On Sentences that Ring

And Sentences that Tink

I have resisted writing about this, because I know I’ll need to give examples.

And I don’t want to quote anyone in an undermining way.

But if I make up sentences that are deliberately bad — or are deliberately not as good as they might be — they won’t read as sincere.

Most writers who write badly do so for what they feel are powerful reasons.

For example, in a first draft, they are being emotionally open and direct, and in subsequent drafts, they don’t want to mess with their own honesty. Which means they leave something unformed and unsatisfying on the page — out of the desire to leave something raw and true.

Or they do a first draft which is fairly simple, but then, in subsequent drafts, they keep thinking of extra details. They then find a way to shoehorn these into the sentence.

I call this the curse of the cursor. It’s there, blinking away, and it can drop new clauses in wherever it wanders. The whole sentence, though, isn’t reconsidered — as a sound and sense unit, as a whole thing — from start to finish. Which leaves it as an object constructed from materials of different ages and full of weak joins.

It isn’t a whole bell of blown crystal, that goes ring when struck; it’s a glued-together assemblage of glass that goes tink.

(I don’t like the crystal glass image, but I’ve never been able to come up with a better one.)

I think that’s exactly what’s happened here, in this altered paragraph from an anonymised story from deep within my hard drive — the curse of the cursor has struck.

Jay was having a party. Her flat was only a couple of streets away and Daisy walked there slowly, enjoying the clammy darkness, the weight of the bottle in her bag and the clack of her high heels on the pavement — all familiar signifiers for the start of a night out.

The word here that goes tink is signifiers, or signifiers coupled with for rather than of.

But the sentence has already broken into pieces before then. It has started to lose resonant energy with the addition of and and the descriptive stuff that follows (bottle, bag, heels and pavement, darkness, clamminess and clack). That stuff is great stuff, but it’s all being dragged along behind the weak verb was.

If you’re going to weigh your sentence down with objects, you need a bigger engine than was to get and keep them moving.

A simple fix would be to break the paragraph into shorter sentences. They perhaps wouldn’t ring all that loudly when struck, but they’d get the job done. This isn’t a rhetorical high point of the story, we just need to get Daisy characterfully to the party.

Here’s a redo —

Jay’s flat was only a couple of streets away. Daisy walked there slowly, enjoying the clammy darkness. It was the start of a night out — the bottle in her bag thumping against her hip, and her high heels clacking on the pavement.

I’m not super happy with this, because I don’t think the bottle and the heels go all that well together. (I like the implied drum and bass, however.) But this version goes a little way to fixing the syntax. I’ve kept the dash — which some writers distain — but tried to use it as an accelerator within the sentence (get a load of this) rather than a brake (let me explain in more Latinate language what that means).

A little later in the same story, we get this —

She saw Jim first. He was outside, rolling a cigarette, leaning against the wall with his brother Iggy, and another boy she didn’t recognise. She slowed her pace to watch them for a little longer in the dark before they noticed her. The boy was talking intensely and tapping his palm with his finger to articulate what he was saying. He looked small in comparison to Iggy, always the tallest, who was nodding into the rizzla curling up between his fingers, frowning and then smoothing his brow intermittently.

I’m afraid this goes tink tink tink the whole way through. And who is rolling the cigarette, Jim or Iggy?

Again the writer starts with something simple and declarative: ‘Jay was having a party’ and ‘She saw Jim first.’ But then there’s a loss of nerve. Writing needs to be more than this, surely? I need to show I’m writing, and show, not tell. I need to pile on the descriptive details. But unfortunately that’s what the details here end up being, a pile.

That ‘first’ isn’t necessary in the sentence, in terms of the order of Daisy’s perceptions, unless gets to work with the second and third boys she sees.

A rearrangement might be —

She saw Jim first — leaning against the garden wall with his brother Iggy and another boy she didn’t recognise

I suspect this might have been how the original draft read. But then the writer wanted to show Jim doing something, so he introduced ‘rolling a cigarette’.

I don’t know about you, but when I see people, I usually see their shape first, then recognise who they are, then figure out what they’re doing.

That would go like this —

She saw three boys leaning against the garden wall — Jim, Iggy and another one she didn’t recognise. Jim was rolling a cigarette.

Alternatively, I see shapes of people, see what they’re doing, then recognise who they are by the way they’re doing that thing —

She saw three boys leaning against the garden wall — one of them rolling a cigarette. It was Jim, and beside him was his brother Iggy but she didn’t recognise the other one.

Let’s untink the rest of the paragraph:

She slowed her pace to watch them for a little longer in the dark before they noticed her. The boy was talking intensely and tapping his palm with his finger to articulate what he was saying. He looked small in comparison to Iggy, always the tallest, who was nodding into the rizzla curling up between his fingers, frowning and then smoothing his brow intermittently.

That first sentence is a mess. The cursor has inserted in the dark almost randomly, as a descriptive detail. Remove that, and the sentence does a far better job.

But if you remixed it completely, you might end up with something like —

She didn’t want them to see her before she had a chance to take them in, so she slowed down. Luckily, she was between streetlights.

For ‘take them in’ you could have ‘look them over’ or ‘suss them out’. Then comes —

The boy was talking intensely and tapping his palm with his finger to articulate what he was saying.

The Latinate phrase ‘to articulate what he was saying’ does as little as the earlier ‘all familiar signifiers’. They are styling things up, making the prose writerly, but to no effect.

A couple of cuts make it function —

The boy was talking intensely, tapping his palm with his finger.

Finally —

He looked small in comparison to Iggy, always the tallest, who was nodding into the rizzla curling up between his fingers, frowning and then smoothing his brow intermittently.

Could become —

Iggy was looking down at him. As Daisy got closer, she saw Iggy was frowning.

Ugh, that down and frown rhyme. But I didn’t want to go for grimace.

In the original version, there isn’t anything like enough time (as Daisy keeps walking) for Iggy to do something intermittently. This is the action of maybe three or four seconds.

Here are a few sentences from ‘Dundun’, a story in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. They have a similar set up: an approach, three figures, some recognition —

I went around the house and in through the back. The room just through the back door smelled of dogs and babies. Beatle stood in the opposite doorway. She watched me come in. Leaning against the wall was Blue, smoking a cigarette and scratching her chin thoughtfully. Jack Hotel was over at an old desk, setting fire to a pipe the bowl of which was wrapped in tinfoil.

Ring ring.