Thanks to a link on Kottke yesterday, we were clued in to some pretty hip tips for tricking out our sentences, David Foster Wallace-style. Originally hatched by one James Tanner, there’s a step-by-step guide for making your hum-drum sentences book-deal ready! To see whether the tricks really worked, we gave a batch of Flavorwire contributors the guide, and the same sentence. See the winning effort out of our offices, after the jump. And, if you think you can top it, we’ve got a heck of a prize for you.
The phrase, to start, reads:
Sascha enjoyed the movie. He liked the book more.
Eli’s winning version — super extra bonus points for suggestive phrasing:
“The movie was known to contain a smattering of hot nude scenes, but Sascha deeply admired the book’s saucy adjectives and some of its meaty verbs passionately — he is a sucker for a steaming-hot adjective — and, most of all, its little, carefully placed subordinate clauses, long words filled delicately with short vowels, little phrases and fragments of sentences that come to an end in rock-hard consonants, like a little boulder at the terminal point of a subterranean passageway.”
If you think you can beat that, hot-shot, post your DFWallacized version of our starting phrase in the comments below. We’ll select a winner by the end of the week, who will receive a bundle of brand-new books from the Flavorwire library. Now, go grow those sentences!
Comments (6)
that eli guy got it goin on.
It's obviously a painful process, undertaking to write like DFW, or else he wouldn't have died trying so hard to accomplish it. Maybe a more salubrious outcome would arise from emulating Henry James?
I'm getting totally lost here:
4. Append an absolute construction or two:
It's obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the puppet work — his arms are perfect for the puppets — and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops moved out of frame.
That addition at the end doesn't seem to make any sense, no matter how you parse it. Can anyone else make sense of that? Because, being that every example following plays off of it, the whole thing ends up feeling extremely flawed to me.
I even looked up the definition of an absolute construction, and while that phrase could fit the bill, it doesn't in this context. It would have to be something more along the lines of:
The camera mounted on a tripod, mops moved out of frame, it was obvious someone had helped with the set preparation.
In other words, that clause has nothing to do with the script, which is the whole point here in the first place. Point being, I'm not sure how good of an idea it is to propogate the original email if its based on an imperfect example.
Sascha, it turns out, had a more than lukewarm jones to re-read the book, preferring its picayune and – when it comes right down to it – penis-tickling detail as opposed to the inevitable bloated Hollywood fiasco, admittedly kind of a good time, that found its way to Cineplex IV in Des Moines, Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in November, said movie directed by a well known Communist sympathizer and Ativan addict.
Sacha enjoyed the movie – even though going to the movies brought immediately to the front of his mind the childhood memory of his parents ending their marriage during a screening of E.T. after a course of subtle, hate-filled glances at each other (i.e. his parents); so acute was the pain he felt after his parents divorce, that every theater Sacha found himself in during his later years could only resemble the same theater where his innocence (i.e. the blissful ignorance of childhood) was traded for an eerie, adult-like prescience concerning the human condition and relationships, an off-putting trait that has ironically left Sacha devoid of any meaningful relationships, which explained his natural attraction to the book that served as the source material for the movie (i.e. the movie that reminded him of his parent's divorce), even though the publication he got his hands on was one of those released as a promotion with the movie (i.e. the movie based on the book) – the kind with key frames printed inconveniently in the middle of the text on glossy pages so as to keep the mainstream reader interested in the story – since the book served no purpose in conjuring up the old, bitter feelings of abandonment and regret that seeing a film that a theater would evoke.
Sim-life on the big screen often made Sascha squirm with no little delight, but raw gaping story and true-blood characters he could feel on every awful printed page — “The Clansman” trumps “The Birth of a Nation” as Puzo stomps Scorcese — invariably kept him up at night for countless weeks on end, perspiring coldly into his little feather pillow, a plucked goose longing to dream of flight yet loving how the brazen words, churning furiously in his always-on mind, prickled his skin and drove him to create his own gangsta comic vook.
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