How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  Here is a quiet yet pregnant first sentence by Agatha Christie, the grande dame of mystery writers, known to her peers as the Queen of Crime:

  In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.

  (Nemesis, 1971)

  The sentence seems simple; but in fact it communicates a surprising amount of information (and more) in its brief space. Even before we meet Christie’s detective-heroine, Miss Marple, we know a great deal about her. She has a routine, she follows it, and it occurs daily. Indeed, it is more than a routine. It is a custom, a word that suggests tradition, duration, and an obligatory practice tied to social and class norms. (These suggestions are enhanced by the slow progress of her full title, “Miss Jane Marple.”) Moreover, one senses that “custom” is not for her a thing easily trifled with. Her customs, we intuit, are methodically, even ritualistically observed. We know this from the word “unfold”; unfolding is so much more formal than opening; merely opening a newspaper, in any which way, would seem indecorous and overhasty to her. As she unfolds it, she can take its contents in the order in which they are given, from the important news of the front page to the (to her) equally important news of the obituary page. The word that sets the seal on this mini-portrait is “second.” The word is casually delivered, but because it comes late and constitutes a small surprise—it tells us that this is part two of her custom, something we hadn’t been expecting—it calls attention to itself and to its message: Miss Marple is not content with one source of information; she has to know everything. And she will know everything. You wouldn’t want to be someone who has something to hide.

  Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast (1980) opens not with something hidden, but with something revealed:

  One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.

  Karen is a detective too, but we can’t imagine her searching the London Times for information and clues; if she has “put a few observations together,” it is probably by looking in pants pockets or checking the mileage of a car. The sentence that introduces Karen to us is distinguished by its speed. We aren’t told what the “few observations” are or how she added them up; the “realization” comes quickly, in rapid bursts of information with no break between them (the acceleration of pace is furthered by the absence of a “that” between “realized” and “her”): husband, infidelity, woman. But not just any woman: “a real estate woman from Boca.” A real estate woman is a southern Florida type often portrayed as blond, brittle, driven by avarice, a dime a dozen (this is of course a literary caricature, not a literal description). For Karen, the fact that such a woman is her husband’s paramour is both infuriating and comforting; this is nothing serious and something she can take care of.

  Both Christie’s and Leonard’s first sentences illustrate what I mean by the “angle of lean.” Their sentences lean forward and point to future, if presently inchoate, vistas; they draw readers in and equip them with quite specific expectations. We know that Jane Marple will find something in her second newspaper of the day and that, whatever it is, she will follow through on it. And we know that Karen DeCilia will soon do something about what she has discovered. (What she does is figure out where her husband and the real estate woman are meeting; she then goes there and rams his Cadillac with the twin Cadillac he had bought her; a short time later, he buys two new ones; he knows the price of things.)

  Our expectations are less specific after reading the first sentence of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but nevertheless they are strong:

  The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

  The economy of this is marvelous. “The first time I saw” is a narrative cliché; it is often followed by something romantic, like “The first time I saw her my breath was taken away” or “The first time I saw her I couldn’t stop staring.” (Working against expectations is something skilled writers often do; it gives them two for one, the assertion they deliver and the one a reader may have been anticipating.) But before Neil (or the reader) knows it, Brenda has taken the sentence over and has also taken the “first time” away from the speaker, who is just someone who can perform an immediate, and minor, service. Despite having the form of a request, “she asked me” does not suggest the possibility of refusal. The fact that she has never seen him before—this is her “first time” too—doesn’t matter; he’s a boy of a certain age and the assumption, confirmed in the event, is that he will do anything she desires, without either question or demurrer. That is all we know, but it is enough. The relationship between the two has been set—he aspires; she lets him, as long as it pleases her—and the story can now unfold in its tragicomic arc toward the narrator’s inevitable disappointment. It’s all there in the first sentence.

  Leonard Michaels was a contemporary of Roth’s (both were born in 1933), and was often compared to him as a chronicler of Jewish anxieties. Michaels’s first sentences explode off the page. Here is the opening of his short story “Honeymoon” (2000):

  One summer, at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains, I saw a young woman named Sheila Kahn fall in love with her waiter.

  The setup is leisurely, each detail of it setting the stage for the punch line. “One summer,” in short nothing special; “ . . . at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains”; yes, there are, or used to be, plenty of those; “I saw a young woman,” a honeymooner we assume, and a Jewish one by her name. Again, all to be expected. And then the cliff the sentence steps off: “fall in love with her waiter.” That is, the speaker saw her do something wholly at odds with her situation—she had been married, we discover, “a few hours earlier in the city”—saw her perform an act of social indecorum; teenage girls, not just-married women, are supposed to fall in love with waiters in the Catskills. How did it happen? What happened next? Who is the speaker and what is his relation to the event? How does it turn out? The sentence propels us into the story, where we find out all this and more.

  Another of Michaels’s first sentences breathes menace:

  Twenty were jammed together on the stoop, tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters, a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.

  (“The Deal,” 1969)

  The sentence works by giving and withholding information at the same time. Twenty what? By not telling us at first, Michaels has us waiting for a picture to be filled in, and it is, slowly. “[O]n the stoop” locates the twenty in space but still doesn’t tell us what they are. That (small) mystery is solved by the phrase “tiers of heads,” which is more than a little macabre, a suggestion of gargoyles and griffins reinforced when we are told that the apparently disembodied heads formed one giant head. It takes a second to realize that the wings resting along the banisters are arms, but wings remains the image in our minds and completes the portrait of some kind of monster, which is then precisely named: “a raggedy monster of boys.” The last piece—“studying her approach”—comes quickly. What lingers is the participle “studying,” an action so much more threatening than “watching” or “observing.” Studying means calculating as a preliminary to action, and we can only guess (with some anxiety) what that action is going to be. (It turns out to be more complicated and terrifying than anything we imagine.)

  In Michaels’s world, danger and threat are everywhere, and they materialize with swift force in the first sentence of “Isaac” (1969):

  Talmudic scholar, master of Cabala, Isaac felt vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes in New York, slipped on an icy street, lay on his back, and wouldn’t reach for his hat.

  Isaac’s credentials are given in modifying phrases of honor (“Talmudic scholar, master of Cabala”) before he is named, as if to shore him up against disaster. It is not enough. The sentence’s form cannot keep back the vulnerability it immediately names. Vulnerability is not a discrete state, but an ongoing one; it travels with Isaac and asserts its power over him
when he least expects it. That is why he does not fall but slips, loses his footing in a manner at once accidental and unpreventable; what can you do? His slipping does not have stages; as fast as the slight pause after a comma, he is on his back; and that’s just what he expects, and because he expects it, he does nothing, not even reach for his hat, for that is going to be lost somehow, isn’t it? The word “wouldn’t” indicates his refusal to entertain any hope of a reprieve, however slight, from the rain of misfortune he immediately accepts. A man who believes that a bad fate can be avoided or at least ameliorated would have reached, but not Isaac. He knows.

  As we can see from the examples surveyed so far, first sentences are marked by compression; they do a lot of work in a short time. (“Call me Ishmael,” Moby-Dick; “It was love at first sight,” Catch-22). Sometimes, as in the first sentences by Christie, Leonard, Roth, and Michaels, they perform their function of looking forward and pulling readers in by hinting at plot and character, both of which then await development. These sentences are narrative in mode; they begin to tell a story, and we want to hear the rest of it. In other first sentences the job of setting things up is done not by narrative, but by mood, metaphor, and imagery. Here is the first sentence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850):

  A throng of bearded men, in sad colored garments, and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

  There is an event here (or at least one anticipated) and human actors, but the work of the sentence is done by colors and textures arranged in a series of descriptive clauses leading to a passive action—“was assembled.” The men are seen simply as beards—their faces are obscured—and as beards dressed in somber, that is, “sad” hues (“sad” also has its connotations of doleful, melancholy, desolate). These beards also wear gray pointed hats, hats that point away from the faces we do not see. There are women too, who for a moment promise to soften the scene and give it color; but they are described as hooded; we don’t see their faces either. What we do see is a dark, heavy (“timbered”) door that has the attributes of a weapon: “studded with iron spikes.” In a scene crowded with human figures, the door is the most aggressive actor. Rather than being a portal through which one might walk, this door opens outward in a posture of threat. Its spikes are aimed at us. No one, we might think, would want to live here, and we would be right.

  In Hawthorne’s sentence, human actors are present, but agency is given over to somber colors and to a door. In the first sentence of D. H. Lawrence’s “Tickets, Please” (1919), agency is given to a piece of machinery. Nevertheless, the sense of narrative is strong. How is this managed?

  There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system which boldly leaves the country town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long ugly villages of workmen’s houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church, under the ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond.

  Here there are no human actors at all (they are presumably in the ugly villages, small houses, and picturesque churches); there’s just the tramcar, which has a personality of its own. At first that personality is vigorous and adventurous; the tram moves “boldly” and it “plunges.” At this stage in the sentence, the word “black”—“black, industrial countryside”—seems merely descriptive, but as the tram proceeds on its way the mood begins to darken with the first appearance of the word “ugly.” The next two clauses—“over canals and railroads, past churches perched high and nobly”—seem to deliver a more benign landscape, until we learn that what the churches perch over are smoke and shadows; no sunlit fields here, and the “nobility” attributed to the churches seems more like a lofty distance from the meager lives of the parishioners. As both the tram and the sentence accelerate, so does the number of somber, even depressing, words: “stark,” “grimy,” “cold,” “ugly” “cold” again, “shivers,” “gloomy.” It is a feature of the sentence that words and objects that appear early on reappear in its second half. So we hear twice about “town” and “country” and things that are “cold” and “little,” and twice we encounter a church that suggests (but only momentarily) a lighter and brighter vision of things; but the tram leaves the second church behind in a rush. What it rushes to we don’t know—it is “beyond”—but we do know that it is ugly, wild, and gloomy. And the story, when it unfolds, bears this out.

  In Lawrence’s and Hawthorne’s first sentences, events in the world of men and women are foreshadowed by nonhuman vehicles—tramcars, doors, colors. Although these sentences are not explicitly involved in the narration of action, they nevertheless set the stage on which action—of a human and unhappy kind—subsequently occurs. But there are first sentences where the nonhuman is not a vehicle of something else, but occupies both background and foreground. These first sentences are often meditations rather than narratives. Here is the first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” (1844):

  There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.

  The sentence is a series of “when” clauses that aren’t going anywhere. They march in place, and the place is glorious. The proportion of bleakness to sunlight is the reverse of what it is in Lawrence’s sentence. The “bleak upper sides of the planet” are mentioned only to be dispelled and sent away. Indeed, it is the business of the sentence to transform time-bound particulars and variations—of emotion, thought, climate, place—into a vision of eternal bliss like the Garden of Eden or the Hesperian Gardens of Ovidian myth (“the happiest latitudes”). The first three words, “There are days,” suggest that whatever these days are, they are exceptional, and unusual in “this climate.” But then we are told that such days can occur “at almost any season” and we begin to suspect that it may be an inner as well as an outer weather that is being described. The hallmark of this weather is twofold: harmony among all things and the absence of thought, that is, of the kind of questioning and questing that signifies being at a distance from that harmony. When everything that lives gives sign of satisfaction, that sign is not something added to the natural repose of being; it is that repose, which is why the image of it is the cattle that lie on the ground, not moving, and having great and tranquil thoughts. The thoughts are great because tranquil—that is, unruffled, serene, calm, quiet, unperturbed, not really thoughts at all. Cattle, after all, don’t think, which is exactly the point.

  At the very opposite end of the first-sentence continuum are sentences that, rather than moving away from deliberative thought, insist on it aggressively. They are first sentences that are neither narratives nor meditations nor celebrations. They are arguments; they pose problems, issue challenges, advance theses, consider objections, draw conclusions. “Politics,” the essay that follows “Nature” in Emerson’s second series, is one of these:

  In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born, that they are not superior to the citizen, that every one of them was once the act of a single man, every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case, that they are all imitable, all alterable, we may ma
ke as good, we may make better.

  This is a sentence that dismantles its putative subject. The sentence begins by placing us in a relationship of negotiation to the state; it is we, apparently, who must figure out how to deal with it. The state, then, is the ostensible center of the sentence, but in fact it is its largest casualty, for it is under attack as soon as it is named in the first clause. After that we learn only what it is not, and with every “that” clause, the claims the state has on us by virtue of its temporal duration are weakened. It is not aboriginal, that is, indigenous and natural; even though its institutions preceded us in time, they were themselves created by single men; and they were created not in accordance with some timeless, abstract norm, but in response to a “particular” and, because particular, temporary need. In short the institutions that ask for our deference were made by us and “we”—the word that takes over the sentence at its end—can remake them or make them “better.” What the sentence argues is that faith in the state is faith in a chimera. And, moreover, faith in law as if it were something standing above us, is a mistake, for as Emerson says a little later, “The law is but a memorandum” (another great sentence), the record of an agreement we may rescind tomorrow: “The statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article today?” This question is asked with an insistence difficult to ignore; that’s what the argumentative mode does.