The Stunning Sentences Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Stunning Sentences Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from HelenSword.com and this is SwordSwings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're driving a car or riding a train or out for a walk or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new.

In today's episode, we're talking about stunning sentences, what they are, how they work, and how to write them yourself. My guest, Nina Schuyler, is the author of a book aptly titled How to Write Stunning Sentences, and she's the author of the brilliant Substack newsletter, Stunning Sentences. In this WriteSpace special event conversation from October 2024, Nina and I discuss the pleasures of grammar, syntax, and style, and how we can make our own stunning sentences work for ourselves and our readers.

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Nina: Writers, you know, parse out what's going on in these stunning sentences, and I show them the architecture, at least. And then they can try the architecture and see what comes of it. And how I ended up on Substack, I finished a 10-week course—I teach now for Stanford Continuing Studies—And we finished 10 weeks, it's called ‘Cultivate Your Prose’. And we were having so much fun, I thought, ‘well, maybe other people want to do this?’ It was really on a whim. I started Substack like, you know, ‘is anyone else interested in this? Because I love it!’ So that was the beginning.

Helen: I love this. Because the way you've done it is so kind of manageable, both presumably for you, but for your readers as well. It's what…Once a week? It's one sentence, one stunning sentence by an author. And I presume you have a large collection of these as well as the new ones you're coming across all the time. And then what I really love—it's one thing to find a stunning sentence. I took part last month in Gillian Hess's Commonplace Book Challenge where every day for a month people were writing quotes or typing them or whatever, showing how they keep quotes from other people and then putting them out there, some prose, some poetry, whatever else. That's a well-known kind of genre, the commonplace book. But you just kind of get the quote and then maybe somebody says, well, it's meaningful to them. What you do with the sentences is you parse them with this very precise grammatical and syntactical language that helps us understand how they're working. I kind of do that with academic writing, but I just felt like this sort of clunky toddler amateur compared to what you do because you know the lingo, but you're also really, really good at writing! Doling it out to us in bite-sized pieces so that we can understand it and follow it.

So I'd be interested to hear sort of at what point in your love of sentences, in your education, did you learn that part of it? Because so many people are really grammar-phobic, aren't they? Yeah.

Nina: Yeah. So, even at the university level in the MFA program, I spent the first three hours of that course going over basic grammar because I found that it had been forgotten. You learned it so long ago. What is a noun? And some of it is…I kind of stumbled on the recent discovery such as the correlative conjunction— neither, nor, either, or, not. not this, but that, or not only, but—so I thought back then, and I didn't get that training at the MFA level either. I had some grammar. I remember diagramming sentences in middle school, what we used to call junior high. I remember that diagramming. And I actually, full confession, I raised my hand during class. “What's the point of learning all this?” And the teacher took me out in the hallway—”I can't believe you're challenging my authority.” So I was a rebel against all of this long ago, but I set out to learn it.

I also have a law degree. So I think it's part of this analysis I've learned in three years of law school of like, “well, what are the elements that are happening? What are the principles? Can I give it a name? So a noun phrase, what is it doing?” So learning the language of it… and it's taken a while, it's taken years, and I always am adding a new one. I think it gives you a sense of mastery and permission. Like, “I didn't know you could use the technique of anaphora.” Anaphora is, you know, repeating the same word at the beginning of a phrase, clause, or sentence: like he understood, like he wanted to understand, like would never understand, like, like, like. You know, in regular English classes, we had to bring a thesaurus, don't repeat the same word! You know, that was beaten into me. And, suddenly, I'm learning as I read literature and find works—Wait, they're repeating! They're violating the rules!

But actually, probably in the English class, you didn't learn all the rules. You learned a piece of the rules. But to create more on the page, there's a lot you can do. And so I encounter a new sentence and say, “well, I want to learn how this is functioning at the name level.” But really, what's really important to me is the rhetorical level. So what's the effect of this? Why do it? In the law, we learn the black letter law. So those are like the principles of the law. This is it. For negligence, you have to have these elements. No, for this, it's like grammar. Usually you need a subject and verb and maybe a direct object. What I want to understand, I think what's important for writers is what's the effect. So what's the meaning that's created from these techniques? And that's what's most interesting to me. And so in that analysis, it's not just I'm going to label everything. It's like: if you do this, you're going to get heightened emotion. If you repeat this word, you're drawing attention to the word, she used the word “salad” so now it's on my mind. You're gonna draw attention to “salad” if you repeat it three times—it creates a rhythm.

Yes, it creates that, but you're drawing a lot of attention to it. And that's the meaning you're generating. So it isn't enough for me as a writer to just understand the labels. I go one more step. And that was really important, especially as a creative writer, that not only the content of the sentence creates meaning, but the syntax creates meaning. The diction creates meaning. The rhythm and sound create another whole meaning.

Helen: And if you move beyond the sentence level in your Substack, then you start to get all the paratextual elements that create meaning as well. The paragraph breaks, the way the words are set on the page, and of course, all the things that poets do to break up lines and things like that. So just...I love the way that kind of distinction between, I guess, techniques and rules, you could say. Most of what you're talking about is not the rules of grammar, it's the techniques of grammar and syntax. But the labels are helpful because then you can talk about them and you can say, oh, here's what I'm doing.

It's the magic behind the mirror. And I see so little of that. I see so little of it, particularly in the realm of academic writing where everybody defaults to content and methodology, and is the research any good? (I say everybody). But that's where most PhD training happens at that level.

And then a lot of professional writing, you mentioned law, and it would be the same in business or whatever else. It's all about... clear communication often or supposedly and all of the ways that these techniques that you talk about they're also about communication but not necessarily about the most stripped-down communication they're actually about a more complex form like repetition and things like that. Do your students ever rebel against all the names and the labels and the things? I mean I'm sure they're happy to learn the techniques but…

Nina: You know, I provide lists. So like in the 15-week course, I have a whole glossary. So they have a reference point. And in my books, I have a glossary and have a reference point. You know, I always preface it, you know, you don't have to learn the names. But here I'm giving you permission.

And if you learn the names, Aphra, Epistrophe, all the Latin things, Names, it also gives you permission. Like this is an actual technique to create this heightened emotion. And so I have permission to use it. So it's that. And I'm working against the voice of the English teacher often that never even touched on this or said it was wrong. We're overloaded with sentences like that, in the newspaper, magazine, texts, or whatever. It's just information. So I come back to a couple of things like, why not go give more? So Gertrude Stein said, “why should a sequence of words be anything but pleasure?” And then you, well, what's pleasure? Pleasure is something that the body experiences. So what's happening when you start thinking about sound and rhythm, for example, is that you start writing orally. You're hearing it. And why does that matter? That matters because you're writing to the reader's body to feel it.

So if something is clunky, you were saying, you know, academic writing can often be clunky. The body is reacting to it, like this is not that pleasurable to read. I have to slog through this thing to understand what the point is or whatever. But there's a completely different way to be writing, which is for the body to experience pleasure and rhythm and sound and some kind of musicality. Now I'll go one more point here—Once the body starts feeling the sound and rhythm, which is what we call language or words, it's an undeniable reality. If the body's feeling it, you don't deny it. You say, “oh, that was really pleasurable to read. I really felt that river.” You know, let's say the scientist is documenting the river, what's happening in the river. But the way the sentence was written, it feels like a river. It's a longer sentence and it's flowing and it's moving and it's moving down the page with all the detail, let's say, of the river. Like “That was really pleasurable to read” versus I went to River A, period. There were ducks, period. or, you know, whatever it is that the scientist is going to observe. But I could take that sentence and create something that also speaks to the body.

Helen: I love that. And as having just published a book last year called Writing with Pleasure, this is obviously something that I've thought about a lot, particularly in that context then of what does pleasure mean for academic writers, professional writers who are writing often in circumstances where they've been, if not outright told, at least acculturated to believe that pleasure has no place here. And that, in fact, if you're experiencing pleasure in the writing or the reading, you're not being seriously academic or scientific. We all know that's complete nonsense, but it's quite embedded in a lot of people's thinking. And so giving people even with certain kinds of writing permission to feel that bodily pleasure in sentences is almost sometimes a starting place that you need or you need to let the pleasure be experienced and then give people the ability, the courage, and also the… I try to give people a kind of research base to show why that's actually okay and good.

But totally, totally agree with what you say. I often in the WriteSPACE studio where people will come and show a piece of writing, I'll always ask people to read it out loud, their paragraph that they've brought. And usually people, by the time they're gasping halfway through a really, really long academic sentence, they know themselves exactly what's wrong with it at a really visceral, physical level. Have you ever taught in contexts that we're not specifically creative writers?

Nina: i have been very fortunate to be around people that want to play with language, that, you know, there's it's a self-selected crowd right? If you're if you're in an mfa program, you love words, you love writing, you love to create in this format, in this medium. So that's the only little bit of an offshoot. I taught for a while at the art academy, so I was working with painters, And the theory there was that every painting tells a story. But these painters are not necessarily word people.

And so to move them into words and help them put what possibly might be a story behind the painting together was not so easy as working with MFA students. But I think, you know, most academics also just love reading, too.

Helen: And language. I think that, you know, it would be fascinating to have a group of legal scholars or lawyers, but people working in the legal profession, given that you have that training as well, because there's so much... that happens in the language, as you say. And while pleasure is an important part of what you're doing… it's not the only part of it, It's also about, as you said, mastery. It's about having techniques that you can use to express things in different ways. And I've watched enough courtroom television at least, or movies or whatever [laughs], to know that these techniques absolutely are used by lawyers and prosecutors and those sorts of attorneys. And of course, it all comes from Latin rhetoric, a lot of these tropes and things. That's where people used to learn it, didn't they? There used to actually be courses called Rhetoric, and you did learn all those terms and all of the phrases for them.

Nina: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Helen: And politicians learn them, you know, right?

Nina: Yeah. Well, if you read speeches, there's a lot of anaphora that is like, like I said, the same word at the beginning of a phrase, clause or sentence, you know, “I have a dream. I have a dream.” You know, you hear it because there's an anchor, you know, if you keep repeating, there's an anchor, but there's also heightened emotion. It's building to something. So that's, you know, anaphora is a Latin term, but it's a technique for heightened emotion. A couple of things come to mind that Virginia Woolf said, and she's our master of rhythm, “Style is a very simple thing. It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.”

So now when I write, as I'm writing, I am talking, I'm saying the sentence out loud. I don't wait till i'm done. I'm writing it's like i'm feeling the sentence because i'm feeling the rhythm as i'm writing it so if it's you said often you have your students read it out loud human the human breath in English can hold 10 syllables before it needs a new breath so that's kind of a guide like okay if you want a breathless sentence let's say You know, you're running fast or you're trying to escape something or you want a more than 10 syllable sentence to create a breathless quality. Now, most people know short sentences create anxiety, but they don't know why. If it's less than 10 syllables, it cuts the breath off. So you're left with a shallow breath or gasping. So it's like, he ran, he ran fast. Then I'm cutting it and cutting it off, cutting him up, cutting off the breath, which makes you kind of, you know, have to take another one and you start doing shallow breathing. But I'm mimicking. I'm now thinking of the body, like what kind of breath does this sentence want?

And then I'm thinking of sound. We have plosives, which say they explode from the mouth. That's the P's and D's and T's and K and C when it's a cut sound. So if I want a violent or more aggressive sentence, you know, He said, shut up. So I've got shut, you know, the T there, that's a plosive and up with the P. Versus hush, please be quiet. That's a softer sentence.

So who is saying it? And how do they say it? Do I want to capture that aggressiveness in the plosive sound or is it someone speaking softer?

Helen: I'm not even trying to keep up with the chat, but I just saw a question in there that is so interesting. I've got to ask it. This is Laurel asking ‘Why stunning sentences rather than sensual sentences? or evocative sentences? To stun is an intriguing choice.’ Can you say more?

Nina: I think often, often as I was busy collecting these sentences as a 12 year old and even now I stop and i think I love it. I want to write it down. I want this in my notebook to keep it. So there is a moment of being stunned or awe. You know, when you're walking down the street and you see something, I'm trying to practice awe more, staying open. You're taken out of yourself. So you evacuate for a moment and you're, you know, dissolve the self and become filled with awe over what you've just encountered. But I love that. I could be sensual. I like sensual sentences.

But there is a whole other area of this that not just speaking of the body, but I can create a delay in my subject with a left branching sentence. Let's say all the modification is coming first and create suspense. And we see this a lot e.g. When he was young, and he ran around the block in his bare feet with this dog with him shouting at the sun, he ran right into the neighbor.
right? So I've made you wait, right? So I've created a whole lot of suspense, a micro suspense at the sentence level to make you wait. So now you're glued to the page. What's he going to encounter? What's happening?

Helen: It's such a great example because in academic writing, people like me and some others, my colleague Inga Muburn, who's written a lot about academic writing, she's constantly trying to make academics aware of left-branching sentences so they do fewer of them. Because academics tend to do them as a way of kind of not getting to the point or putting all this extra stuff there unconsciously. They don't know that they're doing it, but because academics are trained to do so much hedging and are just sort of unconsciously trained to write really, really long sentences. And so they're not aware that they are actually stunning their readers in a different kind of way. [Laughs] Like, by just burying them under words before they get to the main point. So I think that's a wonderful example of how a technique in one context used by a fiction writer really thoughtfully and well. You know, we don't want to have a rule saying ‘no left branching sentences!’ because you've just shown us the effect that it can have. And yet in another context, it can be something people are doing unconsciously to very unfortunate effect.

Nina: Yeah. I mean, one whole revision for me is, you know, did I use a whole paragraph full of left branching sentences? Sentence variety, which we're going to talk about in the second hour, but one whole revision would be, do I have sentence variety?

And let's say you did use a left-branching sentence, a long one; then, for sentence variety's sake, to create a different rhythm, I'd use a short sentence. You know, He ran into the neighbor, period. He stopped, alarmed, period. Just a short one to break it up. Now that's a different rhythm for you.

Helen: Yeah, and academics do that, again, not necessarily consciously, but some of the ones who are the best stylists do this. I've got an example in my book on stylish academic writing by Jillian Beer, who's a literary historian. She has these short sentences, one after another. I wouldn't call them breathless, they're not super short, I wouldn't say they're creating anxiety. They're just creating this sort of, you're staying with her very clearly. And then she has this one really, really long sentence and we have the stamina for it. because it's not the fifth really long sentence in the paragraph, it's the first one.

And then that juxtaposition of the short and the long helps, as you say, create interest, takes us someplace and creates emotion. We need to get people, maybe some of the people from my community who are here will join yours and start sending you studying academic sentences. If they can find any!

Nina: I have some scientists on my Substack, and they send me amazing sentences. It's usually from biology and the description of the natural world. Yeah. Some stunning work done by scientists that are describing, you know, the landscape that they're researching or whatever. And then the language is just amazing.

I just found a new writer. I'll probably do something with him. It's called The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley. I read a little bit online, and I ordered his book—I was thinking of this conversation—but just sometimes I'll get a nonfiction writer who says to me, “Why do I have to bother with this?” It's like, you know, “I'm just providing information about what I studied or whatever, or what I discovered.”

Helen: A lot of people want to. I mean, that's sort of in my world. It's filled with people who haven't learned how to write in a more engaging style but also in a style that they feel is empowering you know, they often feel disempowered by all the prescriptiveness by all the kind of disciplining that happens and feeling empowered to write in a way that's more i don't know the first word that jumped into my head was a motive but that's not really what i mean that is more human, I think I'll say. It's like a lot of humanness has been squeezed out of certain writers and all the things you're talking about are enabling the best of what humans can do. So great science writers definitely learn, do that. How they learn to do that is another question.

Nina: I think part of it is ignoring the admonishment to stay, keep the ‘I’ out of the research.

Helen: Absolutely.

Nina: That's impossible. That's impossible. You know, you are part of the research. I mean, “studies have shown that….” So what's the…what are you seeing? How are you seeing it?

Helen: Yeah, that's so fascinating. I did some research around that before and after my book on stylish academic writing. One of the things I found was that scientists in most fields, there are a few exceptions, but in most fields, scientists are allowed and, indeed, told to use the first person. Now, it may not be really personal—Like if you're one of a team of 20 people doing medical research and you say ‘we’, it's not a personal kind of first person. But they're not saying, you know, ‘the research has been performed’ —that sort of passive voice. And the people I had the hardest time convincing that you can bring an ‘I’ into academic writing are the social scientists who are trying to sound like scientists, but the scientists moved on from that about 50 years ago. The rule of convention! And I'm thinking that that's, you know, the real difference maybe with creative writers — you almost have the imperative not to be conventional, or you're certainly allowed not to be conventional. And so you can play with these techniques and really want to be trying to do something new with them and not just imitate them.

Nina: Yeah, I mean, I think the creative writer feels the pressure to create something original. And my advice is always to play. It's not, you know, that's like the, we're just playing around here. You know, when I open up one of our discussions, I like to take the pressure off of my writing, just play and see what I get.

Helen: And to come back to something you were talking about earlier about the body and the pleasures of the body, that we experience pleasure through the body. When I was researching my book on writing with pleasure, I was asking academics, where do you find pleasure in writing? And yes, there was a lot of physical, “I was sitting in a meadow with my notebook”, or “I was writing beautiful sentences, and that gave me pleasure.” A little less of that second one because, again, that's not how academics are particularly trained or acculturated. But there were also people for whom the pleasure of writing was something much more abstract, or something much more intellectual, or what they wrote about was the pleasure of the ideas. You know, the pleasure of grappling, of doing the research, those sorts of things. And so I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between the body and the intellect. Between… if we want to really simplify it, the concrete and the abstract.

And I know you wrote quite recently about using both concrete— That's one of those things that just fascinates me in academic language, how often, particularly with scientists, you see that the more abstract the subject matter, sometimes the more concrete you need to get in your language to help people understand it.

And that's a really hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. They think if they're writing about something abstract, the language must be abstract. And, of course, you just completely lose your readers that way. But I'm not sure that I've come to a question here, but I'm just wondering how you see the corporeal pleasure, this physical pleasure of beautiful, stunning sentences as you're talking about —using rhythm, using repetition, using alliteration, whatever it may be, it brings this kind of physical satisfaction but also the intellectual pleasure that comes with writing these kinds of sentences. And you must also get real intellectual pleasure out of parsing them despite the sentence diagramming incident.

Nina: Yeah, I do. I feel like I'm lifting the veil in a way, crawling into the mind of the writer and really understanding it. So the person that's writing is excited about the idea, you said, or the pleasure of the research. It feels like it's a missed opportunity.

If you really think about what writing is, it's about communicating with others. It's to reach out and say, ‘Come look at what I discovered’, or ‘please read my story’. And if you're not including the body and the pleasure of the words and the sound, you might not reach that writer or reader. You might not… because it's too boring. It's just thudding sounds. So I think remembering that there's another whole, like I said, way to create meaning with this, the actual making of the sentence on all the techniques that we've referenced to, you can say, ‘Come, let me show you!’ and capture that excitement at the sentence level, not just conveying information.

Helen: And they're working together. And, of course, Virginia Woolf is such a great example. She has this beautiful sentence from one of her letters that I quote in Writing with Pleasure about going to Oxford or Cambridge and the people there are like jellyfish. They don't really have any substance. They're all just sort of intellect drifting around. Or it's like Sir Kenneth Robertson in his famous TED talk saying, academics, they'd rather not have bodies, but they only have bodies to carry their heads around to meetings.

Nina: Yeah. I mean, I remember in my MFA program, there was a whole class on writing from the body. So I think after Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Krust and Freud, there was a movement into the interior. And it wasn't so strong in the 19th century, but in the 20th century, in the modern world and the postmodern, wherever we are now, the interior became the place where what literature could capture so well and what writing could capture so well is the interior, the drama of the mind. And before, it wasn't there. So it's easy to forget about the body if you're consumed with the interior development and shape and movement of the mind at all times. So there might have to be more. And again, that whole class I took ‘Writing from the Body’, it's like a conscious thing. envelopment, a conscious reminder that there is this whole animalistic part of you picking up senses that needs to be appealed to as well.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved someplace new and that you'll feel inspired to devote yourself in Nina's enticing description to “admiring, mooning over loving, and learning to write stunning sentences.” And if you'd like to have a go at writing some stunning sentences of your own, you'll find the full two-hour video of my special event conversation and workshop with Nina Schuyler, including a hands-on sentencing practice session facilitated by Nina in the video section of the Write Space Library.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again soon.