nothing to do but keep mulling over a problem until you understand what you need to do.

Wordswimmer: What's the part of swimming that you love the most?

NFM: Being in the water. Swimming. Writing. Doing it. That's what it's all about... the doing of it. Everything else is ancillary.

For more information about Norma Fox Mazer, check out these resources:

A brief biography at http://books.scholastic.com/teachers/authorsandbooks/authorstudies/authorhome.jsp?authorID=1390&&displayName=Biography

An interview about her most recent book, (What I Believe, Harcourt, 2005) at
http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/2005/11/author-interview-norma-fox-mazer-on.html

Another interview at:
http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-mazer-norma.asp