Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
The other day a student asked how many stunning sentences do you need in a story. I tossed out: oh, well, probably one per page, double-spaced.
And then I remembered Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. Hamnet is one of those rare books that combines a great story with great writing. O’Farrell, as The New York Times Book Review wrote, “has a melodic relationship to language.” Or as NPR noted, “Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we’ve come to expect of O’Farrell.” Or The Wall Street Journal: “O’Farrell’s prose is characteristically beautiful.”
The next class, I broke the news. To garner this kind of praise, to draw the attention not only to the story but language, you need more than one stunning sentence per page. Maybe three, or five, or seven. And the stunningness comes from style techniques.
Instructions (lots going on here)
The sentence begins with the subject, “life,” followed by the verb “has.”
After the verb, O’Farrell uses four main style techniques:
Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, phrases, or clauses. It creates a unique and memorable rhythm, and, depending on the word that is repeated, heightened emotions.
O’Farrell uses “its”: its kernel, its hub, its epicentre
Series: last time we talked about balance and the rhythm of twos (See Balancing Act 2). Series is a string of three things. Winston Weathers writes in his essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” that with three, you create a sense of the reasonable, the normal, the logical. Just like balance, it nods toward a familiar shape, such as a story’s beginning, middle, and end. Or syllogism. Or Hegel’s dialectic. Or The Three Little Pigs.
Balance: After the series, we have balance (or parallelism), the pairing of two clauses.
from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.
Did you see the anaphora in this balance? (the repetition of “which everything”)
Finally, O’Farrell invokes antithesis, or opposites, which is often used in parallel structures.
“Flows out” is contrasted with “returns.”
Antithesis creates rhythm and, like the contrast in a photograph, makes both of the opposites pop on the page. They become memorable, as does the whole sentence.
Seems fitting to end with Shakespeare’s famous sentence in Hamlet and his use of antithesis: “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.”
Now you try it. Tell me how it goes.
I've once again modelled my sentence very closely to the O'Farrell one. In fact, I read 'Hamnet' not so long ago, and now I'm going to borrow it and read it again. Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun doing these exercises, so thank you, Nina, for this opportunity, and here's my sentence.
Elizabeth had her rules, her preferences, her expectations, according to which her long-suffering husband planned his days, against which he would one day rebel.
love your juxtaposition of Hegel's dialectic and The Three Little Pigs!