When November comes, if the autumn showers arrive as they ought, seeping into the soil and permeating the leaves, a forest becomes the liminal space where land and sky come together: the dew lingers longer in the morning, and the trees hold on to the clouds, stitching them to the earth, pulling them closer to the ground.
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, by Margaret Renkl
By the end of this sentence, I am fully immersed in the natural world. The lushness of the autumn showers as the rain seeps into the soil and permeates the leaves; a forest turning into a liminal space, where land and sky come together, the dew lingers, and the trees hold on to the clouds, stitching them, pulling them to the ground.
What makes this sentence so rich and textured are the many modifying phrases and clauses that add particularity. As Columbia Professor of Literature John Erskine wrote in his essay, “The Craft of Writing,” “When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise, the more you add.”
What if the phrases and clauses were stripped out?
When November comes, if the autumn showers arrive, a forest becomes a liminal space: the dew lingers longer in the morning and the trees hold on to the clouds.
In the pared-down version, there are less sensual details. I feel time moving faster. There’s a clip, a rush. With the modifying phrases, lushness saturates and time moves more slowly, and, here, too, is a reason why I feel immersed in Renkl’s sentence. As embodied sentient beings, I think there is a certain pace in which we absorb more, and in these troubled times, with an onslaught of terribleness, we not only crave this pace, we need it.
This is a left-branching sentence, opening with a dependent clause. Renkl follows with a conditional statement, also called if-then statement, further delaying the base clause. The conditional part of the statement is elongated with two modifying phrases, “seeping into the soil,” and “permeating the leaves.” The if-then statement adds tension, especially in this sentence, because, with the climate emergency, it’s no longer certain that when November comes, the autumn showers will arrive.
The base clause is “the forest becomes a liminal space,” which is more vivid with the clause, “where land and sky come together.”
After the colon, there are two base clauses that further describe the liminal space:
1) The dew lingers longer in the morning
2) The trees hold on to the clouds
At the end of this sentence, the two phrases refer not to the liminal space but to the trees and the way they hold the clouds, “stitching them to the earth, pulling them closer to the ground.” These are subordinate phrases because they refer to the immediately preceding clause. Subordinate phrases elegantly move the focus of the sentence forward, heading into a new image, a new thought, a new direction.
There is so much music throughout:
Alliteration, seeping/soil/sky/stitching, leaves/liminal/lingers/longer
Assonance, autumn/ought, seeping/permeating/leaves/trees, showers/clouds.
And the rhythm of the adjectival phrases ending in -ing, seeping/permeating/stitching/pulling.
Your Turn
Use a left-branching sentence and an if-then statement. Before you get to the “then,” add two modifying phrases.
Now comes your “then” or conclusion, which is your base clause. Can you add a dependent clause that describes something in the base clause?
Add a colon and include two more base clauses that further elaborate upon the base clause.
Finally, add two modifying phrases that describe something in your third base clause.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
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. Painters have paint, sculptors have clay. We have words, and words are sounds, and if you pay close attention to this, you can make music.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
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When the Chairman walks in, as The East is Red blares only it can, rolling like thunder and blasting out daylights, the Hall erupts into mass hysteria where the delegates unite to compete to display the greatest fervor: some sob uncontrollably, some burst their lungs shouting “Long Live the Chairman,” all heads bobbing in a red sea of Wisdom Books, drowning with the bliss of absolute devotion.
I'm always pendulating between adding and subtracting words, phrases, ideas. Sometimes sentences seem to nestle in paragraphs, nicely chugging along. Sometimes they seem to be paragraphs in themselves.
Thanks so much for this excellent post (and what a lovely discovery your Substack is). Helps me to now keep an eye when I'm toing and froing (thinking and feeling) in my writing.
Here's the opening sentence(s) in a recent post of mine...(I think of it because this, and following paragraphs, were chipped away at and added to in much the way you describe here):
Throughout the ceaseless Swedish winter oceans of gently tumbling snow fall in heavy waves for months on end as the heavens perpetually collapse in spectacular silence. Colossal storm clouds bruise the sky while the blue black of all creation twinkles above and the snow entombs the land in a tender light below. The dog and I traverse the string of storms like two ghosts haunting a winter wonderland.