Exercise #1: In-Sentence Suspense
Carmen Maria Machado, E. Lily Yu, Leonard Gardner, Daisy Johnson, William Gibson, Alvin Schwartz, Lesley Nneka Arimah
Hi all! Welcome!
Thanks so much for signing up for this experiment! As promised, there’s an exercise included at the end of this newsletter: if you’re a person like me who always fast-forwards through the first 3-12 minutes of every podcast to get past the part where the host blathers on instead of getting to the real subject, feel free to scroll down and start writing.
Still here? Then let me quickly explain the method here. I started this newsletter because I’ve found I love making new exercises for each of my creative writing classes: exercises designed specifically for the particular students in my courses, custom-fit to the books and stories we’re reading together, to the work we’re doing, and to the discussions we’ve been having, in addition to whatever skills I’m trying to teach at any particular time. There’s an art to fashioning a good exercise—an art I’m still learning—but I love the challenge of trying to balance clarity of instructions with well-chosen examples, and of imposing just enough difficulty to make space for play and surprise.
This semester, I’m teaching a graduate course on sentence style and acoustics, so I’ve been writing exercises asking students to explore aspects of grammar and syntax, to focus on particular elements of the sentence or the paragraph, and to write in atypical ways. The exercise I’ve shared here today isn’t something from that class—the exercises in this newsletter will be written just for you, its readers—but it is concerned with what we’ve been studying: how to notice interesting moves in the sentence structures of others, and how to keep adding those moves to the tools we have at our disposal when we sit down to build our own.
If you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so on Twitter or elsewhere. Same if something ever gets published from it—that’d be great to hear! More importantly, I hope that these exercises can be a chance for communal play and experiment: 850+ other people got this first prompt today, so wherever you are, know you’re writing among friends. Have fun!
Thanks for being here at the beginning. It was an incredible joy to see so many people so interested in this idea, and I hope you enjoy being a part of it.
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
“Starver” by Daisy Johnson, from her collection Fen. This year, I’m reading at least one short story every day, and “Starver” is one of my absolute favorites of the new-to-me ones I’ve read recently. Johnson’s prose is perfectly wrought and incredibly paced, but it’s the structure I keep returning to: there’s only one real “pause” in the story’s relentless progress, and even that scene is more a feint than a true rest. I’m going to be thinking about this story for a long time. It begins: “The land was drained. They caught eels in great wreaths, headless masses in the last puddles, trying to dig in the dirt to hide… There were enough eels to last months; there were enough eels to feed them all for years.”
“What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” by Lesley Nneka Arimah, from her collection of the same name. (Available online at Catapult.) There’s so much to admire here, but I especially love the volume of worldbuilding Arimah seamlessly integrates into her fairly short story. It takes place in a post-sea-rise climate change Africa, a new age of colonialism and refugees; the protagonist is a Mathematician, a class of worker who uses Furcal’s Formula (a pi-like mathematical concept) to leech other people’s sadnesses from their bodies; there’s a genocidal colonial war known as the Elimination and a variety of tattoos denoting origin and social rank; plus more typical future technologies marking the story’s era as different from ours. Definitely worth a reread just to study how that worldbuilding gets done.
William Gibson’s Agency. A very good sequel to Gibson’s inventive time-travel/alternate-Earth novel Peripheral (and presumably the middle book in a trilogy, because he seems to only write loosely-connected trilogies). Gibson hit pause on the publication of Agency after Brexit and Trump’s election to rewrite the book’s plot, which means the book is itself a kind of alternate reality—it’s one of two possible texts Gibson could have published. I also love how, in a fantastic New Yorker profile, he explained that he begins writing by commencing “with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day”: “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is… It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”
Exercise #1: In-Sentence Suspense
Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch” (from the collection Her Body and Other Stories) is one of the most memorable short stories I’ve read in the past few years: if you haven’t read it (and if you haven’t, you should), I’ll just say that it’s narrated by a woman born with a ribbon tied around her neck—a ribbon she forbids her husband to touch. Throughout, Machado folds urban legends and cautionary tales (some retold from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) into her own story of power and desire, lust and toxic masculinity. (It also contains a handful of intriguing parenthetical stage directions for reading the story aloud, which, if followed, slowly become more aggressive toward your audience...)
I taught “The Husband Stitch” again this past week, and there’s so much I could say about it—but today I want to focus on just one move from one sentence.
Early in the story, as the narrator recounts her first sexual experience with her future husband, she says: “I have imagined a lot of things in the dark, in my bed, beneath the weight of that old quilt, but never this, and I moan.”
I love those triple prepositions in the center of this sentence, which create what I think of as “in-sentence suspense”: the prepositional phrases create a delay that literally suspends you in the sentence, temporarily preventing you from reaching the next independent clause and preventing the sentence itself from resolving.
If you break the Machado sentence down a bit, you find it contains two shorter simpler sentences: “I have imagined a lot of things but never this” and “I moan.” Neither is particularly surprising on its own, although both are clear and communicative. For me, what makes Machado’s sentence sing are the parts of it that slow it down, the prepositional phrases that keep the first independent clause from meeting the second: “in the dark,” “in my bed, “beneath the weight of that old quilt.”
If she’d wanted, Machado could have extended that delay indefinitely: why stop at three prepositional phrases? Why not five or seven or ten?
Obviously, Machado had her reasons for not adding more. But for this exercise, we’re going to experiment with what happens when you indulge yourself where Machado held back.
To begin, write a single sentence with two clear parts: it might look like the Machado example, with its two independent clauses joined by a conjunction, but it doesn’t have to. Note that the two independent clauses in the Machado have very simple structures: noun/verb/object, noun/verb. I’d suggest yours be similarly simple, to heighten the effect of the next step.
Once you have your sentence fashioned, find a point between the two parts to write into: how can you successfully expand the middle of the sentence, delaying the sentence’s resolution, keeping its parts apart? Can you slow the sentence down without making it drag? Can you fill it with other kinds of information, actions, sensory detail? Is there a way to insert a mid-sentence list of some sort? Play around with different sentence parts, kinds of clauses: you’re certainly not limited to the prepositional phrase. All that material you’re used to putting at the beginnings or ends of sentences? Try putting in the middle instead. Look for ways to create variety and surprise.
What other effects might be possible from within the middle of the sentence? Surely refusing forward motion isn’t the only thing you might accomplish.
Machado’s sentence is fairly short and lives inside a longer paragraph—she moves on rather quickly. For your own sentence, instead of moving on, move in. Try to bloat its middle past your usual comfort level. Keep adding, for as long as you can, only to the inner reaches of your sentence—don’t append clauses before its current beginning or after its present end. How long can you make this sentence—and can that length make its meaning or impact even more powerful than it would be in a shorter version? How palpable can you make the syntactic suspense that blooms between its two halves? How can this suspension be made beautiful and gripping, so that the reader remains happily caught in its web, even as they’re anticipating and craving the sentence’s eventual resolution?
Aim for at least 250 words—a complex but compelling page-long sentence. You may end up with a complete micro or flash fiction. You might make a piece of something longer. (You might also do what I often do and try writing this exercise inside a story or novel you’re already writing, adding this to the kinds of sentences it contains.) Remember that the exercise’s suggestions are only a starting point. Stick with the exercise as long as it’s useful—then swerve toward whatever occurs to you next.
Good luck! See you next month!
P.S. For further inspiration, here are two other example sentences using similar tactics:
From E. Lily Yu’s “The Wretched and the Beautiful”: "When we slid on our sandals and stepped onto the dazzling beach, which long ago, before the garbage tides, was what many beaches looked like, we saw the crashed ship again, substantiation of the previous night’s fever dream." There’s only one independent clause here—”We saw the crashed ship”—but there is the same kind of in-sentence suspense we saw in the Machado. The sentence could read: “When we slid on our sandals and slipped onto the dazzling beach, we saw the crashed ship again.” The three clauses of beach description/backstory/worldbuilding slow the sentence down, inserting themselves between the adverbial phrase and the main clause to offer expository information while playing keepaway with the sentence’s main noun and verb, their vision of the crashed ship.
From Leonard Gardner’s Fat City: "In the midst of a phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted, pocked, crushed and bloated noses, missing teeth, brown snags, empty gums, stubble beards, pitcher lips, flop ears, sores, scabs, dribbled tobacco juice, stooped shoulders, split brows, weary, desperate, stupefied eyes under the lights of Center Street, Tully saw a familiar young man with a broken nose." In this sentence, all of the delay is at the front—this is what Virginia Tufte calls a “left-branching sentence”—but the effect is similar. The core sentence—“Tully saw a familiar young man”—comes only after the “phantasmagoria” of battered body parts, a pile-up of men reduced to their parts, a mass of fifty-plus words from which the young man and his broken nose finally emerges.
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A Place Where He and His Wife Used to Eat Before They Were Who They Became
He finished his solitary lunch, taking his time with what was left of his bowl of black beans, with slurping the final spoonfuls of the spicy fish soup, wiping the mercurochrome red of the broth from his lips with the paper napkins, taking a long drink of the cerveza, which was still cold, as the restaurant -- he had never been there at this time of day! -- began to empty, the afternoon lengthening and darkening, snow outside the windows falling in airy, fat flakes, the parking lot filling with it, the stockyard beyond filling with it, the stacks of boxcars in the stockyard collecting the snow on their rooftops, the light changing, the tempo of the waitresses' movements becoming more languid and patient, their staccato speech patterns slowing, their laughter more easy, less guarded, the mood turning from public to private, a performance concluded, the sound in a kitchen unseen behind him of plates being washed, of plates quietly clanking together as they were put in a rack, stored away, to be brought out again sometime later, the sound of a door being unhurriedly opened, swinging closed without another immediately following it and opening again, the last of the last group of men in suits rising from their wooden chairs from the last occupied table by the windows and leaving, chair legs scraping the floor, hands leaving cash on the table for a tip, a collar being snapped up as the front door opened, a remark on finding good Mexican food in Detroit and the snow, look at this snow, his little red rental car, the last on the parking lot, its top and its windows covered in snow, with nowhere, nowhere, absolutely nowhere he had to be -- si, another cervaza -- no work to be done until tomorrow, no meetings, no calls, no children, no reading, no answering questions, no paying bills, no dinner plans, no dishes, no what's-wrong-with-this or why-isn't-this-working, no what-is-it or what's-wrong-with-you-tonight, no talks about pets or the kids or more kids, no nothing, no arguing, no cajoling, no fighting for the space to have a thought, just the last of the fiery soup, the sound of his spoon on the side of the bowl of black beans and rice, the last of it, and the beer, and the snow burying the parking lot, burying the car, and somewhere, in all that, he found a space, like a quiet sustained note being held by a trumpet, a moment of peace that he didn't want to let get away.
I had a hard time getting to 250 words, but this is what I came up with:
He was on the bus, and he hated to see a large folding knife clipped into someone else’s pocket—these large knives, sometimes brushed stainless steel, sometimes matte black, folded up into themselves with their full serrations or partial serrations, their sheep’s foot shapes or their talon shapes, their notches or their holes for flicking open with a calloused thumb, though maybe the thumb wasn’t calloused but a smooth and soft one, a thumb with a little red eye on its side and a little pink mouth that had no teeth in it, just gums, just softish gums one could push to one’s face and feel a little suck—so he fell against someone, a man with canvas pants, and stole his clip knife, using a pickpocket method he learned from a video online.