Contrasting Images, Contrasting Tones
Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated by Kari Dickson
It surprised me, every year, that the small tubers that I planted in early spring could multiply into so many potatoes, small pale faces or fingerprints in the dark earth, that’s what they looked like, before I caught them on the spading fork and shook off the dirt.
Evil Flowers: Stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated by Kari Dickson
We’re in the late stage of writing when so much has already been written, and it’s only getting later. I feel that pressure. How do I write a story that is fresh and makes the world new again? How do I write a sentence that shrugs off the worn-out and knocks you flat? Not all sentences, of course, but enough.
The New Yorker calls the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug’s work “playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief. She sometimes resembles Lydia Davis, who has read her in both Norwegian and English, and has written admiringly about her work.”
Øyehaug’s work is overspilling with sentences that knock you out. Here, she uses a mid-branching sentence, separating the subject and verb from the clause that tells what, exactly, surprised the narrator. The phrase “every year” could have opened the sentence, but placing it here causes delay and suspense.
Part of the sparkle in the sentence comes from the changing imagery of the potatoes. First, Øyehaug uses imprecision, calling them “small tubers.” The imprecision creates suspense: what type of small tuber? Carrot? Turnip? The relative clause makes the image more concrete, revealing that the small tubers are potatoes.
Øyehaug doesn’t stop there, and now comes the flash of originality: a startling change of the image to help the reader see the world anew. It comes in the form of personification, a subset of metaphor. The potatoes are compared to “small pale faces or fingerprints in the dark earth.” The narrator can’t settle on one image and uses balance (the pairing of two) to offer two, with the latter providing a contrast between the pale faces and fingerprints with the dark earth.
Then comes a parenthetical, “that’s what they looked like,” which introduces a colloquial tone as if the narrator is speaking directly to the reader. It also sheds the poetic imagery to prepare us for the sentence's ending.
The personification of the potato seeps into the end of the sentence with the word “caught” as if the small pale faces or fingerprints possess agency and the narrator must catch them. The poetic is abruptly shaken like the dirt from the potatoes with the violent imagery of a “spading fork” piercing the potatoes. It’s surprising (a word that circles and returns to the beginning of the sentence) because it runs counter to the excessive detailing of the potato, a consequence of the narrator’s close looking. Usually, we associate paying attention with care or even love, but the potatoes turn into objects to be pierced and, presumably, eaten.
Your Turn
Open with a subject and verb that need a relative clause (who/whom/whose/that/which.) Before you add the relative clause, insert a small phrase.
Think of an image and first use imprecision to describe it.
Now, make that image more concrete by naming it.
Add two metaphors to describe the image further.
Use a parenthetical and invoke colloquial language. Here is the first contrast to the poetic tone.
End with a dependent clause that contrasts with the previous imagery.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
(thank you, subscriber, for sending this to me!)
About Evil Flowers: In her new collection, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis’s observation that her “every story [is] a formal surprise, smart and droll.” These tales converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, slime eels, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A fairly large part of a woman’s brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize species of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information through fiberoptic cables, and a new museum sinks into the ground.
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.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
AFTERWORD is a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist in two categories: Science Fiction and Literary!
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I’m so happy that my short story collection, In This Ravishing World, will be published in July 2024. The collection won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
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I’m teaching “Building a Story: Plot” for the independent bookstore Book Passage on Sunday, April 14th, and the 21st, 10:30-12:30 PST, in person and on Zoom. This class examines the traditional causation plot and an alternate structure called the braided or episodic plot. By the end of these sessions, you will have the bones of two new stories. Please join me!
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It’s always surprising, in the fall, that Russian Thistle detaches from its root and dashes across open fields, a peloton of tumbleweeds racing toward a fence line or a farmhouse, where it will make a stand against the wind.
What struck her now, as she stumbled through the chores of the day, straightening coffeetable magazines and scrubbing last night´s burnt lasagna off a pan, was how little she had appreciated the little things that really mattered in a marriage, the quick goodbye kisses and that rough hand that used to search for her palm under the covers.
Decided to tackle the assignment today and only got so far as the midbranching thing -- and maybe the imprecision -- but I felt inspired just the same. Thanks!