The Disorderly Sentence
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
He’d not known how capacious it was, the heart.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
In this sentence, we’re in the mind of the Russian cosmonaut Anton as he’s looking out the spacecraft window at the Earth. Yes, I’m still deeply immersed in Orbital, finding the jewels, traveling with six astronauts and marveling at the universe.
When a sentence doesn’t abide by the usual word order, it draws attention to itself because the ear is not used to this new order and slows to make sense of it. Whatever is out of order becomes emphasized. The technique is called hyperbaton, a change in the usual word order. In Greek, it means "stepping over, transposed.” It’s a favorite of Shakespeare (“Some rise by sin, some by virtue fall.” Measure for Measure. Shakespeare interrupts the parallelism, which would have been: “some fall by virtue.”)
Harvey opens with the subject, “He,” followed by the verb phrase, “had not known,” contracted as “he’d not known.” This is in the past perfect tense, indicating an action completed in the past before another action or realization.
Then comes the direct object (which answers the question: what had he not known?): “how capacious it was.” It’s an interrogative clause with the subject “it.” We have to wait for the next beat in the sentence to find out what, exactly, is capacious.
Now we come to the hyperbaton move. The sentence ends with an appositive, “the heart, which adds information, revealing what “it” is. In a traditionally ordered sentence, the appositive would come after “it.”
He’d not known how capacious it, the heart, was.
Or a more traditional sentence would be:
He’d not known the heart was capacious.
But with this latter sentence, the most important word to Anton is “heart,” and it’s buried. Moreover, because the sentence is written in a traditional order, we glaze right over it. With Haney’s sentence, the reader is left with the most critical word.
Your Turn
Open with a subject and verb. Use a verb (called a transitive verb) that needs a direct object.
For the subject of the direct object, use a pronoun. Consider using an interrogative clause.
At the end of the sentence, use an appositive to rename and give information about the pronoun.
Try it!
How did it go?
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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. Please visit my website for all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
IN THIS RAVISHING WORLD:
My short story collection, In This Ravishing World, was published on July 2, 2024, and won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. If you read it, please consider writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
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We didn't know how fragile it was, the Earth.
I'm so excited for this one! About to crack open this book. Here are a couple of ideas:
- She'd not known how capricious it was, the breath.
- She'd not known how disastrous it was, the breath.
- She'd not known how prophetic it was, the breath.
(An asthmatic climate scientist facing the ruin of her research following an attack that nearly killed her.)