The Middle of a Life Sentence

For as long as I can remember, I have been writing.  I have always known that I would write in some capacity for the rest of my life.  I think the epiphany came when I was in the fifth grade, and I wrote an article publicizing an annual event in our small town.  The assignment was targeted for the entire fifth grade class of Raleigh Elementary School, and ironically, the event was the National Tobacco Spitting Contest.  The thought is so foreign to me now ~ fifth graders writing about tobacco spitting.  Much has changed in forty years.  Still, for a little girl who had been making up stories since the second grade, this was my opportunity to shine. The most creative essay was featured on the front page of the county newspaper, and mine was chosen.  I became a published newspaper writer at the ripe age of eleven.  About fifteen years later, I also became the managing editor of that same newspaper.

Something life-changing happened to me when I read my words for the first time on the printed page.  For some reason, I had always told stories (BIG white lies) as a little girl.  I don’t know why I felt I had to make things up; I just did.  Maybe it was because everything about my family was average and normal.  However, my second and third grade teachers confirmed that I would fabricate events, such as someone breaking into our house, stealing all our clothes, and throwing them into the pond.  Ms. Gaddis (second-grade teacher) recalls that story as her particular favorite.  Or I would make braggadocios statements like my daddy lacked one dollar having a million dollars.  According to my teachers' recollections, each day brought a different story, which always led to the same punishment ~ staying in at recess.  They said I just couldn't help myself.  

As far-fetched as each story might be, I could never tell it the same way twice.  The story started in my head, quickly moved to my mouth, and evaporated into thin air once spoken.  The story vanished...until the fifth grade.  For the first time, I saw the process change.  The words in my head were transferred to the pencil in my hand and became permanently placed on paper.  I remember reading the front page over and over, thinking that I should have changed this word or that sentence. Writer's lament was already alive and well, even then!  I still read that fifth grader’s published essay to this very day.  From that moment, I understood that writing meant processing, and processing meant keeping.  I never realized how much, but for me, writing meant living.

I had been given a life sentence.

Writing is processing, and I can process just about anything.  I have written everything from college term papers to publicity bios to conference presentations to newspaper articles to the chronicles of everyday life.  I have written more journals than I can keep dusted.  Still, no one loves to just write (or type).  That’s like a punishment of writing one hundred times on a sheet of paper, "I will not talk in class” or in my case, “I will not tell stories that are not true.”  People always say they love to write, but what they really love is the process of writing.  Like a physician or lawyer who processes each step for a challenging case or an artist or a composer who carefully selects each brush stroke or musical chord, I love to process each word and sentence as through it will produce the historic courtroom verdict, the medical breakthrough, the finished masterpiece, or the literary classic. 

So how do we process a well-written life sentence?  How do the diagrams of our lives compare to those complicated sentence diagrams we remember from high school English?  My kids hate when I say this ~ especially in front of other people ~ but everyone on this planet is terminal.  Ultimately, each one of us will have a final punctuation mark placed at the end of our life sentence. We may have a floor littered with wadded up balls of paper getting to that point, but we have to keep processing until we are satisfied with the complete sentence.  

Life sentences do not always fit one format.  Every single person is where he or she is today, no matter how terrible or how great that place is, because of processing, selecting, editing, and deleting.  We cut, we copy, we undo, and we save. Sometimes processing becomes too difficult, and people just choose to stop…even in the middle of an unfinished sentence.  In grammar, this error is defined as a sentence fragment. Teachers and editors cringe when they identify a sentence fragment, and they correct it on the assignment or submission with the abbreviation FRAG in bright red ink.  The only 0 (zero) grade I ever received in college was placed on a paper I wrote in Freshman Composition.  In the margin of the paper, my professor wrote a nice little note that read Sentence Fragment – unacceptable.  Grade:0

That zero taught me a valuable lesson about grammar and life. Sentence fragments are unacceptable because they don't express completion.  Sentence fragments are thoughts and intents cut short ~ interrupted, flawed, and ended out-of-place. Pertaining to syntax or the relationship between words that determine their order in a sentence, this action undermines arrangement, structure, and agreement.  Most importantly, a sentence fragment fails to be a sentence in the sense that it can not stand alone.  It is missing the most important component ~ an independent clause.

No matter what reference we attribute to the word sentence, most of us think completion or absolution. Webster defines sentence as an opinion or a conclusion given on request or reached after deliberation ~ like a verdict, such as being sentenced to a life of poverty. Sentence is also defined as a judgment ~ one formally pronounced by a court or judge specifying the punishment and also the punishment period imposed, such as receiving a light sentence or serving a life sentence.  The definition that matches a writer’s use of sentence is a main clause ~ a syntactic (connected or orderly) unit ~ which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses. 

My definition of a life sentence is based loosely on a combination of all three.  Time and again, a life sentence is handed to us like a verdict, or judgment, or punishment.  However, our true life sentences are processed by our abilities to diagram (break down) the necessary parts or elements of those sentences. Once we see how each part describes, modifies, or identifies another, we learn how to qualify, define, and determine the significance of its inclusion and its useful purpose. Our life sentence has a beginning and an end, no matter how restrictive or opposing the middle may seem. Our life sentence is distinguished as being unique by those characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses ~ highs and lows, stops and starts ~ which often occur midstream.  Hopefully, the end result is an independent clause able to stand on its own.

Many times, I have found myself in the middle of a life sentence ~ dependent, adrift, misunderstood. But I know for sure that life is all about composition.  There is no exception to be made for a sentence fragment ~ in grammar or in life.  It is the unacceptable place in our lives where we receive the 0 (Zero) grade if we stop.  We know something is missing or something doesn't make sense.  As long as we are able to ask a question, give a command, make a wish, shout an exclamation, or perform an action, we can turn in the final assignment knowing that our life sentence is complete.

Dianne ; )