Restating Fiction Paragraphs

Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts

The Exercise — Read the following passages to see how the writers convey information while shaping our attitudes and emotions.

In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises an obscure character is killed by a bull being taken to the bullring in a Spanish town. The first brief sentences deliver the objective facts almost as coolly as a newspaper obit. The final two sentences are longer and have a more complex structure (why?), and the string of ten short prepositional phrases that ends the passage not only mimics the rhythm of the train wheels but creates a poetic, lulling, hypnotic effect, suggestive of a chant.

The Objective - To shape sentences to do your bidding. Sentences aren't just snowshoes to get you from the beginning to the end of your story. They are powerful tools with which to carve a story that wasn't there until you decided to create it.

Passage one: Later in the day, we learned that the man who was killed was named Vicente Girones and came from near Tafalla. The next day in the paper, we read that he was 28 years old, and had a farm, a wife, and two children... The coffin was loaded into the baggage-car of the train, and the widow and the two children rode, sitting, all three together, in an open third-class railway-carriage. The train started with a jerk, and then ran smoothly, going down grade around the edge of the plateau and out into the fields of grain that blew in the wind on the plain on the way to Tafalla.

Another way to say the above: The man who was killed was an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His name was Vicente Girones. He had arrived in the city with his wife and two small children to visit the zoo and to have a day visiting museums and art galleries.

Their life on a small farm near Tafalla kept them busy, and a trip to the city was an exciting break for the 28-year-old man, his wife, and children. Now, the trip home with a man too young to die from such a tragedy. An innocent victim in a senseless crime.

The family on the train ride home comforted each other, while tears ran down their faces. They were taking their husband and father home to bury in the place that he loved. The beauty of the scenery on the way to the city was gone, as waves of memories of time together came to them.

Passage two:

In The Big Money, John Dos Passos describes Rudolph Valentino's progress through a city.

the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces, waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their autograph books, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirably tailored dress suit... his valets removed young women from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and cabarets, actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at him from under their mascaraed lashes.

Another way to say the above: Crazy eyes, star-struck, hysterical people pushed their autograph books toward him, pulled off his buttons, and took pieces of his clothing as souvenirs, while actresses looking for stardom and other young women stole away where they could, and when not possible, openly flirted with Mr. Rudolph Valentino. There is not always joy and privacy in the life of a star.

Passage three:

Cynthia Ozick's short story "The Shawl" takes place in a concentration camp during World War II. The child Magda is so attached to her shawl that she can be hidden away from the guards inside it.

She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners when she wanted to be very still.

Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die.

Afterward, Stella said, "I was cold."

And afterward, she was always cold, always. The cold went into her heart...

Another way to say the above: Magda was so in love with her shawl that she couldn't imagine ever being without it. She thought it would kill her to be without, and when Stella took her shawl from her, it happened. She did die. Stella's guilt from taking the shawl for herself stayed with her. She was cold forever after in her body, mind, spirit, and in how she treated herself and others.