Building Great Sentences (13 page)

Of course, the simile doesn't have to come at the end of the sentence.

Here's the way Thomas Pynchon incorporates similes into one of his characteristically cumulative sentences in his novel
Against the Day
:

They loomed out there in black mystery above the bright interiors and the faro players and insatiably desirable girls, and sometimes shadowy figures could be seen kneeling, reaching out to touch one of these slag piles, reverently as if, like some counter-Christian Eucharist, it represented the body of an otherworldly beloved.

This sentence is noteworthy in a number of different ways. First of all, I hope you hear its insistent cumulative rhythms. Second, I'm pretty sure you can't miss its essential ambiguity. Out of context, this sentence does not make clear what's going on, but suggests a kind of mysterious, numinous quality to the semblance of Pynchon's novel. Each time Pynchon uses
as if
, it
suggests the possibility that something is going on other than what seems to be the case, that a report of what characters can see or seem to understand may not be enough to capture the indeterminacy of Pynchon's world. And finally, while the similes he uses may not be dramatic showstoppers (hey, a metaphor!), they are arguably not comparisons any of us would have thought of, thus reinforcing the uniqueness of Thomas Pynchon's novelistic vision. Pynchon's
Against the Day
teems with similes such as these, just as it teems with elaborately extended cumulative sentences. Note how his characteristic similes fit so well into his characteristically cumulative sentences.

And of course, Pynchon is far from alone in employing similes in this fashion and to this effect. For instance, we can see something similar going on in Joyce Carol Oates's frequently anthologized creepy short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” There, Oates introduces the very threatening Arnold Friend, who may be a serial killer, may be the devil, or may be just “an old fiend,” as rearranging the letters of his name suggests. And she creates the mood of her story in part by using simile-clinched sentences such as these:

They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed [up] out of the night to give them what haven and what blessing they yearned for.

She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask.

Once again, I want to call attention to the way in which these similes lend themselves to cumulative rhythm, each giving the sentence another distinctive step, even when that step is not emphasized by punctuation. So far, most of the examples of similes I've offered have introduced their explicit comparisons with the words
as if
, even though we know that similes are frequently, if not most frequently, identified by the use of
like
to indicate a comparison. He spoke like a robot. She looked like a troublemaker. They huddled together like sheep. Nor have I given many examples in which the comparison is introduced by
as though
, which grammatical expert after grammatical expert assures us—incorrectly, I believe—means exactly the same thing as
as if
. I've focused on “as if” similes because they most powerfully lend themselves to cumulative rhythm.

Similes introduced by
like
need to be processed a bit before they fit as well into cumulative sentences. “He spoke like a robot” shows no sign of cumulative syntax, but with the addition of just a bit more information, always a good thing in my view, the simile can become a cumulative step: “He spoke slowly, mechanically, without inflection, like a robot.” We even start to plug into the strength of cumulative syntax in a much shorter version of the sentence: “He spoke slowly, like a robot.” Similes, while not always technically cumulative modifying phrases, can work exactly like them. If the sentence clearly takes a step, indicated either by punctuation, usually a comma or a dash, or by the distinctive rhythm of cumulative progression, then I'm happy to call the simile a cumulative step, and I'm happier still when I come across these steps in the writing of my students.

Adding Speculation in Final Cumulative Phrases

Now, prompts of speculation—the power of
possibly
and
perhaps
. The most effective prose establishes a relationship between writer and reader. That's a relationship between two people, two distinct personalities. If our writing doesn't offer some glimpses of ourselves as personalities, it's hard to say that our work has a style, much less that its style will appeal to readers. The writer thinks about, reflects upon, forms opinions about, and frequently comments on what he or she is writing about.

Our writing is purpose driven, and we nearly always have multiple purposes when we write. We write to accomplish a wide variety of goals, and very, very rarely is our primary goal
only
to record or to report. We record and report in order to accomplish larger purposes, and those larger purposes shape the way in which we approach the task of recording and reporting, choosing what to include, choosing what to exclude, organizing our presentation of information to best suit our purposes. One of the important purposes that we should always have in mind when we write is, as Joan Didion so powerfully puts it in her celebrated essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Didion is specifically meditating on keeping a notebook or a journal and not on writing in general, but I think her reminder serves all writers, applying to greater or lesser degree to almost everything we write. She is definitely not offering a brief for solipsism, even in notebook writing, or even arguing that writers should primarily be concerned with remembering and conveying their personality in everything they write. She is, I believe, reminding herself and us that writing is one of the most distinctly human activities, and that, like all human knowledge, it inherently, inevitably, and gloriously involves acts of interpretation.

We should be concerned not just with the accuracy and clarity of what we write, but with making our writing a reflection of who we are, how we think, what we value. The style of our writing is determined by a huge number of variables, but one aspect of that style should always be that our writing present us as individual consciousnesses, as personalities who
process
the information we pass on in our writing, rather than as automatons who only record, report, or summarize information, as if it were being spewed out by a machine, or even worse, by a committee.

Sure, there are some writing situations where we want to submerge our individuality in the collective prose of a committee, and there are some situations where we might want our writing to pretend to the accuracy and objectivity of a mechanical recording device, although I'm hard-pressed to think of situations where we would want that to be the case. But here, I'm referring to writing as a discovery process in which writers find out things about themselves, even as they write for specific audiences with specific purposes in mind. My understanding of effective writing always includes the
processing
of information by the writer's mind, a requirement that distinguishes writing from copying, from repeating, from mere recording and reporting.

We signal that we're processing information in our writing in a number of ways, several of which we've already been exploring. Using cumulative syntax to include similes and metaphors in our writing or to introduce our speculation about what we have just stated provides another perspective on our way of thinking about our subject and offers a window onto the way our own thinking works, a glimpse of our intellectual personality, our individuality, our style.

Similes That Both Compare and Speculate

Now I want to suggest another way in which cumulative syntax can prompt us to reveal more about the characteristic ways in which we process information. One step beyond making the comparisons, as similes do, between two things or situations that are different is for us to
use similes
as
speculation
about that which is not known. Some similes are already well on their way beyond comparison and into speculation, as we can see in this passage from John Updike's well-known short story “A&P,” where the protagonist, Sammy, is describing a striking teenage girl in a bathing suit who, along with two friends, has just entered the grocery store where he's a checker:

She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white-prima-donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet [that] much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.

Both of the “as if” comparisons Updike offers in this last sentence reveal Sammy's speculation as he tries to account for the girl's noteworthy way of walking. Both of these similes are actually offered more tentatively than authoritatively, presented as possible comparisons, possible explanations. Two sentences from Joyce Carol Oates's “Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going?” suggest the degrees of difference between a simile that primarily advances a comparison and one that primarily advances a speculation:

He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song.

That seems firmly grounded in an easily visualized comparison, but consider this sentence:

She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know.

That is a simile of a quite different sort, offering much more speculation than actual comparison. We signal such speculation in lots of different ways, but I'll focus on just three of these signals: the words
because
,
possibly
, and
perhaps
. I've chosen these words because they also lend themselves to the step logic and downshifting rhythms of the cumulative syntax, which additionally means they lend themselves to becoming generative challenges or heuristic prompts in the way the cumulative syntax does so distinctively and so well.

Consider these sentences:

The dog froze in place, ears up to detect the slightest sound, eyes riveted on the clump of brush, possibly sensing danger.

Cumulative syntax prompts us to add information to our sentences, reminding us that there's always more to say, more detail or explanation that will make our writing more clear, possibly serving as a silent voice, a kind of personal writing trainer, urging us to go for that extra level of meaning, to push ourselves to anticipate a reader's possible questions about what we've just written, always thinking about the benefits of having our sentences take that extra step.

He suddenly ran off the stage, possibly because he had forgotten his lines, possibly because he had just noticed the audience for the first time, perhaps even because he was in some physical distress.

Each of these sentences goes beyond stating what is known to suggest motivations or causes that remain speculative. Each sentence attempts to explain the image, idea, or situation it references, revealing that the writer wants to be helpful, wants to account for things as well as possible, wants to further engage the reader in the effort to understand as fully as possible the information the sentence provides. Each sentence gives us a glimpse of the way the writer thinks about the world in general, and about the subject of his or her writing in particular.

Speculation Informs and Enriches!

My pitch is that adding speculation concerning the motives behind, the causes of, the interpretations of, or the consequences of the events or actions we write about helps forge the connection between reader and writer as two minds at work. Speculations introduced by words such as
possibly
or
perhaps
will not be appropriate in many writing situations, but knowing how well the cumulative syntax lends itself to speculative phrases introduced by these words may prompt us to consider whether or not to use them. After all, just knowing how easily we can add speculation to our writing may encourage us to put a bit more of the way we think into our writing, possibly forging a stronger relationship with a reader who appreciates our willingness to go beyond the “Just the facts, ma'am” literalness of Sgt. Joe Friday in
Dragnet
, signaling our readers that it is as important to wonder
why
and
how
things happen as it is to know
what
happens.

Here, of course, I'm thinking of writing situations where it is as important to present our judgment, our ability to interpret, our commitment to understanding as it is to present unprocessed information. In this advocacy for making cumulative-step speculation an option in our writing, I'm applying to writing the advice that Margaret Atwood gives us in her didactic short story “Happy Endings.” In that minimalist meditation on possible plots involving various relationships among briefly sketched lovers, Atwood urges readers to focus less on plots, which she describes as “just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what,” and instead: “Now try How and Why.” That's great advice for writers as well, and in the cases when the how and why of a situation have not been and possibly cannot be determined, it frequently benefits the writer to move beyond the known to speculate about the likely or even just the possible.

Consider this sentence:

The fire spread quickly, its flames fanned by the stiff breeze, consuming the small apartment in minutes, possibly the result of a candle left burning too close to blowing curtains.

Some cumulative sentences place a second-level modifying phrase just after the first clause in a compound sentence and just before the second clause, as in this sentence from E. B. White:

They dammed the falls, shutting out the tide, and dug a pit so deep you could look down and see China.