Whenever his mind was sufficiently clear he used his gifts to knock me.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
When I read this sentence, the narrator comes alive. He convinces me he’s flesh and blood, and I want to walk the story with him, listen to his take on things.
What pulls me in, what engages me is his language: he has range.
In linguistics, it’s called register, which is the way a speaker uses language differently in different circumstances. There’s high register diction, which is formal, grand, restrained, official. There’s low register, which is informal, casual, regional, a dialect.
You can say “feline” or “cat.” You can say “Mother” or “Ma” or “Mom.” You can say, “Please be quiet,” or “Cut it out.”
In writing, we can play with register, as Bellow does, compressing high and low in one sentence. Bellow uses the polysyllabic, formal word “sufficiently,” and the colloquial diction, “to knock me.”
He could have written the sentence in one unvarying block of register:
Whenever his mind was sufficiently clear he used his gifts to demean and malign me.
This unchanging range alters the narrator completely. He’s proper, educated, erudite, and maybe a killjoy.
Bellow’s sentence creates a narrator who is educated and streetwise. He can speak formally, and he can shoot the breeze with a guy selling hotdogs on the street corner. He becomes complicated and complex because his language draws upon varied sources, which is more like the human voice. His language comes not only from books and schooling but from friends, family, and the streets of Chicago. He’s a narrator who can take the reader to visit a poet and talk about capitalism, Calvinism, the veils of Maya, and the melancholy of affluence; he’s also a narrator who encounters a wannabe Chicago gangster who tries to bully the narrator into being friends.
This technique isn’t confined to first-person narrators. Here’s Bellow again in his novel, Herzog, which is told in the third person.
Late in spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.
As James Wood writes in How Fiction Works, “One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers.”
The Making
To use Bellow’s architecture, start with a subordinate clause (a clause that includes a subject and verb, but isn’t a complete sentence) and include a high register word. Here, Bellow used “sufficiently.”
This is a left-branching sentence, which means the modifiers are to the left of the base clause. Here the base clause is “he used his gifts to knock me.”
In the base clause, use a low register word.
Do you feel the expansiveness of your character? The different, dynamic rhythm of your prose?
Let me know how it goes!
Please share this newsletter!
PS: You can pre-order my new creative writing journal at 40% off or $15. Published by Fiction Advocate.
Here’s the link:
https://www.fictionadvocate.com/product/stunning-sentences-a-creative-writing-journal/
Ah, a short one. Working with register is so good. It's a great tool for building character, as you say, Nina. I haven't strayed very far this time from the idea in the model sentence, which I've tried to do up to now, but here it is anyway:
Should I surrender to the impulse her barely concealed mockery stirred in me, I could with minimal effort take her down a peg or two.
Thank you Nina! I've been searching for the gold you offer for so long. And now that I found your newsletter, I'm buying also the books. As a non-native English speaker and writer, this is a tremendous help, thank you. Ciao from Venice, Italy!