The prairie is made of dirt and sky, of shushling grass and starling night—and the creatures caught between.
“Prairie Alchemy: Advice for the Newly Transformed,” by Myna Chang, from the collection The Potential for Radio and Rain
Myna Chang’s collection of flash and micro fiction, The Potential for Radio and Rain, won the 2022 Cutbank Books Chapbook Competition. I could spend the next several months dishing up deliciously wonderful sentences from her book.
There is a calm feeling to this sentence, which is a result, in part, of balance, the pairing of two things. Robert D. Altick, in Preface to Critical Reading, writes:
The matching of phrase against phrase, clause against clause, lends an unmistakable eloquence to prose. That, indeed, is one of the principal glories of the King James Bible… And, to some extent in reminisce of the Bible, English prose all the way down to our time has tended toward balanced structure for the sake of contrast or antithesis or climax…
Chang uses balance to describe the prairie with “dirt and sky,” and “shushling grass and starling night.” The sentence becomes a series, or three things, with the final description after the em dash. The em dash makes it feel like “and the creatures caught between” is an afterthought or that the previous two descriptions build to this final description. There’s the sky and the dirt and all that is between, which is, in the end, everything.
The calmness also comes from the rhythm, the alternating heavier and lighter stresses. Throughout, Chang uses an iamb, one light stress, followed by one heavy stress.
The prairie is made of dirt and sky, of shushling grass and starling night--and the creatures caught between.
The English ear is used to this rhythm; the iambic pentameter (five foot) line is the most widely used line in English metrical verse, writes Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook.
About now in class, I usually have a student ask whether a prose writer has to pay such attention to every single sentence in a story. Because, well, that’s a lot of sentences to pay attention to. I understand, what an overwhelming task. But by reading good writing, the ear absorbs these rhythms, so when you write, these rhythms spool forth. And when they don’t, you have the feeling that something isn’t right; something isn’t working. Then, you can go back and pay closer attention to the rhythms. If you know you want to draw attention to a particular sentence, you can consciously use balance and create a pattern of stresses.
Anaphora, too, contributes to the eloquent tone: “of dirt and sky, of shushling grass…” Anaphora is the repetition of word(s) at the beginning of phrases, clauses or sentences.
The first pairing of words, “dirt and sky,” echo the pared-down nature of a praire. But Chang introduces a different tone by using the adjectives “shushling grass and starling night.” A lushness enters, and a spark of invention with the made-up word “shushling” and the surprise of not “startling” but “starling” night. And now I picture a night full of birds. And I think “shushling” should be a word.
Your Turn:
Open with a base clause, a subject and a verb predicate, and include your first pairing of words that describe your subject.
Add a comma and use anaphora to add your second pairing of words that refer to your noun. For these words, add adjectives to vary the tone.
Use an em dash and add one more description of the noun.
Can you go back and develop a pattern of stresses?
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.
Please visit my website to find all my books: ninaschuyler.com, including my novel Afterword, How to Write Stunning Sentences, and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal.
Preorder My Award-Winning Short Story Collection:
I’m so happy that my short story collection, In This Ravishing World, will be published in July 2024. The collection won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature.
Here’s what the Judge for The Prism Prize for Climate Literature said about the collection:
“Three pages into reading this fascinating book, I knew it was the clear winner of the third annual Prism Prize for Climate Literature that I sponsor through Homebound Publications. Not only does it cover every facet of the climate issue and the ongoing efforts at dealing with or denying/undermining what needs to be done, Nature’s presence embraces the entire narrative and lends a sense of enchantment. Rivetted, I could barely put it down for the three days it took to read the compelling stories of a diverse cast of characters: there is someone in these pages for every reader to relate to.”—Gail Collins-Ranadive, author of Dinosaur Dreaming, Our Climate Moment.
I’d really appreciate it if you preorder the book. Here’s the link:
Afterword
I’m excited about this upcoming reading! The San Mateo County Libraries purchased over 150 copies of my novel and distributed them for free to patrons prior to this reading. There will be time for questions. I hope you can attend—online! Jan 23, Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. PST. Please register for free here:
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Thank you!
Nina-I was gobsmacked to open your lovely newsletter and see my story! What a thrilling surprise. Thank you so much for the kind comments. I will be happy-dancing in a very non-poetic form for the rest of the day!
My attempt below. A side note - it's interesting how it feels uncomfortable to be "copying" the form of another writer's sentence so directly, but I guess that's the point of the exercises - copy the sentence forms to a certain extent, to help develop our own ear/voice for language? I do realize this is the premise of your weekly posts, I'm just new to craft classes, having been an English major for only a semester or two, a long long time ago. ...Anyway:
The way is full of rocks and dust, of blinding sun and breathless night — and the empty moans of the wanderers.