#PenToPaper: Pacing & a Prompt

Sharing a fun essay published in Brevity Magazine and spotlighting why I love it so much. Plus, a bonus for paid subscribers!

A few seasons ago, I took an online class from Jeannine Ouellette, and one of our assignments was to write a short essay in one long sentence. Use punctuation, sure, but don’t use a period. Turned out, this was exactly the exercise I needed for an essay I’d written but hadn’t really tackled. If you know what I mean.

This kind of exercise is all about pacing and pulling the reader right into the moment and falling into the flow of writing faster than usual because there’s no time to stop and stare at one sentence so that you might telepathically morph that sentence from shit to sparkle. You know what I mean?

Anyway, Brevity Magazine recently published a great example of this kind of essay, “Whatcha Gonna Do?” by Joey Franklin. Pacing, in the moment, deliciously perfect sensory details. The whole essay makes me smile, but I love this passage in particular:

… and there’s no longer any time to think at all, and our Sunday loafers turn and slide across the rough pavement and we’re nothing more than the sound of the court—the slap and twang of the ball, the shuffle of our shoes, the close breathing, the cord-drag of net, the crack of his hand as again he knocks away the ball, and he grins as I retrieve it and he says it once more—whatcha gonna do?

(Okay, here you could argue that the question mark ends the sentence, and there is one more paragraph that follows, so is this really an example of a one-long-sentence piece? Yes. Because it’s all pacing and pulls me right into the moment and I fall into a flow that is completely comfortable, even though I never played basketball. Plus, I didn’t catch that break before the last paragraph until just now. Talk about flow and being in the moment!)

Go read Franklin’s essay. Think about the way the format works for this particular story. I’ll bet there’s a moment you’ve been wanting to write about that deserves a similar break from traditional grammar rules.

I’ll share an early draft of my run-on-sentence essay below, and then if you’re a paid subscriber, I’ll leave you with a prompt and a chance to share yours.

Guardians

You first, I say to my sister outside of the room where our mother lay in a casket on the day of her wake, We’ll take turns, I tell her, take as long as you need, I say, and lean against the wall ready to wait, but a few minutes later my sister returns, silent, and I’m confused, until I walk in and see—a stranger with back-combed hair and no makeup, lying there, and she looks to be eighty, not 56, not glamorous, not my mother, and I walk right back out too—angry, appalled, Did you see her hair, I say, did you see what they did, I ask, do you think they even looked at the photo we left them, I say, louder, hoping someone will hear me say, We have to fix her, and my sister agrees (to the shock of her husband who thinks we have lost our minds in grief) and says she has our mother’s makeup and curling iron in her minivan in the parking lot, and I want to ask why but there isn’t time; people will arrive soon, so in minutes we are back in the room, where she plugs in the iron next to the casket and I dig through the makeup: for eye liner, for lipstick, for that blue comb with metal picks on the end that an eighty year old woman might use but not at all with the same sense of style, but when I hold out the comb I see my sister doesn’t need it—she is leaning over our mother’s face, she knows better than me—using just the iron and her fingers to curl (or, in this case, uncurl) the mess the mortician made: she shapes our mother’s bangs, slightly off center, the way our mother always did, so that they’d cover the scar on her right eyebrow, then I take a turn with the eyeliner and lipstick, only I’m clumsy, I don’t wear makeup the same, but between my sister and me, we transform her: back to the woman we know—we knew—and only then do I feel the weight in my chest and the nausea and the rock in my throat, and I look to my sister to see if she feels the same, relief that we fixed our mother before anyone arrived, before anyone saw her in such a state, and we laugh—Can you imagine? Mother would be so mad!—that kind of laugh that lingers on the edge of a break, and we both swear in that moment that, come the day, one will tend to the other to undo what the funeral home has done—Promise? I say and she says the same, and when people arrive and compliment our mother (as people do at wakes), my sister and I smile, proud and defiant, guardians of our mother, guardians for each other.

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