Writers on Writing: Sherman Alexie's Fence (Paragraph) and Constance Hale's Boat (Sentence)

boat fence by Stavros Kammas

Sherman Alexie's description of a paragraph is unforgettable, at least for some with a little hint. Here's what he has to say: "I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say 'paragraph,' but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose.  They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs." He then describes, in his essay "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me," the pictures that he had once imagined.  His reservation was a paragraph within the United States.  His family lived in a house that was, yes, a paragraph. Each member of his family, all seven members, were paragraphs within their house, yet "each family member," he believes, "existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us."  

This sounds like an essay in the making for that fence-building Alexie. Or any other enclosure, barricade or coop that he or any writer would like to assemble.

But before we get that essay built, all chained up and cinder-blocked, we must say goodbye to the paragraph and say hello to the sentence, so let's give a big warm embrace to Constance Hale. Hale, I have learned, has her own blog, Sin and Syntax, and has contributed a series on writing to The New York Times. 

Hale has some thoughts on the sentence, as I mentioned. It is a vessel that will take us forward, across the water.

Because she envisions, "a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks. And then there are the impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination."

She can't stop there. She gets to the nitty gritty of subjects and predicates in her essay, "The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative."  She likes her boat, and she is not about to step off of it. Here she goes: 

"The outline of our boat, the meaning of our every utterance, is given form by nouns and verbs. Nouns give us sentence subjects — our boat hulls. Verbs give us predicates — the forward momentum, the twists and turns, the abrupt stops.

"For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). The subject is the person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about; the predicate expresses the action, condition or effect of that subject. Think of the predicate as a predicament — the situation the subject is in.

"I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate): The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention."

Now where does that boat go?  Somewhere inside a fence. Undoubtedly, it is somewhere inside a fence. Is it a marina? If you had Mr. Alexie and Ms. Hale sitting down together for the blue plate special to climb that literary Mount Everest café of conversation they might be able to answer that question. Where would you find such a place? Where one eats like a horse and takes it all in like a camera? It would be that land known as the mixed metaphor. Here are more.

Fence Boat by Tea Kolo