Love flooded in her like a spill of paint, blooming across her consciousness and through all her sensations, staining everything with its brilliant vermillion.
“The Math Tutors,” by Tessa Hadley (The New Yorker, 7/17/2023)
Gertrude Stein once lamented the plight of the contemporary writer who looks over her shoulder and sees the gigantic mountain of words that have already been written. In this late age of writing, how do you say it differently to make the words come alive?
Similes and metaphors are one answer, as Hadley’s sentence shows you, and this is particularly true when you have an abstract subject, such as love. Love has been written about to death. But Hadley brings it back to life, and the first word that resuscitates is the verb, “flooded” which functions, too, as a metaphor: Love is compared to liquid.
She makes the flood more specific by following it with a simile, “like a spill of paint.” Then, like a literal spill, the sentence begins to spread out, elaborating and clarifying the spill with two adjectival phrases, “blooming across her consciousness and through all her sensations,” then, “staining everything with its brilliant vermillion.”
Turning verbs into adjectival phrases (using an –ing form of a verb) adds energy and movement to the sentence because you still get the whiff of action from the verbs, “bloom,” and “stain.”
I love the final image of this sentence, “brilliant vermillion,” which creates a visual dimension to love.
As long-time professor of literature, John Erskine wrote in an essay, “The Craft of Writing”:
When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed.
Do you hear the pattern of sounds? The “L” sound is strung like little ringing bells: love, flooded, like, spill, blooming, all, brilliant, vermillion. “L” is a liquid, (echoing Hadley’s metaphor) and is spoken with very little obstruction of air and is much softer than a plosive or stopped sound.
Assonance: love/flooded; blooming/through, across/consciousness/all; paint/sensations/staining.
Alliteration: spill/sensations/staining.
Then the quick flurry of the polysyllabic ending with its play of stresses: BRILliant, verMILlion.
Your turn:
You’ll use a right-branching sentence, with the subject and verb at the beginning. Choose an abstract emotion or idea as your subject. (By the way, if you choose an emotion, this is one way to “tell” an emotion because you’re dramatizing it).
Select a verb that functions as a metaphor, giving shape and dimension to the abstract.
Add a simile that provides more detail to the verb.
Add two adjectival participial phrases that expand on the simile.
End with a strong, vivid image.
Try it!
How did it go?
Tell me what else do you see?
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. 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).
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Despair seeped through his pores like January rain, seizing his lungs and freezing all his senses, inking out his last hope with funereal black.
Rage rocketed and ricocheted through Gina, ratcheting itself into successively higher registers until it erupted from her throat into the space between herself and Josh where it congealed into a blackened gravitational fear that everything she’d just shouted was not merely unforgettable but also unforgivable.