Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.
What a life.
What a time.
What I felt. Then. Gone.
Hotel World, by Ali Smith
I am swept up and carried along the wild ride of this sentence without a moment to catch my breath or take in the view. All because of punctuation. Or the lack of it. Reading a sentence like this helps us see the power of punctuation as a style technique. The lone dot at the end of a sentence gives the reader time to pause. The semicolon allows you to take a small breath, and the comma provides order to phrases and clauses. And if it’s gone?
Smith strips out the punctuation and goes all in for a sentence that is a propulsion of language, giving you the feeling of quickness, of a life lived in a blink, with all its ups and downs. We are in the realm of syntactic symbolism, with the syntax providing a simulation of a sped-up life that comes to an end.
This is the opening of the novel, capturing the hotel chambermaid’s fall down four flights of stairs. I imagine Smith infused with delight in defying the rules of punctuation to create something that deviates from the ordinary. The onomatopoeia of the opening word immediately sets the tone, as if we might be on a rollercoaster and taking off, screaming with delight and terror.
At first glance, the sentence looks wild, chaotic, but on closer examination, there is great order. Smith uses anaphora with the 17 repetitions of “what a,” echoing Charles Dicken’s memorable opening to A Tale of Two Cities, with the repeating refrain, “It was the…”
With so much anaphora, it would be easy for the effect to become dull. She counters that by disrupting the rhythm. The three-word refrain, “what a ___” changes with “what a glide thud crash.” Then again with “what a mad hushed skirl,” and again, “what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed” and “what a heart in my mouth.” (a side note: in the opening Woooooooo, there are eight “o” and in the following hooooooo, there are seven “o”s).
The final disruptions to the three-word anaphoric rhythm are the three short sentences at the end and the fragments feel syntactically like an end-- an end of a life. “Then.” “Gone.”
For more cohesion Smith invokes antithesis, or opposites, as an organizing principle; for instance, “fall” is followed by “soar,” then followed by “plummet.” “Dark” and then “light”; “plunge,” “glide.”
Musicality enters through alliteration, assonance, and consonance:
Assonance: dash/mad/crash/smash/mash/gashed; glide/light/fright/life/time; plummet/plunge/mush/hushed/rush.
Alliteration: dash/dark; mad/ mush/mash/mouth
Consonance: smash/mush/mash/gashed
Your Turn:
This is a sentence that puts itself in the spotlight, demanding attention. When do you use a sentence like this? When you want to create speed and a sense of fullness or being overwhelmed. (How else might you use it?)
Begin with a sound. Now, without using punctuation, choose a short refrain that you will repeat many times as Smith did with “what a.” Can you establish a rhythm and then break it?
Is there room for antithesis? Can you go back in and add assonance and alliteration and consonance?
Now finish that long sentence and add three short sentences. End with one-word fragments.
Try it! How did it go?
What else do you see?
PS: I asked a friend to define creativity and he refused to put it in a box of a definition. This sentence feels like an embodiment of that refusal—the refusal to put a sentence in a box of punctuation.
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).
My New Novel:
Afterword is available now! If your book club chooses my book to read, I can Zoom in and talk to the group. I’ve met with many book clubs, and it’s really fun! If you’ve read my novel please consider posting a review on Amazon or Goodreads or social media.
Thank you!
Order links:
bookshop
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Upcoming Class:
Two spots left! I’ll be teaching “Plot 101: Design the Story You Want to Tell,” at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. The focus is on the causation plot, which is the most popular in Western literature. Three weeks, Mondays, in-person, 6:30-9:00 beginning September 11.
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She’s a chord she’s a dance she’s a conversation an enigma overjoyed on the mountain breathtaking in a bedroom obsessed with her mistakes suicidal on Tuesday afternoons reinvented by Saturday morning she’s a guitar she’s drums she’s the cello for dessert she’s the main course she’s the rainbow in my afternoon bending toward a higher love.
I tried to hang on as she slid away, as music and light faded to night.
Not that it matters for the sentence analysis, which was spot-on and, as always, educational. It was a dumbwaiter she fell down. Here from a Kirkus review is the background.
At 19, Sarah Wilby is a promising competitive swimmer, is newly infatuated with a shopgirl but hasn’t yet said anything, and has a new job as chambermaid at the Global Hotel in a smallish English city. Then, just like that, she winks out. She bets a coworker five quid she can squeeze into a dumbwaiter, does it—and falls from top of hotel to bottom.