Let your sentence tell a story

Constance Hale, a San Francisco journalist, says a sentence is a mini-narrative.

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 apredicament — 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.

Let’s look at some opening lines of great novels to see how the sentence drama plays out. Notice the subject, in bold, in each of the following sentences. It might be a simple noun or pronoun, a noun modified by an adjective or two or something even more complicated:

• “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, “Paradise”
• “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” — James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Switching to the predicate, remember that it is everything that is notthe subject. In addition to the verb, it can contain direct objects, indirect objects, adverbs and various kinds of phrases. More important, the predicate names the predicament of the subject.

• “Elmer Gantry was drunk.” — Sinclair Lewis, “Elmer Gantry”
• “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, “Waiting”

 The best sentences, she concludes, bolt a clear subject to a dramatic predicate, making a mini-narrative.