I heard from a reader who got started on STILL LIFE and said that this sentence, which appears on only the second page of the novel, struck him as a perfect sentence:
“I imagine the lake, too, through the leafless gap in the trees that winter opened like a cathedral door.”
I don’t share this to brag or blow my own horn. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do much of that. If anything, I’m more inclined to downplay my writing skills. I guess there’s something ingrained in me about never performing to a high enough standard.
Anyway, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in this sentence, and why a reader might think it’s perfect.
I don’t remember writing this sentence, but it doesn’t strike me as one of those sentences I re-write a dozen times to get right. Instead, it feels organically conceived and embedded in the narrator’s (Vincent’s) voice. Chances are, I dashed this sentence off in a stream-of-unconscious writing flow, the words leaping from my fingertips and managing to stick the landing.
Is it a perfect sentence? It’s a relatively simple sentence, not flashy or fancy, and represents the narrator’s perception as he imagines what his father is talking about. It’s highly visual, with words such as “lake” and “leafless gap” and “trees.” The sentence personifies winter with the restrained phrase “winter opened.” Perhaps its greatest strength is in the simile “like a cathedral door,” which adds scale to the imagery, and even implies sacredness and silence—much like a cathedral.
Of course, none of this occurred to me when I wrote the sentence. As I said, the words likely just flowed.
And yet, having a reader point out this specific sentence and call it perfect made me want to look more closely and think about what makes a perfect sentence. In the end, in the same way that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the perfect sentence is in the mind of the reader. Maybe the truest definition of a perfect sentence is one that creates exactly the experience it intends to create in the reader—no more, no less.
If you’d like to read more of the sentences in this novel, and haven’t had a chance to get your copy of STILL LIFE yet, you can get one here.
