Sentences Make Magic by Lee Kofman

I am the kind of a writer who writes for sentences. It’s not because narrative isn’t important to me, but rather because I believe the shape and texture of sentences affect our narratives. The structure, rhythm and details of each sentence influence how readers experience our stories. Take this snippet from Sasha Soldatow’s creative nonfiction book, Mayakovsky in Bondi: ‘The old wintry winds were just rising out of their graves when he decided he should leave.’ The evocative, discomforting imagery in the first part of the sentence gives emotional weight to the second part, which is purely functional, informing us of Soldatow’s decision to end his uneasy sojourn in Russia. The windy corpses rising from their graves make this turning point dramatic and emotionally significant.

In my writing, I, too, strive for sentences that not only provide information or move the action along but also inject my stories with drama and emotion. For example, in my memoir The Dangerous Bride, about non-monogamy, I wanted readers to feel the disorientation I experienced upon arriving in Western Australia for the first time. That visit was a major turning point, as there I would meet a man who would become my (extramarital) lover. I wanted my prose to show how in those foreign surroundings I entered a neurotic, almost hallucinatory state of mind, which would affect my decision making. So I tried to write sentences with a hypnotic, dazed rhythm and strange imagery:

I disembarked into the western dust and heat, broke into a sweat, and was told my baggage was lost. My home life twisted its tail and slipped away at once, leaving me in the hum of the airport, shadowless.

So, a fine sentence is the heartbeat of a story. It is the mood and the energy of narrative. But there is more to it. It is also in the sentences, as much as in the action, that the moral compass and overall worldview of a work can be found. When Julia Kristeva writes in her novel, The Samurai, ‘They [French] speak well and eat well. So much ephemeral beauty disappearing down luxurious lavender-scented toilets.’, we see French society the way the Easter European protagonist – a stand-in for Kristeva – does. Her fascination with France, tempered with healthy irony, is expressed through the witty juxtaposition of the ephemeral and the luxurious with toilets. And the sentence imparts an opinion that some of this over-the-top sophistication is unnecessary, because even the finest food will be flushed down the toilet, just like the peasant tripe soup of protagonist’s native Bulgaria would.

But what constitutes a fine sentence? What makes the magic, the sorcery of prose? To answer this can be as difficult as to define what love is. We all know the basic rules, like: don’t join two simple sentences with ‘and’, because this creates flat prose. But then, Brian Castro writes ‘She pulled a bottle of something from the fridge and opened it and I could smell the coldness of its promise’ (from his novel Shanghai Dancing) and it works. Castro’s repetition of ‘and’ recreates the stretchy rhythms of seduction.

Perhaps then, rather than looking for rules, a better way to approach this quandary is by closely examining some more sentences that exude sorcery. That’s why keeping a reading journal is an important part of my writing practice. There, like a magpie, I collect shiny sentences from the books I read.

Peter Carey has numerous entries in my journal. There is something about the sheer expanse of his sprawling sentences that I find majestic. And deeply moving. Take this one from his novel, Illywhacker. This sentence explains how the mismatched couple, Leah and Izzie, ended up together:

They both misunderstood her emotions, and the misunderstanding would continue, would grow greater rather than diminish as that year of 1930 continued and finally reached its zenith in 1931 when she would marry Izzie Kaletsky when it was really Rosa that she loved.

Rosa is Izzie’s mother – a former circus performer, a spontaneous and affectionate woman, and Leah yearns to be a part of her family. Mistaking this yearning for romantic love, she marries Rosa’s son. The long, complex sentence doesn’t just explain Leah’s mistake. It matches the emotional complexity it describes and embodies its tragedy. Like a short-short-story, it rushes, breathlessly, desperately, towards the final revelation. Every time I reread it, I get goose bumps. In particular, I find the music of the ending – ‘when it was really Rosa that she loved’ – infinitely, poetically heartbreaking. 

Often the power of a sentence lays in its surprise. Rachel Matthews is an author who has a knack for wild, unpredictable sentences. Take this one from her novel, Never Look Desperate, where her protagonist Bernard recounts why he liked his future wife as soon as he met her: ‘She was studying to be a legal secretary and curious about the make of his watch.’ This unexpected, hilarious bundling together of two completely unrelated, and not particularly attractive, facts that seduce Bernard stops you in your tracks. And once you appreciated the quirky comedy of the sentence, it compels you to read the rest of the novel attentively, searching for more such delights (and finding aplenty).

I, too, want my readers to read my stories attentively. I want them not only to be curious about what happens next, but to feel something, and to absorb the work’s vision. This is why I try to avoid merely ‘functional’ sentences. During revision, I examine each sentence and think – what can I ‘load’ it with to make it more interesting, or more meaningful, or more affecting? (I also often think how I can simplify a sentence, but here my focus isn’t on clarity but on magic.)

One of my main goals is to make each sentence as specific as possible. This is not specificity for the sake of specificity, e.g. accurate reportage. Rather, the purpose is to reveal something about characters, their context and/or story’s themes, as well as to surprise, charm, entertain, induce a mood.

It was with this in mind that I repeatedly re-worked the opening sentence of The Dangerous Bride: ‘The night before I married Noah in the oldest Australian synagogue in Ballarat, I kissed a girl dressed in a nurse’s uniform.’

Initially, the sentence was far simpler: ‘The night before I married Noah, I kissed a girl.’ It was perhaps a dramatic opening, which established my memoir’s main theme, but it didn’t reveal anything about who Noah and I were or about the context of our story. To engage readers as quickly as possible, I wanted to begin painting the singularity of our story from the very start. And some of it was that we were Australian Jews, and our Jewishness was complex. We chose to get married in a synagogue, but we weren’t religious and affiliated with a particular synagogue; instead, we were guided by our interest in Australian Jewish history when choosing the venue for our wedding. Instead, there was the kiss… The nurse’s uniform mattered too. It is, or so I hope, a surprising detail. A detail that disorients, raising questions. Did I kiss a real nurse? Was I in a hospital? (If so, what had happened to me?) Or was it a costume? And if we’re talking about fancy dress, then what was going on the night before my wedding? More so, the final version of the sentence is meant not only to evoke curiosity but to flag the main themes of my memoir, as they are expressed in its sub-title: ‘A memoir of love [wedding and the kiss], gods [synagogue] and geography [Ballarat].’

Specificity is crucial, but – as I’ve tried to argue here – it is not the only element that imbues our sentences with magic. So I’ll finish by sharing a checklist I use when I revise my sentences in the hope that it may be useful to you.

• Can I make this sentence more specific?
• Do the imagery and/or metaphors fit the emotional flavour of the sentence?
• Can I make it more surprising?
• Does it need some humour?
• Does it need some drama?
• Is the syntax flat or alive?
• Does the rhythm of the sentence reflect its content?
• Does the sentence’s rhythm fit within the music of its paragraph?