What a Sentence Can Do

Everything you write is made of sentences. Sentences of infinite varieties build every story, pick-up line or threat.

To most English teachers, a sentence is any complete clause—any collection of words with a noun and a verb.

“I ran,” is a sentence, as is “I rock.”

“Stay!” can be a sentence because the noun, the subject of the sentence is an implied “you.” I mean “You stay!”

But to me, a sentence can be any word or collection of words that invokes a thought.

Consider this: “He woke up at noon. Gray clouds.”

The "clouds" in the second sentence lack a verb. But in context, it's clear enough what the clouds might be doing. They’re floating in the sky. Or they're littering the top floors of the lissome skyscrapers. Or they're all the point-of-view character sees: Gray clouds.

So my first rule of sentences is that a sentence is a thought.

It can be a complete thought, like “The gray clouds worried the pilot’s wife. “

A sentence can be a fragment of a thought, like “Gray clouds.”

Or a sentence can be compound thought, a thought connected to another : “The sky was filled with gray clouds, and the horses shuddered at the sudden coolness in the wind.”

Or it can be a complex thought where two things are happening at once: “As clouds gathered to gray the sky, the horses circled anxiously.”

Here are some excellent sentences with some humble commentary on what makes them so effective.

Marley was dead, to begin with.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

A simple complete thought with a simple aside to complicate matters. Dickens states the hard fact and then almost interrupts himself to clarify that the story has begun. And ironically it begins with death. You know right away that this narrator will not withhold facts. You can trust him, but things are not as simple as they seem. A perfect opening for a ghost story.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Vladmir Nabakov, Lolita

Nabakov opens the most pleasurably perverse novel of the twentieth century with a fragment. The thought is complete without a verb but modified twice to show the depth of the infatuation. We’re meeting an unstable man obsessed with the feelings created by one singular, in his mind, girl, and that’s evident from the very beginning.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This compound sentence states a thesis as a universal truth. By implication the rest of the story either follows from this truth or, perhaps, even proves the truth. By linking the fate of the happy and happy families with a semi-colon, Tolstoy complicates his observation, leaving the reader to wonder more and more as he follows the story of Anna: Is there such thing as a happy family?

These are a just a ideas about what your sentences can do. More to come.

Photo by Mayr.