Greetings, writers—
After I wrote about recycling most of my New Yorkers without reading them, I decided to try to be better about at least looking at them, in no small part because they’re easier to read on a crowded bus than a book.1
So as my busmates and I were crossing the Tilikum Bridge the other day, I turned to “Evensong,” the Laurie Colwin story in the April 17th issue, which begins thus:
This is not an account of a love affair, and it is not the story of a religious conversion, although elements of both pertain. Of course, in life, which is full of surprises, it is hard to know what anything is.
My husband, John Felix, and I live, with our ten-year-old daughter, Alice, on the bottom two floors of a brownstone, in the neighborhood of an Anglican seminary, a collection of Gothic buildings and a lawn. In the spring, it is possible to watch priests and their families playing croquet on the grass. In summer, vaporous smoke from their tiny barbecues wafts through our front windows. If you were a complete psycho and could not tell one thing from another, the orderly workings of this place—its piper on St. Andrew’s Day, its Christmas procession and Easter picnic—would remind you that the season had changed, and you would know, because the hours are marked by bell ringing, what time it was at least five times a day.
Now, one of these things is not like the other, as the song goes, and it is the sentence that begins “If you were a complete pyscho.” All the sentences that have come before, as well as all of those that come after, are measured, decorous, and supremely calm.
In fact, even the second half of the psycho sentences returns to cool placidity—it’s really only the first clause that’s wack. The other sentences are the “orderly workings” of a fictive tone, which the psycho clause suddenly and perhaps even comically pierces.
Reading a line like this, I feel a tiny but thrilling zing: here’s someone surprising me with the way they wield the tools of the trade.2
The “psycho” line hints at something potentially dangerous lurking beneath a serene surface. And sure enough, a few paragraphs later, Colwin offers another sentence that sticks out—or up, maybe, as sharp as a nail in a floorboard—which is the narrator’s blasé delivery of a shocking revelation.3
Today, I encourage you to look at a paragraph you’ve already written and find a place where you can rupture its surface, explode its meaning, and/or surprise the person who will one day read it.
And if that prompt doesn’t speak to you, try filling in the blanks of Colwin’s sentence with two words of your own and write whatever comes after this first sentence:
This is not an account of _______, and it is not the story of a _______, although elements of both pertain.
Happy writing—
Emily
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I like to hold my book open with two hands, which is impossible on a crowded bus.
On a much smaller, less impressive scale: note how “that’s wack” sticks out of its sentence.
Not going to give it away, sorry.