He drove a semi for the carnival, age sixteen, carrying transformers, his the bright yellow of the Zipper; he drove each Sunday to a new destination, driving all night, driving fast, driving on speed, driving on amphetamines, and then…
As a human, one-to-one, I’m reserved and hard to know, but in writing creative nonfiction, I strive for full disclosure, vulnerability, to lay bare my wounds unbound. In this piece, it is my brother who is laid bare, and as the subject, he is not the engine that drives the piece. Instead, the engine is a question of form and language.
The piece began with me investigating how I might tell a life story in a single sentence. A single sentence forces a focus on language as the driver. I’ve long loved the labyrinthine sentence and find extra joy in reading them aloud like a monologue: Molly Bloom’s famous stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses; Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, a 13,955 word sentence; work from writers like Gabriel García Márquez and William Faulkner.
My goal was to create a sense of breathlessness, impacting the pace at which readers read. If that single sentence were setting details, the pace might slow like a languorous river, but a long sentence driven by action (“he drove”) increases the pacing. The repetition of “he drove” in my story creates a chant-like rhythm that compels the movement. “He drove, he drove, he drove…” When read aloud, there’s an inherent leaning into the form and cadence, increasing the pace as the story reaches the end of the energy driving it.
And as it becomes clear that he was riding in wheelchairs and in the passenger seat, no longer steering his movement through the world, that action switches again. This final switch allows the reader to experience what drove him to run away, what drove him to succeed, to marry, to work, until finally the addictions driving him take him from active choices to passive experiences. The final two-word sentence works as an epilogue, the devastating truth that drove his life.
CINDY SKAGGS is a hybrid writer with ten published books, multiple journal publications in creative nonfiction, and a Pushcart nomination. Her shorter works have appeared in december magazine, So to Speak Journal, The New Limestone Review, WOW! Women on Writing, Fredericksburg Literary Art Review, and Proud to Be (volume 14). She currently teaches in the Graduate Program for Creative Writing at Western Colorado University.
