To See the World Anew

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

Photo by Peng Chen on Unsplash

If part of the project of a writer is to make the world new again, Vuong has accomplished this with his new novel, with pages filled with sentences that counter and disrupt the conventional way of seeing.

In today’s sentence, Vuong describes the transformation of the white-barked birch trees. At night they’re blackened by the roosting black starlings. There are so many birds that they conceal the white bark. At dawn, when the sun rises, the birds awake and fly away, and like a magic trick the white bark of the birch appears.

Vuong turns to metaphor to create a new lens. Defamiliarization is the term coined by the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky for any method that bypasses reflexive knowing. “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life,” writes Shklovsky in his essay, “Art as Technique.” “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar.’”

I’m immediately drawn in to Vuong’s sentence because of the first word, “Look,” an imperative, with the implied subject, “you.” I can feel the sentence taking me by the shoulders and telling me, look here, you have to see this.

Vuong creates suspense by delaying the verb, “shatter. ” To postpone the verb, he first uses a noun phrase, “how the birches,” and then an adjectival phrase that modifies the subject “birches”: “blackened all night by starlings.” I love this image. To crack open the habitual, Vuong fuses together the trees and the birds, as if they are intricately intertwined, so much so that the birds can change the color of the trees. This relational lens in itself is a new way to see the world.

Now we come to the verb, “shatter.” Not only does this verb inject a great deal of energy into the sentence with a sudden burst of motion, it also functions as a metaphor. It grants a new quality to the birch trees, giving them a glass-like composition. The verb also highlights and continues the intimate relationship between the birds and the trees. It’s the act of the birds flying away in mass that causes the shattering, which changes the color of the trees from black to white.

Vuong ends the sentence with a dependent clause, “when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks.” Here, too, he invites a metaphor; more specifically, he anthropomorphizes the sunrise as fire that has the ability to touch. There’s also the subtle suggestion that light ignites or animates since it’s the touch of dawn that causes the starlings to take flight.

I’ll end with Woolf’s wisdom: “Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is,” writes Woolf in her essay, “Craftsmanship.” “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.”

Photo by Bjarne X Takata

Your Turn

Begin with an imperative, which conveys a command, an instruction, request or warning.

Now add your subject and then an adjectival modifier to give more details about the subject. Vuong used a past participial phrase, “blackened all night by starlings.” (A past participial phrase is usually a verb + -ed).

Add your verb. Choose a verb that functions as a metaphor and changes your subject.

Finish with a dependent clause. Can you use a metaphor or anthropomorphism, assigning human characteristics or behavior to a nonhuman?

Try it!

What else do you see?

How did it go?

Swimming in Style

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Upcoming Classes

You Had Me at the First Sentence: I’ll be teaching at Book Passage in Corte Madera, in-person and on Zoom on July 26, 10:30-12:00 Pacific Time. In this 90-minute class, we’ll dive into first sentences from published books and short stories, picking apart what makes them so irresistible. Why this word? Why that syntax? That image? What’s there—and just as important—what’s not there? Using those sentences as blueprints, you’ll craft your own. By the end, you’ll have a solid stack of opening lines ready to sprout into full-blown stories. The registration link is here:

Reading Like a Writer: Fall semester at Stanford Continuing Studies, which begins September 22, I’ll be teaching an online class, “Reading Like a Writer.” We’ll read short stories and two short novels, extracting craft techniques that you can use in your writing. Registration opens August 18.

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.

My short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. My award-winning novel, Afterword, was published in May 2023. My novel, The Translator, was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and The Painting, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. My nonfiction books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal, are bestsellers. Second editions are coming in January 2026. My short stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fugue, Nashville Review, Your Impossible Voice, and many other publications. I teach creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. Please visit my website: www.ninaschuyler.com

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