She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
“A Girl I Knew,” J. D. Salinger
What I love about this sentence is the different registers of language. Salinger moves from a colloquial tone in the opening of the sentence with the Germanic/Old English word “thing,” to the more formal, polysyllabic Latinate word “universe.” Using different registers for a character is a subtle yet powerful way to create complex characters, with the range of language suggesting a character who has a breadth of experience.
In How Fiction Works, James Wood notes that register also creates more complex music:
“One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. An efficient thriller will often be written in a style that is locked into place: the musical analogue of this might be a tune, proceeding in unison, the melody separated only by octave intervals, without any harmony in the middle.”
Like Allende’s sentence from last week, Salinger’s sentence starts out one way and swings another. The fulcrum is the word “except.” In this example “except” is a conjunction similar to “but.” (It can also be used as a preposition to mean “not including” and is followed by a noun).
And like Allende, Salinger uses antithesis to create a robust, energetic contrast between the beginning of the sentence and the end. Salinger uses negation to further minimize the actions of the character, “She wasn’t doing a thing.” He follows with a relative clause, “that I could see,” to generate more build and delay and creates music with assonance—the long “e” in “thing” and “see.”
To generate more tension, Salinger elongates the sentence with two participial phrases, “standing there,” and “leaning on the balcony railing.” These are free-modifying phrases, meaning they could move around.
For instance, he could have written the sentence this way:
Standing there leaning on the balcony railing, she wasn’t doing anything except holding the universe together.
This is called a left-branching sentence with the modifiers coming to the left of the base clause.
Or this way:
She, standing there leaning on the balcony railing, wasn’t doing anything except holding the universe together.
This is called a mid-branching sentence with the modifiers separating the subject from the verb.
Salinger’s sentence is right-branching with the modifiers to the right of the base clause. Grammatically, there should be a comma between “standing there, leaning on the balcony,” but the trade-off is speed. He also more tightly knits the rhythm of the –ing words, which echo the earlier “doing.” The –ing words sing even louder with the word “railing” and the final phrase, “holding the universe together.”
Finally, at the end of the sentence, we see, in fact, she’s doing everything. “Holding the universe together” is a fantastic metaphor that underscores how much the woman enchants the narrator.
Your Turn
Open with a right-branching sentence, placing your subject and verb at the beginning. Negate the action.
Now use “except” and add two modifying phrases that refer back to the subject of your base clause. In Salinger’s sentence, the two phrases refer to “she.”
Your ending needs to be the opposite of the beginning of your sentence.
Can you use a metaphor to capture the emotion?
Try it!
How did it go?
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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. Painters have paint, sculptors have clay. We have words, and words are sounds, and if you pay close attention to this, you can make music.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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Thank you!
This was a fun exercise, Nina! I really enjoy working with different registers, and frequently turn to etymonline.com for help when I want to double down on using word origins for subtle emphasis.
Here's my attempt, even though I messed it up a bit:
"She wasn't teaching anyone as she painted in the park, except for the silent acolytes accumulating behind her, first one and then a hundred, discovering the landscape at their easels by miming her every stroke."
I rarely use the word 'except', and at that point a second subject (the acolytes) took over from the first (she). Is there a word for this? What kind of sentence did I write?!
Fascinating as always. Thank you again.
I have a question, if I might. Do you think (or perhaps know) that Salinger (and writers of his class) are creating changes of register in a conscious and studied way, or are they managing to write with a certain voice from years of honing their craft? (or maybe there's no difference, one begets the other).
I ask because sometimes when I'm writing I seem to flow, and almost sleepwalk along as the writing appears, and other times I'm thinking and editing and constructing the tempo and intervening almost to create a voice.
Sometimes I feel like Salinger writes like a person speaking instead of a person writing. If you read your sentence slowly it could be a man talking to a friend about some girl he saw. There's a very close and direct narrative sound, a kind of whispering in your ear with the poetics of a certain kind of speech.
Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm saying really. But thanks again, I feel like I'm learning from your posts.