The Mother’s voice, dreamy?
The Archer, by Shruti Swamy
The Mother’s voice, dreamy?
This sentence isn’t a sentence. Meaning it isn’t complete in itself. But you understand it; the character is trying to figure out the sound of mother’s voice; maybe it’s dreamy, maybe it’s something else. A new sound, for sure, something she hasn’t heard before.
We are deep in the interior of Vidya as a young girl, and she is listening to her mother, honing in on the cadence of her voice.
Once you step into the character’s interior, all syntactical hell breaks loose. You get to go a little wild. You’re no longer duty-bound to write complete sentences because rarely do we think in complete sentences. The sentence disintegrates like a piece of wet chalk. Fragments float by in our mind: Groceries. Eggs, butter. What the? People, weird, complex, sometimes eggheads. That woman, angry?
Which may be why I love to write and read a character’s interior because the rhythms are so varied and passages become, well, so rhythmic. A ten-word sentence followed by a five-word fragment, by a one-word, and then a complete sentence of a whopping twenty words.
The rhetorical device that Swamy used to illustrate Vidya’s thinking is ellipsis. There are two definitions of ellipsis. There’s the punctuation mark ellipsis—the three dots--to show a missing word, a long pause, or speech trailing off. “I think I might go to….”
And there’s the ellipsis in which word(s) are omitted but we can infer them and also the meaning of the sentence from the context. The context lies in the background and the sentence, with its missing words, is in the foreground. Not only is this technique useful for writing a character’s thoughts, but also for dialogue because—like thinking-- rarely do people speak in complete sentences. Words drop out; people don’t finish their sentences, or they use halting speech (“Sure. OK, got it. I’m not sure, but—").
The Making
To use Swamy’s architecture, write a question, with the verb appearing before the subject. In this instance, it might be:
Is the Mother’s voice dreamy?
Now move the subject to the first slot.
Mother’s voice
Add a comma and an adjective that refers to the subject. Finally, turn it back into a question by ending with a question mark.
Try it! Make something and let me know how it goes!
PS:
I’ll be teaching an online class, “How to Write Stunning Sentences,” at Book Passage on August 13, from 10:30-12:30 Pacific Standard Time. Cost: $75.
If you’re interested, here’s the link:
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/online-class-nina-schuyler-how-write-stunning-sentences
PPS: I have a new creative writing journal coming out September/October 2022, published by Fiction Advocate. You can pre-order it for 40% off, or $15. I’ve found 80 stunning sentences from published work and taken them apart so you can make them.
Here’s the link:
https://www.fictionadvocate.com/product/stunning-sentences-a-creative-writing-journal/