If you love to write, this book should be a lot of fun to read.

If you
write for a living, it should make your life a lot easier.

Learning about these writing techniques, and trying them out in

practice sessions, has noticeably affected my ability to communicate,
to express my own voice more vividly, and to take more pleasure in the
writing process. And the same seems to have been true for this book’s
readers. Over five thousand novelists, bloggers, and freelancers have
read, shared, and commented on these essays.
Some readers said that they reached the final essay in a state of eu-
phoria, feeling that a veil had been removed from their eyes. However,
if reading through these pieces merely expands your verbal toolkit,
and merely gives you more options as you work on your next writing
project, I will be very happy.

1
 Before we begin, here are two quick notes:

Note one: these essays owe a huge debt of gratitude to Rahawa

Haile and Brooks Landon, who together guided me to discover the
riches of the sentence.
Note two: this is a completely free resource intended for educa-
tional purposes. Feel free to share it, comment on it, but please don’t
alter it—and please don’t do something else weird with it that I cannot
at present anticipate.

Yours,

Daniel David Wallace

2
Although style is a topic addressed in many books on writing, I found
that these books either:

1. Presented useful tips on style hidden among other subjects.

2. Expected grammatical knowledge that few readers have today.
3. Had been largely forgotten by the writing public.

My series draws together advice on style from a range of related

topics. The essays cover the order you put words down on the screen,
the sound those words make in the reader’s ear, how caring about
style makes you a better thinker, and how style and point of view are
connected.
My aim is to present it all simply enough that anyone who likes
words can understand and immediately use.

3
 The series contains ten short essays. The first four essays look at
how we join ideas together, the order of words, and the connections
between them. The next three, essays five to seven, try to unpack a
sentence’s building blocks, the grammatical components and neces-
sary elements, so that we can learn how to assemble these blocks in
combinations that are unique to our own voice and style. The final
three essays discuss the sound that good prose makes, even when we
read it in silence, so that our words take on a haunting, striking clarity.
A final, extra essay, a masterclass, wraps up the series and demon-
strates every technique at work in a single sentence: the amazing first
sentence of Dan Simmons’s science fiction classic, Hyperion.
Let’s get started.

4
The essays:
Introduction to the Series
1. Put the key word last.
2. Noun style, verb style.
3. Parataxis, or how to write like Hemingway.
4. Hypotaxis, or how to argue and explain.
5. Clauses and kernel sentences.
6. Phrases, and branching sentences.
7. Christensen’s cumulative sentence.
8. Stress and flow.
9. Iambs and beats.
10. Sounds in Lonely Places.
11. Series conclusion and demonstration of the techniques at work.

Postscript: Resources and further reading

5
 Okay. Let’s start with something simple.

Perhaps the most basic question, writing or editing any given sen-
tence, is to ask -- where should the most important word go? Should
your key point or central image be placed at the start of the sentence,
somewhere in the middle, or at the end?

Essay One: Put the most important word last.

The advice from The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and

E.B. White, that famous little book of grammatical rules and stylistic
commandments, is that writers should put a sentence’s most import-
ant idea last.

6
 Strunk and White advise writers to “place the emphatic words of a
sentence at the end.”
In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White give this sentence as
an example of what they mean, with the original, flawed version on the
left, and the corrected revision to the right:

Humanity has hardly advanced in fortitude since that time,

though it has advanced in many other ways.

Humanity, since that time, has advanced in many other

ways, but it has hardly advanced in fortitude.

Given this example, it’s hard to argue with their theory. The first ver-
sion of the sentence seems self-doubting, taking a nervous step back
as soon as it has advanced its claim. Worse, the reader is left unsure
whether fortitude or those “many other ways” are the sentence’s focus.
If the “ways” are the focus, why are they mentioned so vaguely—but,
if they are not, why have we already acquired the sentence’s key infor-
mation halfway through?
The revised version makes its priorities clear—fortitude is its sub-
ject, and the “other ways” are merely there for contrast. And we have
to read the entire sentence before we understand it, which releases, at
its end dot, a charge of meaningful energy, a buzz of intellectual juice,
that makes us feel well treated. The sentence seems to ring.
This “putting the key word last” principle is particularly useful in

7
comic writing, where the punch-line needs to hit with the suddenness
of a full stop, and is in visible use in Iris Owens’s 1973 novel, After
Claude.
Her narrator, Harriet, is a New York free spirit gone wrong, pen-
niless, homeless, desperate to save her relationship with a man she
hates. The reader gets to enjoy her tirades even while questioning
their relation to outside reality.
Many of Harriet’s sentences feel so perfect because they rise to an
unexpected, scandalous, utterly self-justified conclusion—they put the
key words last.

His voice got soft and mean. “Has anyone ever told you what
a terrible bore you are?”

“Me a bore?” I laughed, amazed that the rat would resort

to such a bizarre accusation. I have since learned never to be
amazed at what men will resort to when cornered by a wom-
an’s intelligence.

The last sentence would be far less funny, less right, if it went:

When cornered by a woman’s intelligence, men will resort to

anything, I have since learned.

My weak revision puts the stress on Harriet’s learning, whereas the

original holds back its best word, “intelligence,” right to the close, each

8
of its pieces raising the stakes, cornering the reader just as Harriet be-
lieves her intelligence has cornered Claude.
The sentence snakes along, gathering speed, each piece the answer
to or development of what preceded it—and its claim, that Harriet’s
intelligence is too much for Claude, seems proved by her sentence’s
zing and punch.
Later in their argument, Harriet exclaims to herself:

His distortions, the lies he was telling himself and me, filled
me with a cold fury, because, as an American, my war against
injustice knows no bounds.

This works so well because each comma takes the sentence to a further
height, going from distortions to lies, to fury, to the well-armed Amer-
ican thirst for justice. The joke is set up in the penultimate phrase,
where we wonder, stunned, how being an American can possibly
relate to Harriet’s current situation, and the answer comes straight
away—her life with Claude, she proclaims, is another episode in the
Cold War, in Manifest Destiny.

9
 It’s also worth noting that these choices allow Owens to keep her
narrator’s tone relaxed, untheatrical, because her word sequencing
does the work of italics or exclamations. Her end-loaded sentences
guide us quietly up to the next slap in the mouth.
Here is Harriet, for instance, giving her opinion of dreams:

That night I had my usual dreamless sleep. I hardly ever

dream, which is probably a reflection of the fact that I live my
life fully and consciously. I solve my problems while awake,
and, as a result, spend my sleeping hours resting, not receiv-
ing inane messages.

So. The advice is—put the key word, or phrase, last. It gives your argu-
ments the ring of inevitability. It means that readers are less likely to
skip ahead, knowing that at the end of each breath lies a gem. It lets
your best jokes or claims stand alone during the pause of the full stop,
confident in their visibility.
However, there are situations when one should probably not
put the key word last. This “end-loaded” style very often goes
along with an air of calm, of reflection, of control. Neither Ow-
ens’s nor Baldwin’s narrator talk like they are in personal dan-
ger—they stand outside their tales’ events, explaining and present-
ing with the ease that time and safety brings. One situation where
you might not want to end-load your sentences is when you want
to stress action, sudden developments, scattered consciousness.

10
 For example, imagine a narrator writes—

In the little town of Luton, in the dim gray of evening, halfway

down a dripping alley, while I stood frozen in shock, the dog
bared its teeth, and leaped.

A reader is unlikely to feel much concern for the narrator’s longev-

ity. This is not how people at risk think or speak—instead it sounds
like someone remembering and recreating with all the resources of
a detailed diary, hotel receipts, street maps, and a camera crew. In
action-heavy prose, or in prose meant to convey the immediacy of ex-
perience, or a nonchalant deadness of affect (the kind found in Hem-
ingway and Denis Johnson, for instance), the ringing culminations of
end-loaded prose may seem out of place.

11
Here is a second writing technique that is simple to understand, but
substantial in effect: the difference between a noun-based style and a
verb-based one.
It comes from Richard A. Lanham’s Analyzing Prose, an excellent
guide to writing style.

Essay Two: Noun style, verb style

Lanham suggests that a passage of writing can either be dominat-

ed by verbs, or by nouns.

I came. I saw. I conquered.

Arrival; Reconnaissance; Victory.

12
 The verby version, the first one, I think you’ll agree, sounds better,
and this is Lanham’s point—passages that rely on verbs usually sound
better than those that rely on nouns. Verb styles sound stronger, clear-
er, and yet we constantly encounter noun-style writing whenever we
open an official document, scientific or technical writing, or academic
prose.
Lanham quotes, as an example of noun style, this awful passage,
which is much less readable than its author probably believes:

The connection between behaviour in the socially real world

and dramatic performance is a double link. Much of everyday
social behavior and socially consequential action is itself com-
posed, and often in a fashion which is recognised at the time
as ‘theatrical’ or is revealed as such afterwards.

Lanham points out the basic structure of this sort of prose:

“noun + is + prepositional phrase.”

If you do not use strong verbs, you risk getting locked into this pat-
tern, this sequence 0f vague verbs and prepositions, one after another.

The connection

between behavior

13
 in the socially real world

and dramatic performance

is a double link.

Opening my filing cabinet, and pulling out an official document at ran-

dom, I see:

Adjuncts and Visiting Lecturers are eligible to receive contri-

butions from the College towards health insurance premiums.

This kind of writing isn’t grammatically incorrect, but it is dull.

In contrast, here is Virginia Woolf, in her novel To the Lighthouse,
who Lanham deploys to represent the verb style.
Imagine you want to write a paragraph describing what a lon-
ger winter night is like. Probably you would reach for a succession of
nouns and adjectives: “it was cold... there was ice on the driveway...”
That’s not what Woolf does. Her winter is full of verbs, of strong
clear actions.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when
the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock
crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the
hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The
winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally,

14
 evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they dark-
en. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of
tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves
where golden letters on marble pages describe death in battle
and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.
The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light
of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of la-
bour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping
blue to the shore.

Wow.
Perhaps you noticed, however, that Woolf’s passage actually con-
tains many prepositional phrases, such as “in the gloom of cool cathe-
dral caves.”
Lanham points out that Woolf chooses to emphasise these phrases
by frequently keeping them the same length, and so building a delib-
erate rhythm into the passage:

The autumn trees, ravaged as they are,

take on the flash of tattered flags
kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves
where golden letters on marble pages
describe death in battle and how
bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands.

15
Virginia Woolf is infamous for writing intricate, complex prose. And
yet, in the above passage, most of her sentences begin simply, clearly,
with the “subject-verb” opening that forms the basis of the standard
English sentence (e.g. “The winter holds,” “The autumn trees gleam”).
Verb-based sentences tend to present their readers with clear,
distinct claims. Here, for instance, is master copywriter Brian Clark,
warning his students to avoid clickbait, in How to Write Magnetic
Headlines:

If people don’t believe you can deliver on your promise, they

won’t bother reading further, and your over-the-top headline
fails.

See how Clark’s verbs anchor and strengthen the sentence:

If people don’t believe you can deliver on your promise, they

won’t bother reading further, and your over-the-top head-
line fails.

Noun-styles, on the other hand, tend to rely on long sentence

openers, and worse, on abstract phrases like “the phenomenon of,”
or “a reason why,” or “the process of.” These phrases bog down both
reader and writer.
Nora Bacon, in her textbook The Well-Crafted Sentence, gives this
example:

16
 Another reason that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake is
that it caused the stature of the United States as a world leader to
plummet.
This sentence’s point seems simple, even obvious, and yet the poor
reader has to read eleven words merely to find out what the sentence
is about.
Bacon corrects it to:

Furthermore, when the United States invaded Iraq, its stature

as a world leader plummeted.

Another benefit of verb style: it tends to be concise. Lanham points

out that, if translated into verb-style, most noun-style sentences will
be shortened.
Verb-style seems to lead to plainer, simpler ways of expressing
ideas.

17
 Now, in reality, few writers consistently maintain such a clear style
preference, and good writing can mingle action and object, verb and
noun style. Sometimes a good verb should lead the sentence; some-
times a string of prepositional phrases will work better.
Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness is defiantly nouny,
but I’m not sure that this damages it:

The root of the trouble springs from too much emphasis upon
competitive success as the main source of happiness. I do not
deny that the feeling of success makes it easier to enjoy life.
A painter, let us say, who has been obscure throughout his
youth, is likely to become happier if his talent wins recogni-
tion. Nor do I deny that money, up to a certain point, is very
capable of increasing happiness; beyond that point, I do not
think it does so. What I do maintain is that success can only be
one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all
the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.

And here is Thoreau, in Walden, speaking of solitude, both his nouns

and verbs doing their fair share:

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain

storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house
for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their
ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in
a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root

18
 and unfold themselves.

So. It’s possible to make both styles work. But when in doubt, focus on
the verbs.

19
In your writing, do you relate one thing to another, explaining what is
cause and what is effect, when one experience ends and another be-
gins, which of two facts is primary and which secondary?
Or do you place each element on the page alone—each image, con-
cept, claim—and let the reader guess the connection? The first option is
formally called hypotaxis, where one element is placed under another
(“hypo” meaning beneath, and “taxis” arrangement), and the second,
parataxis. I do not think I can offer a better introduction to parataxis
than Richard A. Lanham’s, in Analyzing Prose, where he writes,

Whatever units a writer chooses to work with—phrases, claus-

es, or complete sentences—he or she must relate them equally
or unequally. He or she can tell us how they are related—A
caused B, B came after A—and thus subordinate one to the

20
 other, by cause, time, or whatever, or can simply juxtapose
them and leave the relationship up to us.
When Caesar wrote, “I came; I saw; I conquered” (Veni,
vidi, vici), he leaving a great deal up to us. We were to infer
that, for Caesar, diagnosing the situation (“I saw”) and de-
feating the enemy (“I conquered”) were no more difficult than
simply appearing on the scene (“I came”). He boasts with-
out seeming to by putting three different kinds of action on
the same syntactic level. This syntactic democracy is called
parataxis.

All writing relies on parataxis to some degree, because often there

is no need to spell out a connection—putting one sentence after anoth-
er is enough.

Essay Three: Parataxis. Or, how to write like Hemingway.

Much narrative action, for instance, inevitably relies on paratax-

is—unconscious for the writer, unnoticed by the reader—using the for-
ward motion of events to offer the necessary linkage between images
and ideas. Here is John Grisham, in The Firm, describing a rogue FBI
agent leaving a mobster’s hotel room, his briefcase filled with bribe
money:

Tarry Ross walked in panic down the hall. He could see little

21
 from behind the glasses. Seven doors down, almost to the ele-
vator, a huge hand reached from the darkness and pulled him
into the room. The hand slapped him hard, and another fist
landed in his stomach. Another fist to the nose. He was on the
floor, dazed and bleeding. The briefcase was emptied on the
bed.

The action has to move quickly, and we need no placement or ex-

planation other than where exactly the huge hand grabs him (“almost
to the elevator”). If we also had commentary and explanation, this
would indicate either a distinct narrator commenting from a safe dis-
tance, or that Tarry is a very unusual person, with the mental capacity
to reflect on what is happening to him while he is getting beaten.
Parataxis, therefore, can be a natural, unobtrusive way to tell a sto-
ry. But its lack of connecting links can also be emphasised, to help a
more artistic para-tactician portray confusion and unease, or to de-
scribe a scene which itself lacks order. In The Great Gatsby, Nick finds
Gatsby’s parties disorientating, and so Fitzgerald has him narrate his
impressions in a rambling, disjunctive parataxis.

“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow,
“but we met you here about a month ago.”

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan and I

started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark
was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the sup-

22
 per, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slen-
der golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and
sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us
through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two
girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as
Mr. Mumble.
It is possible, although more tricky, to write an essay or argument
paratactically. Such an essay does not explain—it merely states one
maxim or belief after another, and its self-certainty is its proof. Here is
D.H. Lawrence, in his unforgettably strange Studies in Classic Amer-
ican Literature.

Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters.
There is always a master. And men can either live in glad obe-
dience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional
opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In American
this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given
the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile
Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring
class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.

But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a par-
ent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion
against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels
he has completely escaped its mastery.

23
 Lawrence is not interested in explaining his terms, or detailing the
process of how one thing leads to another. Although he uses the oc-
casional hypotactic conjunction, like “hence,” or “only”, mostly these
points are delivered like self-evident facts, and a reader is obliged to
accept each of Lawrence’s grim statements, or close the book. There is
no half-reading here; there is no wavering or questioning.
And this seried paratactic presentation of things, is found in many
parts of the Bible, in epic sagas, in much poetry, and in the prose of
Ernest Hemingway.
Everyone likes to say that Hemingway’s style gets its power from
the “iceberg theory.” This is Hemingway’s claim, in Death in the Af-
ternoon, that

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing

about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if
the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The
dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of
it being above water.

Yet, as Robert Paul Lamb points out, in his excellent study, Art Mat-
ters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Sto-
ry, as a total explanation of Hemingway’s distinctiveness, the iceberg
theory is very disappointing. All writers omit needless information,
even big talkers like Virginia Woolf and William Shakespeare, and all

24
good writers hint at more than they state. And some of Hemingway’s
most famous icebergs are actually bogus, such as the short story “Out
of Season,” in which Hemingway, years after the story was published,
claimed the reader could sense that the Italian guide, Peduzzi, would
later hang himself—but, as Lamb points out, Peduzzi was based on a
real person, and while that real person did indeed later hang himself,
he had not yet done so while Hemingway was writing about him.
No, what in fact gives Hemingway’s prose its signature ring is not
the iceberg theory, but what Richard Lanham calls his “consistent,
philosophically reasoned” paratactic style. This style omits explana-
tions (frequently), and emotional reactions (almost always).
Here is the opening of Hemingway’s famous short story, “Cat in
the Rain.”

There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They

did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on
their way to and from their room. Their room was on the sec-
ond floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and
the war monument. There were big palms and green benches
in the public garden. In the good weather there was always
an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew
and the bright colours of the hotels facing the gardens and
the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the
war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the
rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees.

25
 Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a
long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come
up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars
were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the
square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out
at the empty square.

The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside

right under their window a cat was crouching under one of
the dripping green tables.
Notice, in the first sentence, how Hemingway chooses the word
“stopping,” and not “staying,” and what the word suggests about his
couple. See how he uses propositions to place his images, and how
those prepositions add detail to what seems such bare prose.
The use of “up” in “Italians came from a long way off to look up at
the war monument” almost shows us a real Italian family, their necks
craning. And the sentence, “Across the square in the doorway of the
cafe a waiter stood looking out at the empty square” gives us the un-
canny sequence of getting the American wife’s viewpoint of the cafe’s
doorway, and the waiter, in that doorway, and what he sees (“the emp-
ty square”). We get a lot for such plain words.
And notice how Hemingway zooms his focus in once the rain be-
gins. Before the rain, the scene is described from a distance. After it,
the wife’s eyes give us a closer view: “The rain dripped from the palm
trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths.”

26
 Hemingway is not trying to be eccentric or confusing. Instead, pre-
sumably through enormously laboured re-writing, he creates a para-
graph where the reader’s mental eye is directed and guided at every
step by a series of seemingly distinct and unconnected flashes of per-
ception, yet where, somehow, the sea and the rain and the public gar-
dens hint at the main character’s emotions.
Not easy to pull off.

27
If parataxis is the style of writing where clauses and sentences are laid
out one after another, with no connecting terms to explain how they
relate, the opposite style is hypotaxis, where the connections between
ideas are written down, where one idea is “subordinated” to another.
If the essay you’re reading is full of ifs and becauses and therefores
-- it’s hypotactic.
Hypotaxis is the standard style, therefore, for essays and argu-
ments. Here is Hemingway, for instance, critiquing the owners of pets,
in Death in the Afternoon:

I believe, after experience and observation, that those peo-

ple who identify themselves with animals, that is, the almost
professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts, are capable of
greater cruelty to human beings than those who do not iden-

28
 tity themselves readily with animals.

Hypotaxis is powerful. Merely saying “because,” even if what follows is

nonsense, can often be persuasive. The scholar Northrop Frye, in his
amazing opus Words with Power, suggested that the rise of “dialecti-
cal” writing—hypotactic writing—enabled the rise of court bureaucra-
cies and kingdoms in the ancient world. This kind of language gave
its speaker authority, logic, even inevitablity, offering a semi-magical
power over its audience, the power of compulsion. There is no state
without hypotaxis.

Essay Four: Hypotaxis.

Because of the power of hypotaxis, one has to think before one

can disagree with Hemingway’s claim about those horrible dog-lov-
ers, even if one has never seen a dog-lover slap a child. The reader’s
attention is caught by how Hemingway’s sentence promises and holds
back, moving forward only to pause and elaborate again. Powerful hy-
potaxis delays gratification of understanding, setting up hooks (if...
because…), implying pay offs which the reader scans forward to reach.
This suggests the second advantage of hypotactic writing: it reads
quickly. Hypotactic structures accelerate the reader through the text.
Hypotaxis clarifies the relationship between ideas, so a reader doesn’t
have to pause to figure out how the two parts connect. It also embeds
promises into the sentence, the paragraph, the essay. If you read the

29
first part of the sentence, you’ll get the answer in the second part. Be-
cause you saw a “because” in the beginning of the sentence, you know
an explanation is coming soon.
Inside his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King cre-
ates one incredible sentence made of many “when” clauses. “Whens”
begin each main clause, “ands” extend some of them, and “and sees”
coordinate the longest series of elaborations. The parallelism ensures
that the sentence keeps rushing forward on its terrible course.
Here is merely the first half of his sentence:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging
darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vi-
cious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown
your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate
filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers
and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty
million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of pov-
erty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly
find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you
seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t
go to the public amusement park that has just been adver-
tised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when
she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see
ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little
mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality

30
 by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white peo-
ple; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old
son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored
people so mean?”…

The repeated clause openers both keep the reader clear on how each
piece fits into the overall story, and also accelerate the reader’s eye,
giving the sentence the weight of inevitability, the rising volume of its
argument becoming unavoidable.
When King finally gives the answer to all these “when” clauses:

“then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait,”

the reader has long since been convinced.

31
Can we pause for a second? We’ve been talking a lot about sentences.
But what is a sentence?
There are three explanations that make sense to me.

1. “A sentence is a complete idea.” This suggests that every sen-

tence advances one major thought. Even if the sentence is fifty
words long, it all ends up presenting a single unified statement
to the reader. I’ve never felt much helped by this definition. It
may be true, but it’s hard to know how one could disprove it,
and it’s not much of a guide to how to write a sentence.
2. “A sentence is a breath.” There seems to be a connection be-
tween reading, between breathing, and the period / full stop at
the sentence’s end. People who are good public speakers often
seem to pause with the end of a sentence. So a sentence should

32
 bear some resemblance to how we speak, how we breathe.
3. “A sentence contains a clause.” This is the boring grammatical
answer. It seems like a fairly pointless observation. But it is sur-
prisingly useful.

Every sentence contains a clause. This seems like a simple idea. It’s
like saying that a car can contain many things, but unless it contains
an engine, it isn’t a car: just a very expensive chair.
Googling the question, “What is a clause?” one finds the basic idea
repeated everywhere—

A clause contains a subject and a predicate

In other words, a clause has a subject and a verb (“Jesus wept”), a sim-
ple combination of a doer and the thing done.

Essay Five: Clauses and Sentence Kernels.

The clause is the heart of the sentence, the essential engine. We

can sense this when we look at a long, complicated sentence like

In a sleepy suburb of London, last Tuesday, my old friend

Tim—a lovely, sweet man—killed his landlord with a hammer,
and then called me to ask what he should do next.

The main idea is clearly Tim’s murder of his landlord. He is the doer,
the murder the thing done. The first part merely sets the scene (a sub-

33
urb of London, last Tuesday) and the rest of the sentence (after the
“hammer”) hangs off his act, explains it, situates it.
The only tricky rule with clauses is that if you have more than one
in a sentence, you have to specific the relationship between them. You
can’t write

“The company’s stock fell the CEO was fired.”

That will look jarring to many readers’ eyes.

Instead, you either have to link the clauses paratactically, with an
“and” or something similar, or hypotactically, by adding a word like
“because”or “after.”

“The stock fell because the CEO was fired.”

The word “because,” in the above sentence, weakens the second

clause, makes it “dependent” on the first -- because it can’t stand alone
any more. “Because the CEO was fired” looks weird as a sentence of
written English; the word “because” specifies that the second clause is
dependent on the first.

In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte calls indepen-

dent clauses “kernel sentences,” implying that they are the essential
parts of sentences. Indeed, if you keep all your sentences down to the
kernel, you will probably not confuse your reader, thought you may
bore her.

34
 It was a sunny day. Lots of children were eating ice cream. I
hadn’t eaten breakfast. My mum didn’t buy me an ice cream.
We played in the park. We threw a frisbee. We counted clouds.
We played hide and seek lots of times. I was hungry. My stom-
ach hurt. My mum’s eyes were very bright.

Using this idea of independent clauses as the kernels of sentences, we

can distinguish between writers who stress the kernel, and those that
obscure it. For the former, one immediately thinks of the American
minimalists, of writers such as Grace Paley.
Here is the opening section of her story, “Wants.”

I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen
years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how
time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of
them. The library is only two blocks away.

In this section we see many sentences with only one clause, only
two subordinating terms (“so” and “because”) and only two cases of
“and.” When the narrator says,

“Because I don’t understand how time passes,”

we believe her, because her prose suggests a mind constantly sur-

prised by the world’s thereness, far too surprised to interpret it much.
In contrast, in the sentences of a more byzantine writer like M.R.

35
James, the famous teller of ghost stories, a reader is forced to search
through masses of sentence-stuff for the main idea.
This is the opening sentence of “The Mezzotint,”

Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the
story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by
the name of Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art
for the museum at Cambridge.

This sounds like someone telling an old story, someone in no particu-

lar hurry, and the main idea, if there is one, is all but buried—“I have
already told you Dennistoun’s story.”

Virginia Tufte proposes that there are four types of sentence ker-
nel, and (this is interesting) that these four options can be ranked in
terms of “energy.” The four types of kernel are:

1. Clauses with “be” (is, are, were etc).

The hills are dark to the east.

2. Clauses with “linking” verbs such as become, seems, resembles.

His dog slowly became tetchy with age.

3. Clauses with intransitive verbs (lacking an object).

Jane cried so hard that night.

36
4. Clauses with transitive verbs (which take an object).

The two dogs attacked the door.

(All these example kernels are mine, not Tufte’s.)

She suggests that when a writer wants to present a passage full of
energy, grabbing the reader’s pulse, the third and fourth types of ker-
nel are the way to go. Stuff your sentences full of intransitive and tran-
sitive verbs—use “be” verbs and linking verbs only when you want to
ease the pace. Don’t lose energy by mistakenly switching out of action
verbs, or your reader will lose interest in your narration.
In contrast, if you want to signal to the reader that your prose is
stepping out of action, moving to reflection and observation, stepping
down the energy path will assist the transition.
You can adjust the intensity of your sentences by moving up and
down this spectrum of clause types.

37
Sentence kernels are interesting in their own right, but they become
most useful when combined in sentences with another kind of gram-
matical object, the modifying phrase.
Phrases are usually named after the word that begins them. A prep-
ositional phrase, for instance, begins with a preposition: in the castle,
by the lake, at night, with the dead King.
A phrase is kind of a weakened clause. It lacks either a subject or
a verb, or both. This weakness, however, makes it versatile. The re-
markable thing about adding phrases to a kernel clause is that these
phrases can go anywhere.
This is not true of adjectives or relative clauses (that… who… etc),
which must be put close to the noun they modify. If, for example, I
write “The man who had only one eye threw away the ugly baby’s sup-

38
per,” then the “who” bit of the sentence must stay after “man,” and
“ugly” must stay before “baby”—or the sentence means something
very different.
But phrases contained by commas have the freedom to go any-
where, and so are therefore called “free modifiers.” They can range all
over the sentence, adding details and elaborating images.

Essay Six: Phrases and branching sentences.

Because of their freedom, it can be hard to put clauses and their

allied modifying phrases into categories. Tufte divides them into
left-branching, right-branching, and mid-branching, depending on
where the modifiers are. This is tricky to explain but easy to demon-
strate with examples.
For example, if we start with the kernel clause

The prince raised the sword.

the sentence can either stop there, or branch right, adding detail after
the main clause:

The prince raised the sword in both hands, grinning with

madness.

Or branch left, adding information before the clause:

Clutching the hilt in both hands, grinning with madness, the

39
 prince raised the sword.

Or branch in the middle of the clause:

The prince, clutching the hilt in both hands, grinning with

madness, raised the sword.

There is potentially no limit to these additions:

The man cut down the tree, sweating in the noon heat, his
back bent, his arms aching from the rusty axe’s weight, des-
perate for money, knowing the gringo tourists would pay a
good price for the wood.

Does this sound exciting? I think it is. Tufte’s idea of “branching

sentences,” combining a kernel clause with one or more modifiers, al-
lows us to imagine all kinds of rich, detailed sentences.
The sentence you just read, for instance, was mid-branching.
There was a phrase (“combining a kernel...”) between the subject and
its verb. And I don’t think you found it hard to read, or follow.
What kind of phrases are there? Lots. If we pick a simple kernel,
like “I threw the ball,” then we can add all kinds of modifiers to it.

I threw the ball in the dark courtyard.

I threw the ball red with rage.
I threw the ball, my fingers sore and aching.
I threw the ball, hoping to hit the dog.

40
 I threw the ball, angered by the CEO’s laughter.
I threw the ball, as if possessed by a giant’s strength.

For many writers, a technical holy grail is the ability to merge the
needs of action and description. We want to keep the story moving at
the same time as we keep it vivid in the reader’s mental eye, and we no
longer have the Victorian luxury of long paragraphs of exposition. We
need to do both things at once.
A sentence composed of a kernel clause and one or two free modi-
fiers enables a writer to push a story’s action forward while seamlessly
adding in sensory details (via the modifying phrases), and for this rea-
son, according to the rhetorician Francis Christensen, it became the
primary sentence of American writers in the early twentieth century,
the one most useful to their art—and the one least understood by writ-
ing textbooks ever since.

So, rather than the slightly clumsy:

The prince asked me to introduce myself and my companions.

His eyes bulged with the intensity of madness.

We can instead write:

The prince asked me to introduce myself and my companions,

his eyes bulging with the intensity of madness.

41
Or:

People generally distrust generosity, lacking much experience

of it in their own hearts.

Or:

The city groaned under the weight of refugees, unfamiliar

languages filling the hospitals and the public parks.

Francis Christensen points out that this kind of writing weaves

back and forth, the modifiers altering what came before, referring
back to the action the reader thought she had understood, only to race
onwards with the next kernel clause.

42
To recap the last two lessons:
1. Independent clauses can be seen as the kernels of bigger, more
complicated sentences. A clause, containing a subject and a verb, an
actor and an act, is necessary to make a complete sentence in English,
and so one can strip out everything else, and just see the kerne, the
sentence’s seed, its starting point. She poured the coffee. The leaves
were green.

2. In English, we can’t separate two independent clauses by a com-

ma—teachers call that a “comma splice.” But we can join phrases to
independent clauses, simply by separating the clause and the phrase
with a comma. As a result, a kernel clause can branch off in various
directions, depending on where you put the modifying phrases.

43
 She poured the coffee, glaring at me in disgust.

The kernel is in bold, and the phrase in italics. The kernel is at the
start of the sentence, and it “branches” right, being modified by the
phrase that follows it.
Or, if that didn’t feel right, you could “branch” left, putting the
modifier first:
Glaring at me in disgust, she poured the coffee.
These phrases can go almost anywhere in the sentence, and so they
are also called “free modifiers.”
The dog, a wheezy, tired old thing, heard nothing.

Perhaps this seems like basic stuff. Not to Francis Christensen,

whose observation of the use of these techniques in 20th century
American fiction led him to create firstly an entire system for teaching
better writing, called the “cumulative sentence,” and a radical way of
re-seeing how creative writing (in the loosest sense of the term) works.

Christensen’s “cumulative sentence” works, he argued, on four

main principles.
1. We are all told that good writing relies on brevity, simplicity,
paring our sentences down to the most essential nouns and verbs. Sus-
pect adjectives, dread adverbs, disdain the unspecific noun. But this

44
is bad advice. We should instead see writing as a process of addition,
not subtraction. Start from a short kernel clause, and begin to modify
it, adding phrases as you go, rethinking your very meaning and intent
as the sentence develops.

2. Once you begin to add modifications, you must put them some-
where in relation to the main clause—before, after, or within it. There-
fore, the second principle is one of direction.
Christensen gives this example of what he means:

The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence mod-
ifier before it, advances the discussion; but the additions move
backward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the
main clause or more often to explicate or exemplify it, so that
the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing
to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping
and lingering as the popular ballad does.

The modifier “as in this clause” effectively delays the reader, telling
her to look again at the preceding clause, while “to modify the state-
ment…” takes the argument forward, going onwards with conclusions
and results.

3. In every piece of the sentence, a writer chooses what level of de-

tail or generality to focus on, either abstract and broad, concrete and

45
specific. That focus can change from clause to phrase, from phrase to
phrase, with a writer zooming in and out, moving from sight to insight.

It was one of those ruined Honda Civics you saw all over the
estate, its front wheels missing, moss in the grill.

4. Also at every level, a writer decides how much texture to give a sen-
tence. Should the clause be decked out with modifying phrases, ad-
verbs, adjectives, or should it be left bare? A skilled writer can com-
municate much to a reader by this choice, keeping certain sections
simple and direct, others densely foliaged.

Christensen suggests that variety in texture, however an individual

writer’s style achieves this, is the road to excellent writing.

This is a radical way for writers to re-examine their sentence craft.

Suppose you are a writer of narrative or exposition, and you have
heard a thousand times to “be specific!” or to “use strong verbs!” and
one day you find that you have written:

The leaves were green.

Clearly this is terrible sentence by those rules. Perhaps you start add-
ing adjectives and adverbs to aid the specificity:

The big five-spoked sweetgum leaves were joyfully green.

46
Hmm. This is only sort of an improvement. Perhaps you should have
fixed the verb:

The leaves greened in the dawn.

The problem with both these solutions is that they feel so heavy
handed. Of course, there are genius stylists out there, and if you are
one of them you can make anything work—but Christensen’s outlook
offers another way. In his “generative rhetoric,” there’s nothing wrong
with your original sentence. Keep it as it was. Instead, try to write the
simplest independent clause you can, then start to modify it.
Instead of trying to jam all your detail and brilliance into the read-
er’s eye/ear in one go, try to see a sentence as something unfolding in
time, altering a reader’s perception as it goes on, as varied as it needs
to be—sometimes focused, sometimes abstract, sometimes dazzlingly
rich, sometimes as plain as a walk in the park with the person you love.
Writing this way also allows you to think about what you’re doing
as the writing happens, just as the reader has time to think while read-
ing it. It is “generative” because it encourages new ideas, urging you
on to new modifications, helping you to ask yourself “how does my
character smile when she’s cross at her son?”—rather than sending
you back to the thesaurus for another synonym for “smile.”
Christensen offers this writing exercise—start with a few basic
clauses, the most simple you can think of, absolutely the least artsy
and profound stuff you can imagine, like:

47
 The leaves were green.
She poured the coffee.
He smiled at his son.

And then treat that kernel as the starting point of your exploration
into reality. How does that woman behind the coffee shop’s counter
pour coffee? How would you modify the clause to capture how she
pours milk into a latte? How are those leaves outside green? Try it
with just two modifying phrases, then three-

She poured the coffee in a single slop, her wrist flicking up as

my cup filled, spilling a little on the pale wood.

48
 If we really want readers to notice our prose, we can amplify the
sonic qualities of our words, by creating patterns of similar sounds. To
create similarities in the opening consonants of words is called allit-
eration (the pink penguin plodded); to create similarities in vowels is
called assonance (the reddish eddies meddled with Ted); similarities
in word endings is called rhyme.
To describe similarities in rhythm, we must first, however, under-
stand the crucial idea of stress.
English is a language heavily dependent on syllable stress. Native
speakers of English don’t notice it because it’s so natural, and only
when we travel across the Atlantic (in either direction) do we become
aware that some words can be stressed differently.

49
 In London, the word “garage” is stressed on the first syllable: GAR-
ige. In New Jersey, it’s more like ga-RARGE. AD-ult versus a-DULT.

Essay Eight: Stress and Flow

Not all languages do this, this variety in stress; but all formal En-
glish poetry, and much song, is based around creating a regular alter-
nation between stressed and unstressed syllables. Although things get
complicated fast when thinking about stress, it’s possible to say, for
the purposes of this essay, that certain words are generally unstressed
in English:

pronouns (she, he, it), conjunctions (and, if, then), and articles
(the, a)

And certain words generally are stressed (in at least one of their sylla-
bles):

nouns, verbs (‘be’ verbs are pretty close to unstressed, howev-

er), adjectives, and adverbs.

As a result, there is a real sonic difference between writing:

The man was huge and tough and mean.

and

The man was huge, tough, mean.

50
 The first sentence is practically sung. I don’t feel too threatened.
The second, however, hits with one stressed syllable after another. I
don’t feel so comfortable now.
If you want to train your ear, poetry is the best place to do it, and
you can get used to hearing stress by reading aloud poems that use it
as an organising principle.
Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” a poem about that unfortunate guy who
asked the Gods for immortal life, but forgot to also ask for immortal
youth, seems me one of the most beautiful passages in English verse.

Look at the poem’s first line, and count the stresses.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The pattern of five stresses, five unstresses, is not perfectly fol-

lowed through the poem, but it is followed enough that we hear it, and
come to expect it.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Can you see / hear the pattern of one unstress followed by one stress?
I can only promise that marking stressed syllables on lines of verse is
one of the most enjoyable activities one can have alone.

51
If you’re not a poet, why is syllable stress important? One reason is
that stress can add emphasis.
David Jauss, in his amazing essay, “What We Talk About When
We Talk About Flow,” demonstrates this with the opening paragraph
of D.H. Lawrence’s first published story, “The Odour of Chrysanthe-
mums.”
This paragraph is one of the more famous in literary history. The
legend goes that, when the famous author editor Ford Maddox Ford
read this paragraph, having picked the unknown writer’s story from
the slush pile, he not only approved Lawrence’s story for publication,
but announced the discovery of a major new writer.
Here it is:

52
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stum-
bling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared
round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it
startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly
in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman,
walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the
hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the
engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by
one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificant-
ly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge;
then they curved away towards the coppice where the with-
ered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at
the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that
had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from
the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were
dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the
whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned
their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house.
The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores
licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just be-
yond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-
stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast
up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little
spasms. The miners were being turned up.

53
 Jauss first points out the smoothness of the paragraph’s flow, and
suggests that this smoothness comes from its highly varied sentence
structures and openers. Lawrence drastically varies how he opens his
sentences, how long they are, and the components they contain.

Essay Nine: Iambs and beats.

But more than the easy flow, the stresses in the paragraph seem
placed to reflect and embody its meaning.

Jauss quotes this one long sentence:

The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevi-
table movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between
the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away
towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped
noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside
the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into
the spinney.

Jauss then shows how, on the one hand, the description of the
train as it is passing is densely stressed, while the description of its
departure is stressed more sparsely.

Jauss hears three levels of stress in this prose—unstressed, stressed,

heavily stressed:

54
 The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevi-
table movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between
the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away
towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped
noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside
the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into
the spinney

The reader shares the woman’s fright as the train passes, and her
return to calm as it departs.

Once you start to see and hear rhythm in prose, it becomes a beau-
tiful thing. It is everywhere. There is the pleasure of the smoothly ca-
denced magazine headline, the ring of a story’s sentence closing per-
fectly to its beat. Elaine Scarry, in her essay On Beauty and Being
Just, points out that the rhythm of

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are creat-

ed equal,

supports, or even proves, its meaning.

How? The first part of the sentence earnestly plods through six
mono-syllables, then speeds to end with the rapid four syllables of
“self-evident”; the second part repeats this rhythm, starting slow and
ending rapid. Rhythmically, the two parts are so similar that their
claims feel linked, that “we” are the “equal men” and what is “self-ev-

55
ident” is how all are “equal.”
English is a language influenced by centuries of rhythmically regu-
lar poetry, and prose writers can sneak those rhythms into their work.
The metre considered the closest to regular prose or normal English
speech is the “blank” (non-rhyming) iambic pentameter line, the line
of Shakespeare and Tennyson.
An iamb means a pair of beats, with the weak beat first, then a
strong one; pentameter means five of these pairs per line.

For days I see her car across the street.

Or, the stresses in bold:

For days I see her car across the street.

Look at the whole sentence by Amy Hempel, from her story, “Chuch
Cancels Cow,” and see how the opening, a perfect five-beat pentame-
ter, gets played with and messed up by what follows.

For days I see her car across the street, parked on the lit-
tle-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house
where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakable dog.

How can prose writers take advantage of pentameter patterns? One

option is to write entirely in loose pentameters, sticking a comma or a
full stop after every fifth strong beat. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom,
apparently does this, to a degree. The other option is to listen out for

56
iambic possibilities as you write, and when your predictive ear calls
out for two or three iambs, perhaps to end a sentence, you slot them
in.
This is how I use syllable stress in my own writing—when I am de-
ciding how to end a sentence, often a rhythm comes to me first, and I
search for words to match that sensation.
Of course, there are other lines, and other beats. Five-beat iam-
bic lines often sound reasonably natural as prose, whereas four-beat
iambic lines tend quicker towards song. Alternating four and three
beat lines make up the traditional ballad rhythm in English, and can
be especially hard to hear as prose, just because we are so used, from
songs, hymns (e.g. “Amazing Grace”), and Emily Dickinson, to read
them sing-song.
Three-step rhythms are called “anapestic,” going weak-weak-
strong. These are usually used for light hearted, singsongy material:

By the house, in the dark of the night, crept the wolf.

And the weak-strong beat of iambs can be reversed to go strong-weak—

there are many, many rhythms. Prose is so flexible; it can switch into
one rhythm, then back off, pretending it had never been dancing. Of-
ten when a sentence sounds right, I cannot parse the syllables into
plain iambs and anapests, but I know a rhythm is there, doing its work.

57
In everyday life, prose is largely silent. We are taught to scan words
without much mouth or tongue-if, during our reading, we breathed
out the “w” in “way,” we would seem quite strange, or not wholly pro-
ficient.
We all have favourite words whose musicality we enjoy, yet we
are also able to comprehend whole legal documents without becom-
ing conscious of the jostling soundy-ness contained in every syllable.
However, skilled prose writers can force that awareness back, creating
patterns of sound that reawaken the reader’s ear. Rhyme, for instance,
is often too noticeable, and so is alliteration.
The cheapest use of these techniques is to wave them in a reader’s
face. Only-just-perceived sonic patterns can add an uncanny quality
to sentences, a magical persuasive force, the way a musical score mul-
tiples the visual impact of a horror film. When Johnnie Cochran said,

58
 If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit

the rhyme suggested that there was a pre-existing connection between

the two ideas, a connection that pre-dated Cochran’s coining of the
phrase, some design principle of the universe.
Gordon Lish, the famous editor, taught a technique for connecting
sounds within a sentence: he called it “consecution.” The idea is that
as you write each sentence, you look for sounds and fragments, within
the words you have already put down, that you can repeat as the sen-
tence develops, nears its end.
Consecution, depending on how you carry it out, can seem artsy,
stately, or uncanny.
Gary Lutz describes this method in his seminal essay, “The Sen-
tence is a Lonely Place”:

Gordon Lish… instructed his students in a poetics of the sen-

tence that emphasized what he called consecution: a recursive
procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor
by discharging something from deep within itself into what
follows.

Consecution is like assonance or alliteration, then, but more flex-

ible: you simply take something from the beginning of the sentence
and repeat it as the sentence develops. It may sound ridiculous, but I
often find a little consecution gives a sentence a strangely potent au-
thority, as though it was a discovered thing, not something invented

59
by a person’s whim. Consecution makes it seem as though your writ-
ing was meant to be.
The technique is also meant to be generative, to help you find the
right words when stuck.
Lutz gives this example from the very uncanny Christine Schutt, in
“The Summer after Barbara Claffey”:

“Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowy.”

Tall repeats itself to create tallowy.

Lutz comments:

What she winds up doing is literally dragging forward the

previous adjective, tall, and using it as the base on which fur-
ther letters can be erected. The result is the astounding, per-
fect tallowy...

60
To round up and conclude, I’d like to discuss one last sentence, the
remarkable opening of Dan Simmon’s sci fi classic, Hyperion.
Although its content is fantastical, the style offers much to study.

Essay Ten: Masterclass

Here is the novel’s opening sentence:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony space-

ship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on
an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green,
saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

Simmons does a lot in these 36 words.

Firstly, in partial accordance with Strunk and White’s advice to put

61
the key word last, Simmons puts the most dramatic information last,
saving until the end the menace of monsters gnashing their teeth.
The sentence breaks into two significant parts at the word “while,”
the word which separates the Consul’s world from that of the mon-
sters. Prior to “while,” we are in his world of concerns, noting that the
Steinway is “well-maintained,” but after it, we enter a world of inhu-
man rage and struggle.
Notice that before “while,” there are only two verbs, and they are
both bland (sat, played). After “while”, however, come another two
verbs, and they are vivid and bold (surged, bellowed). This means that
Simmons uses a noun-based style for the sentence’s first part, when
describing the Consul’s static, serene, calm situation. He then switch-
es to a more verb-based style for the alien world, to show its energy,
its constant motion.
The placement of verbs of differing strengths emphasises the pre-
cariousness of this future human civilisation, at once both powerful
and fragile—which is the theme of Hyperion and its sequel.
In terms of setting out its meaning, the sentence is quite paratac-
tic, with no causal linkage offered (the monsters do not roar because of
the piano), yet it remains well ordered. The two clauses describing the
Consul use a parallel construction, each starting with a compact sub-
ject-verb that is modified with right-branching prepositional phrases.
The prepositions in bold:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony space-

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and

played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an an-

cient but well-maintained Steinway

The sentence is not technically cumulative, but these initial two claus-
es do adhere to Christensen’s vision of a sentence that starts off sim-
ply, and gets its specificity from the way the following phrases modify
it.
Additionally, the sentence’s sonic qualities alter at the “while”
turning point. Before it, the sentence is quite sparsely stressed, large-
ly due to its many long words and unstressed prepositional phrases.
And while there is some assonance between, say, “ancient” and “main-
tained”, this sonic pattern is not so vivid.
But after the “while,” the alliteration becomes pronounced, and
the stress much more dense, warning us about dangers dimly seen.

while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the

swamps below

Simmons also uses one, or maybe two, instances of “consecution,” the

great feat of prose engineering beloved by Gordon Lish: where a word,
or pieces of a word, after having entered a sentence once, reappear
later in the same sentence, as if following underneath the passage of
the text, looking for a chance to resurface.

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 In this sentence, “bellowed” reappears as “below,” and “balcony”
comes back, perhaps, as “ebony.”
Lastly, the sentence advises us whose point of view we are in. What
the consul sees clearly, we see clearly. But he does not really know
what is in the swamps, and so there we get the vague word, “things.”
The sentence is a guide from our world to the story’s world, leading us
from the almost-familiar to the bizarrely strange, promising to show
us the unknown, but to keep always the tale within human, compre-
hensible concerns.

Style lets you do many things at once.

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I hope you have enjoyed this series.
If you would like to read more, I have links to the books mentioned iin
these essays, as well as some bonus material and practice exercises,
over at my blog: danieldavidwallace.com/prose-style-resources

If you would like to buy any of the books I mentioned, there will be
Amazon links to a great many of them on that page.

And feel free to email me at info@danieldavidwallace.com, too!

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Resources
(Note: some of the links here are afflialiate links: if you use the link
to buy the book on Amazon, I get a small commission. This helps me
pay for hosting this document and so on)
Brooks Landon
Strunk & white
To the Lighthouse
Green book
Lanham prose
Lutz believer
Arts Matters hemingway
Towards a new rhetorical
Steven fry
Florida schutt

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