Sentence Types

Igor Rybak

Image: Laurence Musgrove

opening sentence: sentence written while looking through a window

casual sentence: sentence written while lying down

static sentence: sentence written while sitting

moving sentence: sentence written while sitting on the bus

run-on sentence: sentence written as the bus crashes into a lamp post

compound sentence: sentence written in jail

complex sentence: sentence written in a shopping mall

dynamic sentence: sentence that makes the reader’s heart explode

fast sentence: sentence that makes the reader perspire

slow sentence: sentence that makes the writer perspire

loose sentence: sentence about the neck of a turkey

long-winded sentence: sentence written by a writer who has no telephone, does not leave her house, has no one to visit her

short-winded sentence: sentence written by a heavy smoker, likely a man who drinks whiskey, wears a fedora and writes detective novels

winded sentence: sentence written on a stormy night beside an open window

winding sentence: sentence written after drinking a triple espresso

middle-of-the-road sentence: sentence about continuous or continual lines

translated sentence: sentence spoken by a ventriloquist’s dummy

Sigmund Freud's 10 Steps to Great Fish

Rebecca Coffey

1. Buy a dead one. When the eye stares at you accusingly, think forbidden thoughts. Might as well.
2. Wait until your mother leaves the room. Then smear the fish with béchamel sauce. Quickly, before she gets back!
3. Béchamel. The very syllables take my breath away.
4. Cook the fish any way you like, but serve it with bloody beets.
5. Please remove the bones gently.
6. Lemon makes you pucker.
7. When fish cooks, the proteins denature and then coagulate. How does this make you feel?
8. There’s a delicate balance between perfectly cooked fish and overcooked fish. Does this remind you of anything in your goyishe childhood, like perhaps the Christmas morning when you were three and your mother was disappointed to find nothing for her from your father under the tree but mounds of gifts for you, and she cried as she sifted through the balled up pieces of wrapping paper looking for something, anything, but found nothing there? And when you saw her breasts heaving and heaving and heaving some more, you cried, too? And then you ran into your room and looked at yourself naked?
9. Don’t pound the fish. Please don’t pound the fish. Just touch the fish.
10. Hurry and change your clothes.

How To Write Like an Eastern European Writer Who Does Not Win Awards

Igor Rybak

First: Abandon proper grammar. This is your identifiable style. When you are questioned about it, defend it as a marriage of prose and verse.

E.g., Valentin woke from dreams of his homeland. Wife Anya already preparing tea. Her thick, blonde hair swept across shoulder in pale light of rising sun, a desert sand blown across her skin. Valentin writes in notebook: childhood memories built me a garden, nostalgia opened its gate. Anya pours two cups.

Second: Tell self-deprecating jokes, in a tone that mocks the self-deprecation.

Third: People must feel your deep sarcasm. Your patronizing feelings for Canadians should be apparent and when questioned about it, you must laugh it off as if it’s a joke, which it isn’t. Your interest in Canadian culture is only superficial and sociological, fodder for conversation rather than anything else.

Fourth: People must feel your pain, which you must look like you’re trying to hide, and which you express with deep sighs and unfinished sentences and comments like, You would not understand.

That’s about it.

Also, you should use a lot of erotic imagery in your writing and when you are called out on it by Jian Ghomeshi on CBC, tell him he is a prudish Canadian and that this country is backwards because brutal violence is aired on TV every day and no one notices, yet when an artist addresses the beautiful human form and the sensual relations between men and women that make up the fibre of life, people get nervous.

NB, your subjects are always heterosexual but you are tolerant of homosexuality. You are, after all, a writer and thus are liberal and progressive on such issues.

That’s it!

One more point: If you want to write like a Latin American immigrant, keep everything the same, except rid yourself of standoffishness.

Done!

Upcoming lessons:

• How to sit at a desk like an immigrant writer

• How to hold your pen like an immigrant writer

• How to smoke like an immigrant writer