How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

  The sentence divides in half, with the pebbles and boulders occupying one half and the water occupying the other half. No relationship between the two halves is explicitly asserted. They are just laid down next to each other, linked by an “and” that does minimal work. The clause “dry and white in the sun” is technically adjectival, but “dry” and “white” come across more as qualities (dryness and whiteness) than as modifiers. The water in the second half is a surrogate for the style’s (unvoiced) claim to be making no claim for itself at all. Like the water, the style is “clear” and “swiftly moving”; it does not stop or take a turn or qualify something it has presented. In short, this “simple” sentence is an allegory—one of the most complex of literary forms—of its own unfolding.

  Sentences like this one are employed by Hemingway as a contrast to the anguish, despair, and pointlessness often experienced by his characters. In To Have and Have Not (1937), Marie Morgan thinks about what life will be like now that her husband, Harry, has been killed. We overhear her inner monologue, written in a style that is almost a parody of Stein’s; its repetitions, rather than circling around each other and straining toward a final complicating simplicity, are just . . . well, repetitions.

  I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life. I guess you do all right. I guess I’m probably finding out right now. You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just about what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to. All right. I got a good start then. I’m way ahead of everybody now.

  This doesn’t quite work, but you know what Hemingway had in mind: he wanted to convey a consciousness in the process of distilling a little bit of stoic hope out of a huge sea of troubles. He succeeds in the next sentence by leaving human consciousness behind and moving to the only real realm of security and stability, a landscape purged of human losses and perturbations:

  Outside it was a lovely, cool, subtropical winter day and the palm branches were sawing in the light north wind.

  “Outside” is very precise; it means not inside, not inside the mind of Marie or anyone else. “[L]ovely” and “cool” are attributes of natural phenomena that know nothing of the effect they have on mortal agents. One is reminded both of the pastoral tradition in which Nature is often presented as indifferent to man’s woes and of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens,” and declared to be more important than any human perspective. Even when, in the novel’s last sentence, the landscape contains objects that must be man-powered, those objects have achieved the “thingness” and serenity of palm branches:

  A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.

  Three objects—the yacht, the tanker, and the sea—fill a palette of white and blue. The yacht and the tanker are not related to each other except as objects within the sentence’s pictorial frame. One is coming in to the observer, the other moving away at a westward angle; both seem self-propelled. In another sentence, “hugging” and “she” might be humanizing touches; here they function as painterly details: the small and neat boat stays close to the shore; it doesn’t make love to it; the feminine pronoun is merely precise, a feature of a language that, like French, but less formally, classes things by gender categories. It’s sexuality without the sex, a peaceful realm of nonaffect available to Hemingway’s characters only in death. Even the tension between the vessel and the currents of the sea is muted and stilled as the tanker moves in a way calculated to lessen it. In the same way, the tendency of language to move to a point of judgment and discrimination is also stilled by a syntax that refuses to develop or subordinate, and is held together by a slight connective (“and”) and a present participle (“hugging”) that is the declaration and vehicle of ongoingness.

  Sterne, Salinger, Stein, Hemingway—the additive, non-subordinating style is obviously versatile; it can be the vehicle of comedy, social satire, philosophical reflection, realism, and something approaching photography. In any of its guises it displays the advantages of being able to stop on a dime, arrest action, freeze the frame, stay still at the same time the reader moves linearly—all effects achieved in spectacular fashion in a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Mrs. Ramsey has just rebuked her daughters for mocking “the little atheist” Tansley. We see them react in a moment that expands and remains in focus despite the passing of considerable reading time:

  She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers: in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a queen’s raising from the mud a beggar’s dirty foot and washing it, when she thus admonished them so severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them to—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them in—the Isles of Skye.

  The word “behold” is a command: behold this woman! In the sentence, our surrogate beholders are the three daughters who gaze upward at their mother as if at a portrait and think thoughts in silence. From its beginning to “a life different from hers,” the sentence proceeds in the subordinating, hypotactic mode: “looking up from their place” is the present action the three young woman perform, but the present is immediately framed by the “after” clause—“after she had spoken so severely”—which provides a past and causal perspective on what they are doing. But then, “in Paris, perhaps” the prose breaks free. Who says “perhaps”? Is it a qualification from the outside, made by an omniscient narrator, or does the word belong to the three sisters, who perhaps have not yet settled on their preferred dream? And who is it that wants not to be “always taking care of some man or other”? Surely the daughters have not yet taken on that burden; does this wish belong to their mother, who is now playing in the fields of her daughters’ consciousnesses? Are the “infidel ideas” the sisters “sport” with theirs or hers? Is it for her or for themselves that they imagine “a life different” from the one their mother leads? The latter is the more likely; the austere majesty of Mrs. Ramsey leads them to question the world of ceremony and courtesy they associate with her; and yet—the sentence does not progress, but keeps adding to the perspectives and vistas that open up in its leisurely spaces—the severity from which they imagine themselves freed has its own attractions, its own beauty, which is summed up in the person of their mother, to whom they, and the sentence, return, re-conceiving her as a queen admonishing her subjects. At the same moment the subordinating style, with its clear temporal demarcations (“who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them”), also returns, putting events and persons in their proper place.

  What makes the Woolf sentence able to shift direction and emphases without seeming discontinuous or disjointed are those “slight ligatures” that mark the coordinating style: “and,” “for,” “though,” “when.” These interact with a succession of present participles—“looking,” “taking,”
“raising,” “speaking”—verbal forms indicating ongoing actions, no one of which is completed and all of which combine in almost a symphonic fashion to paint a densely layered moving, kaleidoscopic, sometimes frame-frozen picture.

  Earlier I remarked that sentence makers are selectors; possibilities must be foreclosed so that clear and demarcated relationships can come into sharp view. But it is just such a discipline that the additive writer refuses, cultivating a looseness that allows meaning and worlds to enter and leave freely. Like Stein, Woolf explicitly theorizes her method. Words, she says in “Craftsmanship” (1937), do not “express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities.” Those possibilities are locked in as long as words are asked only to be useful; but liberate them from usefulness, and marvelous things happen. She illustrates by riffing on the words written on a sign in a railway carriage: “Do not lean out of the window”:

  At the first reading, the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, “Windows, yes windows—casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn.

  From the physical fact of the window to a Keats poem to the Bible: leaps of intuition and association without causal links. Or, she continues, take the sign “Passing Russell Square”; repeat the words like mantras and their “sunken meanings” surface:

  The word “passing” suggested the transience of things, the passing of time and the changes of human life. Then the word “Russell” suggested the rustling of leaves and the skirt on the polished floor; also the ducal house of Bedford and half the history of England. Finally the word “Square” brings in the sight, the shape of an actual square combined with some visual suggestion of the stark angularity of stucco. Thus one sentence of the simplest kind rouses the imagination, the memory, the eye and the ear—all combine in reading it.

  And so it is with Woolf’s own writing, which corresponds precisely to her description of the nature of words. They have, she says, a “need of change . . . because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that.”

  In the loose but finely controlled style of which Woolf is a master, the words can flash in and out of time frames and even flash from speaker to speaker as one consciousness gives way to another, without warning or editorial direction. This is what is usually called stream of consciousness, a term often used to describe Woolf’s prose. Here is an account of it by the great critic Erich Auerbach. Woolf, he observes, attempts “to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions” (Mimesis, 1946). She has reversed the usual relationship between interior events and narrative events, where the former has always been subordinate to the latter and where inner thoughts comment on or prepare the ground for the movement of plot. But, “in Virginia Woolf’s case,” Auerbach explains, “the external events have lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events.”

  Here, for example, is Mrs. Dalloway, walking toward Bond Street in London and thinking about her inevitable demise:

  Did it matter then, she asked herself, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

  (1925)

  Is this a sentence? It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, or end, and as you read it you can’t chart its progress toward a designed close. Who says “she was positive”? Is it Mrs. Dalloway, declaring her certainty to herself ? Is it Woolf, standing outside her character and pronouncing authoritatively on Mrs. Dalloway’s inner state? The questions are unanswerable, for as Auerbach observes, “we are given not merely one person whose consciousness . . . is rendered, but many persons, with frequent”—and, I would add, unannounced—“shifts from one to the other.” For a second, when “Did it matter then” is followed by “she asked herself,” we seem to be in the company of a conventional narrator-novelist who reports the speech of her character. But then “did it matter” is repeated, and it is clear that what we’re hearing is a musing. The perspective now ruling is an interior one; even though the third-person pronoun “she” carries the train of thought along, we sense that this is merely her form of self-reference. A sequence like “she survived, Peter survived” shows how it is done. “She survived” might be spoken by a narrator, but “Peter survived” is obviously uttered by someone who shares an intimacy with him; we cannot believe that the observation is made at a distance, by a third person, but then again, “lived in each other” seems to belong at once to Mrs. Dalloway and to her creator.

  As the sentence continues, Mrs. Dalloway shares an intimacy not only with Peter but with everything—a house, trees, people, mist, branches—all of which “ebb and flow” with her and through her. Everything enters her, and she enters everything. Near its end the sentence names the action it is imitating; it spreads; she spreads, “ever so far, her life, herself.” Formally, the sentence is fragmentary; no, it is fragments, held together barely by a soft “but,” which is more like an “and,” many participles, many ofs, all tumbling forward, all jumbled up, yet unified somehow by her consciousness, streaming, variegated, and always the same. An anonymous critic for the Glasgow Herald in 1927 got it just right: “Mrs. Woolf never for a moment becomes the detached observer of the world which she is creating; therefore her people are entirely real without ever being tangible.” Inhabited, as it were, from the inside, Mrs. Dalloway receives no description of the usual novelistic kind, and yet, as a result of sentences like this one, the reader knows her better than if five paragraphs full of details and adjectives had been devoted to her.

  Common sense might suggest that the loose, coordinating/non-subordinating style Woolf excels in is easier to manage than a style that requires the building of architectonic structures where words and phrases serve as foundations, stairways, bridges, basements, attics, and trusses, and the exertion and strain of control are felt at all times. But while the logic of subordination is demanding, it is also comforting precisely because of its demands. If the requirement is that every word or phrase you write must take its place in an unfolding design, that requirement is both a constraint and a guide; it gives you something to test yourself against. Have I gone off the track? Are some of my words and phrases operating in some alternative verbal universe? Are they striking off on their own, floating freely and untethered to any grammatical ground?

  But that experience—of being free-floating, in flight, on the wing, not tied down—is precisely what the additive style is trying to achieve, although “achieve” may not quite be the right word, because, in the art practiced by Woolf, effects seem not to be achieved, produced after arduous labor; they just—or so is the desired impression—emerge. So if you are testing yourself against anything, it is the danger of looking as if you were trying too hard to be the kind of writer whose labors show. Although it might seem as if writing in the additive style is just a matter of putting one thing after another in no particular order (how can that be hard?), it is in fact the more difficult style to master; for the relative absence of formal constraints means that there are no rules or recipes for what to do because there are no rule or recipes for what not to do. (Remember “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”; they do fine because of, not despite, being confined in a narrow space.) But that itself is a rule of a (nega
tive) kind; don’t forge bolted-down connections, don’t put everything in its one and proper place, don’t maintain a consistent time frame, don’t sustain the integrity of the speaker’s voice, don’t make things clear. Before you can follow these “rules,” which amount to the flouting of the decorums of hypotactic prose, you must first master those decorums; you can’t depart from something with confidence unless you are fully practiced in the something you are departing from. Behind every paratactic, additive, associative sentence—even the ones written by masters like Woolf and Stein—is the subordinating, tightly designed, and controlled sentence that is not at the moment being written. You have to know how to write “do not lean out of the window” before you can riff on it. The answer to the question raised a while back—Are sentences written at the furthest reaches of the additive style really sentences?—is yes; they are sentences in which the logical structure of components firmly tied to one another is self-consciously relaxed. (Whew! Formalism saved again.)

  How do you learn to write sentences like that? Not by trying to imitate Stein and Woolf. You need training wheels. There are writers less experimental and more conventional (in a good sense) who might serve as beginning models, not because they are un-artful or simple, but because their artfulness is (relatively) accessible and therefore available for imitation. Here is a sentence in the additive style by a truly great novelist, from what he himself considered his finest novel. The novelist is Ford Madox Ford (friend and publisher of Stein and Hemingway), and in this scene from The Good Soldier (1927), a man and a girl sit on a bench amid trees, unaware that a jealous woman is spying on them:

  Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night, the silhouettes of those two upon the seat, the beams of light coming from the casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree trunk.