Taking her into a turn, he seemed to glide out of himself and into the ethereal, his body erect, his hand riding high on her shoulder blade, off tempo with the music crooning from the bandstand but in perfect harmony with the Strauss waltz he hummed, and the seesawing swell of their steps left Anna wordless with warmth for the strangeness of people because who was a less likely vessel for grace than Rudi Bloch?
Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra
Can you feel the movement of dancing in this sentence? The swaying, this way, that way, the couple gliding around the dance floor?
We are in the world of syntactic symbolism in which the sentence itself mimics the content. Marra creates movement through his phrase groupings separated by five commas. In the absence of any verse line as you’d find in poetry, rhythm in prose is usually organized according to syntactic phrase groupings.
Here you have:
#1. Taking her into a turn
#2 he seemed to glide out of himself and into the ethereal
#3 his body erect
#4 his hand riding high on her shoulder blade
#5 off tempo with the music crooning from the bandstand
#6 but in perfect harmony with the Strauss waltz he hummed
#7 and the seesawing swell of their steps left Anna wordless with warmth for the strangeness of people because who was a less likely vessel for grace than Rudi Bloch?
The first phrase modifies the base clause, which is #2, with the subject—he—followed by the linking verb—seemed. The next phrases, #3-#6 refer back to and further describe the subject. We see him physically, his body erect, his hand riding high on her shoulder blade, and we learn he isn’t moving to the external music but the Strauss waltz that he is humming.
Anytime you invoke the conjunction “but,” the sentence takes a turn, and because of this, I gave it a number, #6. The sentence was heading in one direction, but the conjunction “but,” moves it in a new direction.
We come to the second conjunction in the sentence “and” which solidly shifts to Anna’s point of view. In this final part of the sentence, #7, the commas are eliminated and Anna, as well as the reader, is swept up in the flow of the dancing. This grace is further heightened by the cluster of alliteration: seesawing/swell/steps and wordless/with/warmth and less/likely. The sibilants, along with the glides (w/y) and liquids (l/r) are juxtaposed to the plosive-infested name, Rudi Bloch.
The Making
Begin with a modifying phrase. Marra used a present participle phrase (--ing verb).
Now write your base clause.
Add three more modifying phrases that describe your subject, as Marra does with “his body erect,” “his hand riding high on her shoulder blade” and “off tempo with the music crooning from the bandstand”?
Add the conjunction “but” and now your sentence takes a turn in a different direction.
Add the conjunction “and” which invites a character’s response to the opening base clause. Can you add alliteration as Marre does to provide an aural analog to whatever you’re writing about?
How about assonance: steps/left/less/vessel and strangeness/grace
Give it a try!
What do you like about this sentence?
How did your sentence turn out?
I love the way this sentence glides out of and back into itself while it whirls and makes waves out of time.