Dear all,

I’m teaching a class, “The Art of Compression,” for Flash Fiction Magazine this weekend, June 6 and 7^th, from 10:30-1:30 pm Pacific Time. If you can’t make it, they’ll send a recording. Cost: $99

While the class focuses on flash stories, 1000 words or less, compression techniques can be used to tighten and make “thicker” any story, whether it’s in the form of a novel, short story, or memoir.

Compression is about doing more with less. Sometimes it’s cutting; sometimes it’s the right image, the right word. Sometimes it’s telling or sequencing or summary. With that as the lens, we’ll look closely at five or six flash fiction stories, extracting techniques and prompts. It would be great to see you there!

To register:

Register for The Art of Compression

Thank you!

Nina

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

From Woolf’s novel, I could pluck a stunning sentence from any page, every page. When I first read To the Lighthouse, I stumbled around in a daze, as if someone had blown open the cloud layer and shown me how sentences could sing and whirl in directions I didn’t know existed. All that the poets know, Woolf knows, all the rhythm and sound, and it’s in her prose. Can you hear it?

With this sentence, Woolf creates exquisite tension by delaying what the bee and hive are being compared to. Why do this? What Woolf is doing is mimicking the privacy of a mind that thinks of the image first and, at the last second, concedes to include the reader.

The sentence opens with a short phrase that introduces a simile: “Only like a bee.” But we get only one prong of the simile. If a simile is “A is like B,” in this sentence, we have B but not A. I’m going to call A the “target,” or what is being discussed, and B the “source,” or the concept/image to which the target is being compared.

We have to wait to discover the “target,” A, because what follows is more details about the bee: “drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air.” Woolf uses balance, or the pairing of two things with “sweetness or sharpness,” to create a pattern of sound and an eloquent rhythm: SWEETness or SHARPness (heavier stresses capitalized). The alliteration of the “s” renders more music and draws the ear to the sibilants. She creates variety by mixing sensory categories with taste and touch.

The next modification concerns what’s in the air, and by adding this second layer, Woolf holds the reader right there, in this moment, feeling the air: “intangible to touch or taste.” Again, she uses balance, and this time she alliterates “t,” a plosive, providing variation of sound.

Now we come to the base clause: “one haunted the dome-shaped hive.” The initial simile, “like a bee,” is finally connected to the target, “one,” an abstract, universal pronoun that invites the reader into the moment. And a new metaphor is introduced, “the dome-shaped hive,” along with another delay in what the hive is being compared to. The base clause continues to grow through two more verbs: “ranged/haunted.”

The first verb phrase is “ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone.” The phrase “wastes of the air” plays with the usual wording, “wasteland,” and invites the reader to see the sky as a vast landscape.

In the second verb phrase, Woolf repeats the verb “haunted”: “and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings.” In this part of the novel, Lily Briscoe is wondering how one knows anything about another person. Now we have a better understanding of the word “haunted,” which, in this context, is not about a ghost but about frequently interacting or spending time with people. By returning to the word “haunted,” Woolf creates a circular motion—you’re drawn to people, then head out into the world alone, then return to people. Again, Woolf uses balance with “their murmurs and their stirrings,” rendering a pattern of stresses MURmurs and STIRrings. And there’s the music of the repeated “their.”

After the semicolon, we learn hives are compared to people: “the hives, which were people.” Reading the sentence again, I hear so much assonance with bee/sweetness/people; taste/shaped/ranged/wastes; dome/alone; murmurs/stirrings.

At our recent Zoom gathering behind the paywall, we talked about psychic distance and how that affects everything. Psychic distance is the distance between the reader and the events of the story. Throughout the novel, Woolf narrows the distance between the reader and her characters’ minds, and in this instance, we’re deep in Lily Briscoe’s thoughts.

Your Turn

Open with a short phrase that includes one part of a simile, the “source.”

Add a modifier to give us more details about that image. Can you use balance, the pairing of two things? Now add more details about the image and more balance.

Now comes your base clause, which reveals the “target,” or what the opening simile refers to. Here, introduce a new simile, but include only the “source.”

Use two more verbs to lengthen the base clause. For your third verb, repeat the initial verb. Can you add balance?

Add a semicolon, then reveal what the second simile referred to.

Try it!

How did it go?

If you like, share your sentence in the comments below. Our lovely, lively writing community has grown! I’m so happy about this, but as you might suspect, commenting on everyone’s sentences has become overwhelming. For paid subscribers, I’ll be commenting to thank you for supporting my work. Please consider a paid subscription for $6 a month. Thank you!

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New Class: The Art of Compression!

I’m teaching a class for Flash Fiction magazine on compression. Some of you attended the “Ask, Write, Repeat,” which was sort of like taking a car out for a test run. Compression isn’t subtraction; it’s intensification. You’ll learn that dialogue can do more than one thing, including carry the weight of the past or the present conflict. Verb tense smuggles in years of backstory, where what’s left out is doing more work than what’s left in.

So far, I have ten compression techniques, drawn from published works. Whether you’re writing flash fiction (1,000 words or less), a short story, a novel, or a memoir, compression helps you make your writing sharper and shinier. We’ll talk about imagery, dialogue, sequencing, telling, summary (both kinds), and more. And you’ll write a story. It’s June 6 and 7th from 10:30-1:30 Pacific Time. If you can’t make it, there’s a recording (lifetime access!) Here’s the registration link:

Register The Art of Compression

Short Story Ties for First Place!

My short story, “The Velvet Chair,” tied for first place in Blue Mesa Review’s short story contest. As the judge said, “I hope we all find our velvet chair.”

Thank you, Claire Oshetsky, for your generous words! This means so much to me. Claire has such a rich, deep imagination; you must read her novels. Lucky us, she has a new one out, Evil Genius. Thank you for helping this novel find its way! Open the Floodgates is available for pre-order.

Consider a One-Time Donation

• —a $5 tip, like applause, a cheer, a little gift for a job that brought you a bit of inspiration: Ko-fi.com/stunningsentences

Niall Williams allowed us to step into the big pool of the omniscient voice, and in this novel, Time of the Child, that voice has range. It could be an on-stage singer! With his sentence as the creative fuel, you wrote such gorgeous prose!

We talked about psychic distance, a term used by John Gardner in his brilliant book, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (for every writer) and saw how the omniscient voice in William’s novel kept the distance fairly great. We talked about sentence variation, hyperbaton to foreground or draw attention to the opening word, and how a list could be written so it’s interesting to the ear. Again and again, we saw how his sentences fall into the category of syntactic symbolism, with the syntax simulating the content. More was said. There’s always more.

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In Babel’s short story, the narrator, a young, poor Jewish boy, is befriended by Mark Borgman, the son of a prominent banker, who invites him to his villa for lunc…

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Dear all,

On Sunday, May 24, we’ll hold our Zoom gathering at 11:00 am Pacific Time. You’ll find the Zoom link in this post. We have the great pleasure of looking closely at a passage from Time of the Child by Niall Williams, which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award.

In the small town of Faha, Doctor Jack Troy, who was born and raised there, is the only doctor around. So as not to be overwhelmed, he’s cultivated aloofness, which means he lives an isolated life. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care.

Williams uses an omniscient narrator, and as you can see, feel, and hear from the passages below, this affects style: syntax, diction, schemes, and tropes. I think of a third-person omniscient voice as a big container: it can hold so much style.

Below are the passages. We’ll see how much we can cover in 90 minutes. If you can’t make it, I’ll send a recording:

Melancholy was an occupational hazard of the General Practitioner who, in rural places, ran a solo operation that came with the guarantee of spirit-exhaustion for three reasons. It had no operating hours, everyone in the parish was your patient and the human being was a creation in which human life kept finding flaws. But to these Jack Troy had long ago grown accustomed. They were in the small print of his vocation. On the first morning he had unbolted the door of the surgery in Avalon House, there were ten patients standing in the rain at the bottom of the steps. Though for most the surgery then was the place of last resort, somewhere after appeals to the saints and martyrs, after holy wells and penitential rites, after the cures of Mrs. Casey, whose hot bran in a stocking defeated pneumonia, no morning since had had a smaller number.

So as not to be overwhelmed, early on the doctor had learned to combine his natural aloofness with an arm’s-length philosophy, whereby he kept largely to himself. But he left the door to the waiting room unlocked.

Although he lived in the magnificent dilapidation of Avalon House, and carried himself in a manner that Faha might have summarized as Not like us, he was vouchsafed a place of honour in the parish by the twin virtues of not leaving and being indispensable.

Every doctor was in the business of trying to delay the inevitable, and in every day there was failure.

Some good was done, had been his summary when he finally collapsed in the absolving hollows of the bed and his wife Regina woke to ask what happened that day. Some good was done.

Caring, if not curing, carried him forward, as well as the imperative of raising the three Troy sisters, a business something like herding butterflies.

Time of the Child by Niall Williams

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Dear all,

I’m teaching a class, “The Art of Compression,” for Flash Fiction Magazine on June 6 and 7th, from 10:30-1:30. It’s all about how to do more with less, and …

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This Boy’s Life: …

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They heard foghorns in the bay and paused to listen and the sound had an element of formal awe, it rolled and caromed down the narrow streets, collided with itself, …

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morr…

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What a fabulous first day! So much encouragement and creativity and inspiration! Now we turn to Tessa Hadley:

English Literature homework ought to have been easy, but too much was at stake: she was supposed to be writing an essay on imagery of growth and decay in Twelfth Night which she could have done standing on her head, except that through it she was trying to communicate, in a veiled language, her passionate affinity with her new English teacher—who was in his forties, slim, equivocal, elegant, dry, divorced.

Free Love by Tessa Hadley

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We begin!

Five stunning sentences over five consecutive days. What I love about this is the ecstatic explosion of creativity and how a single sentence’s architecture can lead to so many variations. It’s a testimony to creativity, that tremendous, gorgeous life force. If you’re here, I know you know what I’m talking about.

This week, you’ll play around with so many style techniques. As you immerse yourself in them, you’ll find some of them that you really love. You’ll quickly take them with you, and they’ll become woven into your writing without thinking about them. They’ll be part of your rhythm and sound. Some won’t suit you, and that’s fine. Shed them. For now, they don’t appeal to your ear.

The sentence is what we, as writers, have. I’m stating the obvious, but I come back to this as a touchstone, a lodestar, and why I care so much about the sentence. The more you understand, the more you hear and feel the sentence, the more possibilities open up for language and meaning-making. I’ve also found that paying close attention to the granularity feeds me enormously as a writer. It makes me excited to get back to the page and write something in a way I never have before.

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All That Is by James Salter

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If you’ve vacillated about becoming a paid member, now is the time! Five stunning sentences in five consecutive days to push language, to stretch beyond your rang…

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The Bluest Eye, by …

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What a pleasure to listen to your writing! So much beauty and rhythm and sound to fill a Saturday.

We looked at the opening of Lauren Groff’s novel, The Vaster Wilds, plus one more sentence of hers. From her work, we played with using the verb to introduce the metaphor, breathing life into the world. We created rhythm and sound, patterns of stresses and the rupture of these patterns to wake up the ear. Groff’s work invited us to play with language, doing the unexpected, using an adjective when an adverb would have been the conventional thing to do. She inspired us to try hyperbaton, reframing the syntax to amplify the first words and make different sounds.

We saw she employed syntactically symbolism, balance, and a series of five to beautifully mimic the movement of mist. And then you, amazing writers, used the technique to move comfort and the trees and more.

If you couldn’t make it to the Zoom session, I’ve included the video and an analysis of the sentences.

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Dear Paid Subscribers,

Tomorrow at 11:00 am Pacific Time is our monthly Swimming in Style gathering—a space to slow down and look closely. We’ll take apart a passage, study the moves that give it life, and then you’ll write one of your own.

This is sentence-level practice, where writing actually changes. One strong sentence generates the next, and the next, carrying you forward. As one student put it, instead of circling the same familiar patterns—those neural grooves hardening into habit—you begin to open up new pathways, discovering not one way to write a sentence, but many. It’s akin to a singer training her voice, expanding her range.

This month, we’ll look at the opening of Lauren Groff’s novel, The Vaster Wilds, set in the fledgling Jamestown colony around the winter of 1609–1610, a period known to historians as the “starving time.” Groff’s main character, a servant girl, escapes from the primitive fort.

Sentences matter to Groff. It’s always a pleasure to read anything she writes because she employs so many style techniques to create meaning beyond the content of the sentence.

Here is the passage:

The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.

In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.

Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrambled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight. Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.

These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak, the girl had stolen off her own mistress.

If we have time:

As the night ended, there grew from the earth a pale mist that enveloped first her ankles then her knees then her waist then her chest then the entirety of her person, and soon it blacked out the light of the stars and the new day being born at the edge of the east. The mist carried a wicked and clammy cold that slid up against her skin and made her gasp.–The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

If you want to join us, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $6 a month. Each month we hold a Zoom gathering like this one. If you can’t make it, you receive a recording and analysis of the sentences. You’ll also receive comments on your weekly sentences and have access to the “Sentence Intensive”: five stunning sentences on five consecutive days with instructions on how to make them. The real beauty, though, is the generous, creative writing community that has formed.

Subscribe now

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