Then there was a girl whose slender neck, emerging from a collar edged with layered purple and black ruffles, clearly had no idea what ruffles were, or that they were there; it was just peacefully going about its business, holding up the Muppety head with the eyes and all that hair.
The Idiot: A Novel, by Elif Batuman
I’m reading The Theater of the Absurd by Martin Esslin and thinking about the project of the theater. At the same time, I’m teaching novel writing this semester, and the other day, I lectured about the traditional plot structure and offered alternatives. The two came together in my mind as I thought about the art of writing. There is an expected frame, a known frame to hold a story. But the absurdist playwrights and innovative writers---even if they don’t take the full plunge into absurdism—step outside the frame.
I want to say one more thing about frames. Before I threw myself into the passionate study of sentences, my writing stayed within a known frame. I didn’t know about the subtextual reverberations of repetition, for instance, or the potential suspense of a syntactical structure. I kept writing the same way in the same frame. Here is an argument, I believe, for looking closely, reading deeply, and understanding the blood and sinewy muscles of sentences so that you can move beyond your inherited frame.
Batuman’s sentence steps outside what is expected. If the sentence were written inside the frame, it would be about the girl’s neck or her face, but Batuman takes the lens and focuses on the relationship between the neck and ruffles. She injects more vitality and originality by personifying the girl’s slender neck: it has “no idea what ruffles were, or that they were there; it was just peacefully going about its business holding up the Muppety head with the eyes and all that hair.”
But before we get there, Batuman lures the reader in with the familiar. She uses an expletive sentence, “there was,” creating a tiny build to the subject, “girl.” A relative clause follows, introducing the subject of the clause, “whose slender neck.” The sentence becomes mid-branching with the insertion of the adjectival phrase that introduces the ruffles: “emerging from a collar edged with layered purple and black ruffles.” This insertion delays the moment when the sentence steps out of the frame. We’re still in the familiar. We’re comfortable (too comfortable?)
Then, we come to the verb predicate of the relative clause, and Batuman pops us out of the familiar and into the unfamiliar. She injects the sentence with energy by giving the neck consciousness: the neck “clearly had no idea what ruffles were, or that they were there.” Implicit in this negation is that the neck is aware of some things.
After the semicolon, she continues the new frame (thankfully, what a delight!), elaborating on the neck with another expletive sentence: “It was just peacefully going about its business, holding up the Muppety head with the eyes and all that hair.”
Your turn
Start with an expletive structure, (“There was,” “There are,” “It is,” “It was”) and add your subject and a relative clause. A relative clause usually begins with who/whose/whom/which/that. For the subject of the relative clause, choose a body part of the subject.
Now, add an adjectival phrase describing some aspect of the body part or something located near the body part. This phrase interrupts the clause’s subject and verb.
Add the verb predicate and personify the body part.
Now comes the semicolon. Use another expletive sentence and extend the personification of the body part with more details.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
I want to thank my generous subscriber who sent me this—and many other sentences!
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.
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There was a dog whose wagging tail was responsible for making amends on behalf of the yapping, sniffing front end providing a friendly how-are you and a heartfelt so sorry with a wave of its bushy tail.
In marched one of the sisters whose sharp elbows, jutting out in all directions, were firmly decided that the room was full of lazy, stupid people; they pointed to the exits and stabbed the soft flesh of anyone not moving.