Tag Archives: vocabulary

Building a Sentence, Step by Step

Photo by Dmitry Shamis on Unsplash

You know what excites me? Crafting sentences that overflow with content and brim with alluring vocabulary. When I read Stanley Fish’s book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, I became giddy with pleasure, thinking about all the future memorable sentences I could write. In one chapter, Fish demonstrates how to expand a four-word basic sentence into one that reveals character, moves the plot, and illustrates how the setting affects a story. Let me show you what he suggests with my own example.

My basic four-word sentence is: her brother went to the meeting.

Now, if I want to build the character of the brother, I must say something about him. Here’s my first addition: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor. But I could say even more. Here goes: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness. Now, the reader knows that this guy is unpleasant and too arrogant to take responsibility for his short-comings.

Next, let me tackle how he went to the meeting. I replace the verb “went” with a more exact one and add some related information: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather, wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs. Not only does this addition explain how he got to the meeting, but under what conditions. It also infers that he was determined to go since driving a wheelchair over the snow in freezing weather is tough.

Ok, home stretch here. Let’s finish by adding something about the meeting: her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather, wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs, to get to his AA meeting. Whoa, I only added one more word, here, but a term full of meaning and content. Now, the reader might associate the brother’s tetchy deportment with his alcohol problem that he is struggling to overcome.

I like this sentence so much I’m going to paste it on the bottom of this post, so I can admire it. Happy sentence-crafting to you, too.

Her brother, a tall and lanky 56-year-old with a cantankerous and rude demeanor, who always arrived twenty minutes late to every appointment and made excuses for his tardiness, rolled his wheelchair across the snow-packed sidewalk in thirty-degree weather-wearing a down jacket, gloves, wool hat, and earmuffs-to get to his
AA meeting.

by Tess Perko

Reference: Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. Harper. 2005.

Why This Writer Reads Stories: Reasons 1, 2, & 3

I have 257 novels marked “read” on my Kindle and I also read books on paper. My six-foot-tall bookcases in my home library contain over 300 books, plus I have some on the shelf underneath my television, on my coffee table, and inside drawers next to my bed. I read every day—in bed, on the couch, in the doctor’s office, at the hair salon, in the rocking chair in the back yard, and at the dining room table. Everywhere, whenever I can.

I became a writer when I was nine years old and wrote my first poem. Since then, I’ve written more poems, short stories, articles, websites, blogs, recipes and essays. Now, since I’m retired and have more free brain power, I’m writing a novel and loving my increased writing time. 

But I read more than I write. I devour stories like they’re chocolate sundaes, loving every bite of their plots, characters, settings, and figures of speech. I read voraciously because I’m a writer; I love language, the power it has to convey information, emotion, and empathy. In addition to loving other writer’s stories, I read to improve my writing.

Here are three specific writing techniques I’ve studied recently from reading other author’s stories.

Reason 1: How to indicate who is talking without using “he/she said”

Dialogue is a dynamic technique to use to create action in a story, but a writer must make it clear which character is speaking. I’ve read stories where authors use tags such as “he said” or “she said,” and sometimes these tags create wordiness and take impact away from the dialogue; therefore, one day I chose to study how an author can use effective dialogue between two characters without including these repetitive tags. By reading The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers, I learned to identify the speaker of dialogue by describing what a character does right before she starts talking. Maybe she steps closer to the person to whom she is speaking and then she speaks. Another technique that Myers uses is to describe what a character thinks about the person with whom they’re talking right after she speaks; for example, she might imagine him playing a sport or eating spaghetti.

Reason 2: The effect of strong vocabulary on a reader

One thing I love about my Kindle is that I can underline a vocabulary word and get a definition for it immediately. I’m always looking up words, even familiar ones. I ponder about why the author might have chosen this word instead of its synonym. Is it a more accurate choice?

Or the word might be one I’ve never heard of before. This happens more often when I read authors who were educated in countries other than the United States. Recently, when I read Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams, I learned another word for altitude sickness, soroche. Discovering a new word feels a little bit like having a new baby. It’s a treasure and an opening to a bigger world.

Reason 3: How to move characters from one geographic location to another

In my current novel, my two main characters are traveling in South America. I was struggling with how to move my story from one scene to another. Should I describe what they can see outside the train window? Should I create a scene about how they pass the time on the train? Maybe one of the characters could be lost in thought as she crosses the border between Argentina and Chile.

Luckily, I began to read West with Giraffes: A Novel by Lynda Rutledge, a story about a destitute young man from Texas and an old man who must transport two giraffes from New York to San Diego.

Rutledge uses many techniques to move her story across the United States. The young man first steals a motorcycle and follows the giraffes’ truck. He watches the old man and his first driver as they argue. He notices a woman in red pants following behind them. He listens to the noises the giraffes make, and finally, when his motorcycle runs out of gas, he convinces the old man that he can drive the truck for him after the other driver quits. By the time he starts driving the giraffe’s truck, he knows the old man’s routine. While he’s driving the giraffe’s truck, he watches what the giraffes are doing in his rear-view mirror, he feels how their movements destabilize the vehicle, he talks to the old man, and he thinks about his childhood.

After observing how other writers use specific techniques, I then experiment with the same methods to develop my own novel. I can’t think of a better way to learn the craft of writing than to study writers—one technique at a time.