Exercise #8: Punctuation as Thought
Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Chana Porter, Maria Dahvana Headley, Elvira Navarro, Abbey Mei Otis, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Gary Lutz
Hi all,
On August 20th, I started my seventh year of teaching at Arizona State, where this semester I’m teaching a new 38-person course on “Worldbuilding for Science Fiction and Fantasy.” I’m conducting class remotely via Zoom, a space I’m reasonably comfortably teaching in by now: my main worries before I began were less about how to teach the material and more about how to build community in the virtual classroom. Thankfully, those worries passed quickly too, as my students seem so happy to be with each other, even virtually, and in some ways they’ve begun collaborating even faster than usual. It’s truly been a pleasure to imagine alongside them, and I’m excited to see how their worlds come together as we make our way through the semester’s writing. (This week’s assignment is an exercise in world-generating mapmaking, and so by Thursday afternoon we’ll have thirty-eight new fictional lands to visit…)
We also started our semester by reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which led me to build this month’s exercise around Le Guin’s excellent prose. I hope you enjoy it! More importantly, I hope those of you who are teachers or students or who have children or partners or friends in school this fall stay safe and healthy, and that the people who are supposed to help keep you that way do the right things on your behalf.
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
The Seep by Chana Porter. I truly loved The Seep, one of the most inventive speculative novels I’ve read this year. Hopeful and sweet, smart and morally clear on the search for purpose as an individual and in a community, it follows protagonist Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka’s journey through her dissatisfaction with a utopia brought on by the gentlest of alien invasions. Of course no literary utopia has ever been perfect, and so it’s no surprise that this one still needs improvement: “There is always work to be done,” Porter charges, “so why not do it?”
Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. I’ve been looking forward to Maria Dahvana Headley’s take on Beowulf ever since finishing her brilliant novel The Mere Wife, and now that it’s here I’m glad to report that it’s a total thrill. It’s surprising and bold, funny and bawdy and feminist, unlike any previous translation. The closest stylistic point of reference for me is Anne Carson’s Antigonick, which like Headley’s Beowulf injected just enough contemporary material to bring the historical, mythical world fully into the present.
Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro. I’ve only read the title story of this collection forthcoming in 2021 from Two Lines Press, but so far so good: the jacket copy compares Navaro to David Lynch and Clarice Lispector, which I can certainly see, but this title story’s strangeness reminded me most of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, perhaps because of the haunting and rhyming rabbit imagery the two works share.
“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Evicted By Now” by Abbey Mei Otis, from her 2018 collection Alien Virus Love Disaster. Speaking of Le Guin, I’d love to teach Otis’s story alongside her "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas": both make visible the unacceptable ways in which our happiness rests on someone else's pain, and require the reader to grapple with that and imagine how it could be different. In the first half, a pack of siblings must murder their mother to save their family home:
They reminded themselves of places they had heard of where things were very different, where you did not have to kill any of your own relations but instead lived with the knowledge that a stranger, or several, in an unknown place had killed another stranger, or several, in order for you to live as you did. This seemed altogether more dishonest, and imprecise. They shivered at the thought and congratulated themselves for being so decent and so square.
Exercise #8: Punctuation as Thought
Almost every year recently, I’ve chosen to try to read all of a living writer’s body of work over the course of a calendar year. And while I never quite get to everything—perhaps superstitiously, I always leave at least one book unread—by doing this I’ve read almost all of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Anne Carson, among others, each in a twelve-month period. Three years ago, the writer I chose was Ursula K. Le Guin, who by then had written so many books I knew I likely wouldn’t get through all of them in a single year, but in the end, I did read more than twenty-five of her novels, collections, and translations in 2018.
As I mentioned above, the first book I’m teaching this fall is Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, my favorite books of hers. I’m liking it more than ever on this reread, in part because Genly Ai and Estraven’s crossing of the Gobrin Ice late in the novel is so incredibly good, and this time I knew in advance that it would be. It’s both an incredible piece of adventure writing and a moving depiction of two characters learning to love one another across boundaries of physicality, gender, culture, and temperament, and there are few moments in literature I love more than its conclusion, which ends with the following heavily punctuated sentence:
All those miles and days had been across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.
I semi-jokingly wrote last month about being “raised” by minimalists, which meant, among other things, that most of my teachers advocated for very restrained punctuation in “literary” writing. I was told without real explanation that I was allotted one exclamation point for my career (a common enough teaching that I can’t figure out its origin!); I was taught not to use the semicolon, which Kurt Vonnegut once dismissed as only serving to “show you’ve been to college”; I idolized writers like McCarthy, who eschewed the serial comma in favor of strings of conjunctions and in some books even removed the apostrophes from contractions, leaving behind words like cant and aint. (“I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it,” he said once, although Oprah later got him to grudgingly admit he’d once used a single colon.) My guess is that, like me, you’ve let a whole host of these punctuation taboos creep into your practice, including some you no longer think about: I mean, when was the last time you even considered typing an interrobang?!
That’s my first one in public! Ever!
More and more, I don’t really want to take any tools off the table, not for myself and certainly not for my students. Writing is full of choices, and the choices we make about things like punctuation have consequences, but none of our choices are inherently right or wrong: you just have to be willing to work through the effects your choices create.
Returning to that Le Guin sentence above, I can see it’s got a fair bit of punctuation, including a number of commas, but the standout feature is its series of colons, which for me creates a kind of near-equivalency, or else a series of ratios between three distinct descriptions of the crossing of the Ice, so that the sentence’s logic offers three units that progress, for me, sum up the crossing of the Gobrin glacier. According to Genly, it was:
a houseless, speechless desolation OR MORE CONCRETELY rock, ice, sky, and silence OR MORE EMOTIONALLY nothing, for eighty-one days, except each other.
If I’d written that sentence myself, at the height of my minimalist-trained McCarthy worship, I might have left out Le Guin’s two colons, losing much of the logic even as I kept the images:
All those miles and days had been across a houseless and speechless desolation of rock and ice, sky and silence. Nothing else for eighty-one days except one another.
My version is clearly inferior, to both my ear and my intellect, as I’ve removed a lot of Le Guin’s poetry, as well as her suggestion of a thought turning and progressing that the colons give the original. In fact, my training in punctuation, if adhered to too closely, would have prevented me from even thinking the thoughts she so precisely renders onto the page, much less writing them so well.
Every time I read that Le Guin sentence and its double colons, I’m also reminded me of this lovely triple-semicolon sentence (technically a fragment) from Toni Morrison’s Sula, describing a character falling deeply asleep:
A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pit of plums, steadier than the condor's wings; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.
The two sentences work differently, but they both use punctuation outside the limits of what I was taught to accomplish surprising ends. Yes, Morrison’s sentence contains a list with commas inside at least once of the items, necessitating the semicolons, but that’s not what’s exciting about it. Like Le Guin’s colons, Morrison uses semicolons to create a progression of thought and feeling, in this case dropping from level to level as the character falls into sleep, the punctuation working in concert with the intensifiers of “deeper, deeper, more” to invite us down through the felt layers of his slumber.
I’m enamored with these examples because of their contrast to what I was taught as “correct”: but if Le Guin and Morrison can punctuate in this way, why can’t I? Why can’t you?
The more I reread Le Guin, the more examples I find of her precisely punctuating a thought or action. For instance, in another part of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai relays a remembered bit of wisdom from his training to be an envoy to Gethen:
As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Here the semicolon balances a koan-like if-then operation that Genly can use to interpret his situation and plan his next steps, words of ponderable wisdom and, in the right situation, clear instruction. There’s a Buddhist influence and practice running throughout Le Guin’s work—years after The Left Hand of Darkness, she’d complete her own translation of the Tao Te Ching—and the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang that influences The Left Hand of Darkness is explicitly invoked by Genly in conversation with Estraven during the Grobin Ice crossing: to me, a sentence like the one above has a related dualist pattern, in which the first idea is a near syntactic mirror of the second. Seen this way, this sentence becomes a place where, through precise punctuation and sentence structure, the book’s balance and wholeness are made to appear at the level of its grammar.
What else can we learn from Le Guin’s punctuation? Generally, she prefers the serial comma to the conjunction, but it’s not a hard and fast choice. Consider this sentence from The Farthest Shore, where Arren looks into the face of a dragon for the first time:
It was carven of iron, shaped from rock—but the eyes, the eyes he dared not look into, the eyes like oil coiling on water, like yellow smoke behind glass, the opaque, profound, yellow eyes watched Arren.
The dragon’s eyes are described in a series, giving us three ways of seeing them, two figurative and one physical: “eyes like oil coiling on water,” “[eyes] like yellow smoke behind glass,” and “the opaque, profound, yellow eyes,” a three-adjective series within the greater three-clause series. (The three-adjective series is one of her favorite moves.) Many aspects of Le Guin’s worlds are similarly layered, nested, made multitudinous by her grammar: a dragon’s eyes are not this or that, but this and that and that also.
But that doesn’t mean she can’t make other syntactical choices, when the moment demands it. In her early novel Rocannon’s World, Le Guin uses a different tactic to describe the Ekumen that would later sent Genly Ai to Gethen:
A hundred worlds had been trained and armed, a thousand more were being schooled in the uses of steel and wheel and tractor and reactor.
Like so many Le Guin sentences, this one from Rocannon’s World contains yet another progression, this time from “a hundred worlds” in the first clause to the “thousand more” in the second, expanding the subject’s scope while at the same time sentence complexity increases. And again a number of ways one could punctuate the sentence’s final series of items, including:
the uses of steel and wheel, tractor and reactor
or
the uses of steel, wheel, tractor, and reactor
But Le Guin’s version is probably the best, both for acoustics and for making an equivalency of the four technologies: steel and wheel are equal units here with tractor and reactor, instead of an order of importance or a linear advancement. Gary Lutz calls this quality of a sentence’s being unable to be improved by further changes “lexical inevitability”: it’s a hallmark of a fully realized work when every change you make to the writer’s prose worsens it. More often than not, that’s what I discover when reading Le Guin’s best prose closely: whatever choice she’s made is hard to improve upon, no matter how I might try.
Before (finally!) releasing you to try this month’s actual exercise, indulge me by reading a passage from Le Guin’s The Other Wind, which I read for the first time shortly after she passed away. This paragraph is much more simply and straightforwardly punctuated than some of the others above, but its power still comes from the same kinds of choice: this time, it’s Le Guin’s restraint that makes the difference. (Knowing she could do more, she does less; it’s not about finding the one right way, but about considering all the options every time.) Here she works almost entirely with simple sentences and sentence fragments, each building on the last until she reaches the exquisitely constructed last sentence, where the first clause’s near-chiasmus leads to a precise progression of life to love to breath:
I think... that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
Perfection.
This month, your task is to use punctuation as differently as possible from your default, aiming to write prose that creates a new-to-you effect in its acoustics or its logic. How should you do this? Here are two possible ways you might begin:
You might first make a list of all the “rules” about punctuation you’ve learned during your time as a writer, especially any taboos or prohibitions. Then set out to write a short scene or passage in which you break every single one as dramatically as possible. Rebel! Go crazy! What do you have to lose?!
Compression is your friend here: the effect will be more dramatic in a smaller space. Try 250 or 500 words?
Or you might choose one of the following punctuation banks, each of which is designed to force you to punctuate in what will probably be atypical ways. Using your chosen punctuation bank, you will then write a passage following these three additional rules:
Your piece must be exactly 250 words. No more, no less.
Other than the exceptions in rule three, it must use only the punctuation in the following punctuation bank and it must use every punctuation mark in the bank. You can use the punctuation marks in any order you’d like.
There are no apostrophes in the punctuation bank but you can use them for possessives and contractions only, as necessary. There are no quotation marks either, and you may likewise use as many as you need, but only for dialogue.
Your punctuation banks, should you choose to use one:
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
, , , : : : : ; — — — ( ) .
( ) ( ) [ ] — — , , , , , , ; . . ? ?
. . . ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
[ [ [ [ [ [ ] ] ] ] ] ] .
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , , , , , , , , , , , ,
!? !? !? !? !? !? , , , .
: : : : : : : : : ! ? ; .
? ? ? ? ? [ ( ( ( ( { } ) ) ) ) ] ! ! !
Of course, you might also make your own punctuation bank. (One complicated but fun way to do so might be to write down all the punctuation from a favorite page of someone else’s prose, then write your passage of the same length, using only the punctuation they did.)
The goal here is first and foremost to shed some of the punctuation prohibitions you might be burdened with, as well as to see new possibilities you’d otherwise. But in the same way that Le Guin uses punctuation to show the movement of her mind or her characters’ minds, changing the way you punctuate might also change the way you think or feel or imagine, leading you to new places in your prose. I’m excited to see where you end up.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in Summer 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.