Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
In class the other night, we read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," and once again I was riveted by the sentence, "The world had been sad since Tuesday."
Then later that same night, I read Bailey's sentence and was struck again by how, like Marquez's, personification animates and makes the world new or makes me new. As if I've been given glasses to see everything more vividly and more alive.
Bailey first introduces time in a realistic way. With the conjunction "as if," she moves away from realism and unveils a new way to see time: "Time itself is starving." (this is a great technique if you want to move the story into the realm of magical realism or surrealism). The comparison is between the target, time, and the source, a starving person.
The metaphor continues with the verb "is swallowed" and the modifying phrases stretch the metaphor further, "leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all."
This last part of the sentence invokes anaphora, the repetition of a word(s) at the beginning of phrases, clauses, or sentences. As a result, there is a steady beat of "no," which raises the emotional tone and subtly suggests negation: life itself is disappearing. Asyndeton, the deliberate omission of conjunctions (there is no "and" with the final phrase, "no trace at all), creates a feeling of speed, as if time is gobbling everything up rapidly.
I want to point out, too, that although the three modifying phrases (series) have the same syllable count, four, they have a different rhythm of heavy and soft stresses. This creates variation, which the ear loves.
I'm jumping back to the opening again. Bailey uses the technique of ellipsis for a more musical rhythm, omitting the relative clause: "Time that is unused and only endured still vanishes." She also invokes balance or parallelism, assigning two adjectives to the subject "Time" to create a more eloquent sound.
Your Turn
Open with an independent clause and start with your subject. Choose a subject that is abstract-- an emotion, or something inanimate. It might help to write the sentence using "that" and include two adjectives to describe your subject, then eliminate "that."
Now comes the verb.
Add the conjunction "as if" and repeat your subject, using a verb associated with human activity.
Add "and" include a second base clause and continue the metaphor with another verb, as Bailey did with "swallowed."
Add three modifying phrases to continue the metaphor further. Can you use anaphora? Asyndeton?
Try it!
Let me know how it goes!
PS: I’ve found a fabulous app “Word Hippo”—type in a word and it spits out synonyms.
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com (including “How to Write Stunning Sentences” and “Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal).
My new novel Afterword is available now! If your book club chooses my book to read, I can Zoom in and talk to the group. So far, I’ve done three of these events and they’re really fun.
Order links:
Next Reading: Today! So happy to be included among these fantastic writers!
Word-hippoed my way into the following sentence:
Love, vacant and weathered, dangles deathlike, as if fasting, and fate itself is tightly stationed, halting all of time and life and feeling.
Delighted to have sentence from my book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, analyzed so thoughtfully! You just taught me a lot about what I wrote. :) Elisabeth