A few days later I saw the young man again, I saw his picture, I mean, a shot from a doorbell camera, while scrolling the neighborhood app.
“My Wonderful Description of Flowers,” by Danielle Dutton (from The New Yorker, November 28, 2022)
What does this sentence make you feel?
Slow down and read it again even slower, not the content but the rhythm. It starts in the realm of the familiar as a linear line, but it quickly becomes jagged and jittery because of the commas that separate the phrases, interrupting the linearity. It’s as if the narrator, in real-time, is piecing together, phrase by phrase, what she’s seeing, and she can’t quite believe it. I feel the narrator’s anxiety, maybe fear, her disbelief, and I feel it primarily because of the syntax and punctuation.
In this sentence, there are four commas, creating five separate syntactical sections. Each time we encounter a comma, there’s a little pause, as if taking a breath before proceeding.
The comma splice, too, adds speed and tension. If you need permission to disobey your English teacher, here it is. Your teacher (Hi, Mrs. R,) would tell you to add a semicolon after the first base clause and the second one, so it would look like this:
A few days later I saw the young man again; I saw his picture.
But the semicolon is too orderly; it tamps down the anxiety that Dutton beautifully creates with the comma splice. The narrator’s thinking is rushed, frantic. There’s no time for an orderly semicolon.
Anxiety is also introduced by anaphora and the repetition of “I saw.” Repetition draws attention to what is being repeated; here, it feels like the narrator can’t believe what she’s seeing.
That little phrase, “I mean,” doesn’t add necessary content, but it adds necessary rhythm. I’m going to call it a form of phatic utterance. A phatic utterance doesn’t add new information or ideas, but it’s small talk to connect with the listener and perhaps extend the conversation. It’s what happens in dialogue when someone adds, “To tell the truth,” or “uh, huh,” or “you see.” In Dutton’s sentence, it’s an internal conversation, and, because the story is being told, it’s also a conversation with the reader. It adds a small stutter, a moment of the narrator trying to gather her thoughts.
Then there’s that word “shot.” One word can animate an entire world. We use “shot” in the context of taking a photo, but it’s also associated with violence and guns. By including the modifying phrase, “a shot from a doorbell camera,” to further elaborate the “picture,” the violent associations infuse into the sentence.
Your Turn
Open with your first base clause. Now add a comma and write your second base clause.
Add a short phatic utterance to increasingly disrupt the linear flow.
Add a modifier that refers to the second base clause. Dutton chose to modify the direct object “picture,” telling the reader how the picture was taken: “a shot from a doorbell camera.”
Can you choose a word that proliferates different associations?
Add a subordinate clause.
You can make more music:
Assonance: the long “a” in days/later; the short “a” in man/camera/app
Do you hear the heavy stresses in “young man,” making the reader slow down and see the man too? And the heavy stress in “shot,” which makes that word ring out.
Try it!
How did it go?
What else do you see? Or feel?
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. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! 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, www.ninaschuyler.com. You’ll find my book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and my new book, Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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Hi Nina! Such an interesting sentence. I love that about the phatic utterance, found also in George Saunders stories, as well as in Donald Barthelme and apparently Samuel Beckett? Going inside the voice!
Here’s my attempt:
It was, you know, the time of our lives, the only time there was, the vibrating chord we lived inside of, a soulgasmic heartbeat that lasted forever until the moment we got sledgehammered in the face by the lives we thought we’d left behind.