The 3 Mandates of the Literary Sentence

How to write good literary fiction (hint: it's not the adjectives)

The other day, as I was washing dishes, a line from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants popped into my head.

This is a series I read back in high school and haven’t returned to since. And yet this line is one I remember several times a year—especially when I encounter dried apricots.

I couldn’t tell you which book in the series has this line, but I remember the context: one of the characters (Carmen?) comes into the kitchen full of anxious consternation, and she starts snacking on dried apricots—only to break off, revolted, with the feeling that she’s chewing on somebody’s ear.

I like dried apricots, usually. But that description is so harrowingly accurate that it’s always stuck with me. That is the texture of a dried apricot. And I’ve had that feeling before of eating something perfectly normal and being suddenly repulsed by it.

The reason that line in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is so good and memorable—I wasn’t even eating dried apricots when I thought of it earlier this week—is that it’s true to life. It accurately captures, in language, a familiar truth about the world that we usually don’t put into language.

True to life is one of three criteria I look for in a literary sentence. I want to break down those three criteria, because while we all love to talk about which books are literary and which books aren’t, we rarely talk about what actually makes a sentence feel literary.

The three criteria I’m about to share come from my own analysis of the writing I like and the writing I dislike. This is not a rubric anyone else is using—if everyone in the publishing industry used it, then I would buy a lot more literary fiction.

But I think this rubric will still be useful to you, for two reasons:

1. I’m right.

2. Even if I’m wrong, disagreeing with me will prompt you to articulate your own criteria for good literary writing.

Shall we?

Surprising

Let’s start with the most basic of the criteria: good literary writing should be surprising at the language level.

We can think of surprise here as the opposite of cliché. It is not surprising to encounter a room that is dimly lit, a face that is starkly white, a woman who is staring beseechingly, a man who is mumbling shamefacedly. We have seen these phrases many times before. In fact, as a twelve-year-old writer competing in timed writing tournaments (those were the days), I thought it was proof of my sophistication to know that “mild” went with “breeze,” “shaft” went with “sunlight,” “pit” went with “stomach,” that hearts thumped and beat loudly in the chest and sometimes hammered against the rib cage.

This is one of those stages you have to pass through as a writer—learning the rules before you break them.

Now, of course, like all literary writers, I avoid clichés like the plague whenever possible.

Pick up any literary novel and you’ll see the writer trying to surprise you in various ways. Maybe they’re doing it with word choice, maybe with syntax, maybe with rhythm, maybe with juxtaposition. These efforts to surprise earn various labels according to the writer’s style: the writing is deft, incisive, beautiful, layered, lyrical, lucid, vivid, finely wrought. There are gradations and categories here, but the common denominator is surprise: the writer is doing something other writers wouldn’t do, something unusual, noteworthy, surprising.

Here’s an example of a great language-level surprise, from the short story “Irina” by Mavis Gallant. The opening paragraph of the story introduces the late intellectual titan Richard Notte, his wife Irina, and their five children. The fates of the children are briefly described: a banker, a university lecturer, a minister’s wife, an art historian’s wife, an industrial designer’s wife. Not bad—seems like everyone did pretty well for themselves. But after this list of professions and marriages, we get this line:

These were the crushed sons and loyal daughters to whom Irina had been faithful, whose pictures had traveled with her and lived beside her bed.

Whoa—crushed sons? The adjective is surprising, contradicting our nascent impression that the sons turned out basically okay. It’s a devastating write-off of their achievements, confirmation that they never made it out from under their father’s shadow.

This is a word choice surprise, and I’m sure if I combed through the story I could find a syntax surprise, a rhythm surprise, a juxtaposition surprise… But you’ll just have to trust me on those other types of surprise, because we’ve got more important things to discuss.

Literary writers have gotten the memo that their language needs to be surprising. Some of them have taken that mandate too much to heart. You’ve probably encountered a writer who was determined to surprise you with every single sentence—and not all of those surprises were welcome.

You know that stage of childhood kids go through, where they think anything random is automatically funny? “Lol, I’m so random.” That’s sort of how it feels when a literary writer has decided that all surprises are automatically good.

In the gauzy dark of the bedroom closet, she lifted the trembling web of her fingertips to her wincing temples, behind which a headache cracked and unspooled.

This is all surprising, but is any of it good? The closer we look at these mixed metaphors, the flimsier they seem. Do fingertips against the forehead really feel like a trembling web? Can we think of any real object that would first crack and then unspool?

Which is why it’s not enough for literary writing to be surprising. It has to also be:

True to Life

This is where a lot of literary writing falls short for me. The problem with that headache sentence above is that it doesn’t actually capture what it feels like to have a splitting headache. (“Splitting headache,” a cliché, does a better job.) The writer of that sentence is more concerned with surprising us than she is with accurately communicating something true.

I read a literary novel a few years ago in which a chandelier was described as a “constellation of overpriced incandescence.” At first glance, this seems kind of fun, maybe. Chandeliers are bright and expensive. Point taken. But on closer inspection, this phrase doesn’t actually evoke the thing it’s pretending to describe. Picture a star formation of incandescent light bulbs, expensive ones. Are you picturing a chandelier? No—not remotely. This is cleverness without truth.

When a literary sentence succeeds, it’s because the writer has expressed something true with total accuracy. Maybe they used beautiful, nuanced, elaborate language to express that truth—but not necessarily. Take the apricot line from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. There’s nothing especially elegant about the phrase “chewing on somebody’s ear.” It’s just unsettlingly accurate re: the texture of dried apricot. (Sorry if I’m putting anyone off their dried apricot.)

Literary writers tend to value surprise in their sentences a lot more than truth. And there’s a simple reason for this: writing a surprising sentence is easier than writing a true one. You can quickly master the surprising sentence by reading a lot and avoiding the things that other people do.

But in order to write a really true-to-life sentence, you have to be a keen and imaginative observer of the world. This is hard! It’s the difference between looking up at a chandelier and thinking, “How can I make this sound interesting?”, and looking up at that same chandelier and thinking, “What is the essentially interesting thing about this chandelier that I ordinarily overlook?”

Let’s go back to Mavis Gallant for an example of a sentence that is both surprising and true to life. Same story, same first paragraph. We’re talking about how the children of the illustrious Richard Notte feel about their father after his death:

They carried his reputation and the memory of his puritan equity like an immense jar filled with water of which they had been told not to spill a drop.

Damn—that image is so good. It’s good because it captures, in that prickle-under-the-skin way, what this particular kind of grief feels like, where you’re protective of the story you’re telling or have been told about the deceased, and you’re terrified of contaminating it somehow, and so you’ve got to move through life very carefully, making sure no one knocks the memory askew.

Notice how my paraphrase is way longer and more convoluted than the original sentence? This is because Gallant has hit on a perfect, concise, straight-to-the-bone way of describing this true-to-life thing she’s getting at.

Which brings me to our third criterion for a good literary sentence:

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

A good literary sentence takes the shortest route to the idea it’s trying to express. In other words, the sentence is only as complicated as what is being communicated.

Here’s a quick example that I think is illustrative. A couple years ago, I impulsively bought a literary novel without flipping through it carefully. A chapter or two in, I came across a sentence that featured a woman drinking “bitter black acid.”

It took me several scans of the paragraph to realize that the woman was drinking… coffee. Just coffee.

The writer didn’t want to refer to the beverage as “coffee,” presumably because that would be boring (not surprising enough). But what she meant was “coffee.” There was nothing important or relevant about how bitter or acidic (or, apparently, both?) the coffee was. This was a pure thesaurus switch-out for a familiar object.

Finding alternatives to common phrases may feel literary, but if those alternatives are neither necessary nor informative, they end up just bizarrely cluttering the prose. So my third big rule for the literary sentence is that you’ve got to say whatever you want to say as simply as possible. If you can say it simply, dressing it up in complicated language isn’t going to convince anyone that you’ve said something profound.

(Well, actually, it does seem to convince a lot of people, which is why I get grumpy about contemporary literary fiction on the regular. But I chucked that particular literary novel as soon as I hit “bitter black acid.”)

All the bells and whistles of your literary talent, your innovative syntax and your quirky diction and your latitudinal leaps, should be brought to bear on the ideas that matter to the story, that can’t be tackled head-on, that you might spend half an hour in a coffee shop vainly trying to articulate to a close friend.

For the simpler ideas, it’s okay to just say what you mean. Sometimes coffee is just coffee.

Here’s Gallant describing Richard Notte’s furniture:

His room was furnished with a cot, a lamp, a desk, two chairs, a map of the world, a small bookshelf—no more, not even carpets or curtains.

The desk need not be mahogany, the cot need not have threadbare sheets. The bookshelf is only “small.” Gallant probably could have thought of a magnificently true-to-life and surprising way to evoke this particular map of the world (a constellation of desaturated continents, perhaps?), but why bother? The important thing is that it’s a map of the world.

We pay close attention to Gallant’s use of “crushed” in the first paragraph (the crushed sons and loyal daughters) because she’s not spraying adjectives everywhere; she’s saving her spear-pokes of vivid language for when she needs them.

So while a good literary writer can fire off sentences that are both surprising and true to life, they only do so when necessary—when such a carefully wrought sentence is in fact the shortest route to the thing they’re trying to say.

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As I hope I’ve made clear, these three criteria should be used in tandem. The best literary writing manages to be simultaneously:

• surprising

• true to life

• direct

You’ll notice that I do not include “musical” or “lyrical” among my criteria. This is because I doubt we could all come to an agreement on what makes a sentence musical or lyrical. In fact, I think those terms are, not 100% nonsense, but maybe 80% nonsense. (The poet Mark Halliday has a great essay on this, in which he quotes eight stanzas of poetry out of context and dares you to judge whether or not they’re musical. The essay, “Courageous Clarity,” appears in his collection Living Name—it is funny and convincing, and that would be true even if he weren’t my father.)

When I flip through a literary novel in the bookstore, trying to decide whether or not to whip out the credit card, I’m not looking for “lyricism,” however we might define it. I’m looking for evidence that the writer can surprise me; that those surprises are warranted, earned, and true to life; and that the writer is genuinely attempting to communicate with me, the reader. (The communication of “I am really smart and you should admire me” does not count.)

How can you pull this off as a literary writer? Well, you have to be a prolific reader, an imaginative observer of the world, and a person with something urgent to say.

Easy!

Just kidding. There are times when I qualify as none of the above. But these are the qualities I work toward.

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A couple weeks back, I wrote about the ways that short stories often go wrong: an opening that is too dizzying, too cluttered, too descriptive. Many of those openings fail on the counts that I outline above: they’re not surprising, they’re not true to life, and/or they’re not direct. So if you want to know what it looks like when literary aims go astray, here are some more examples:

And if you’re feeling that my definition of literary fiction seems a little fuzzy, that might be true, but I defend it more carefully here:

February has been a month of semi-abrasive hot takes, so next week I’m going to try to post something that is both practical and motivating. We’ll see how I fare.

Thanks for reading!