Several Short Sentences About Writing

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Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg
Full Title: Several Short Sentences About Writing
Category: #books

Highlights

There are no rules, only experiments.
- Note: Pragmatism, aphorism
Like most received wisdom, what people think they know about writing works in subtle, subterranean ways. For some reason, we seem to believe most strongly in the stuff that gets into our heads without our knowing or remembering how it got there.
This book isn’t meant to replace the received wisdom. “Received” means untested, untried, repeated out of habit. Everything in this book is meant to be tested all over again, by you. You decide what works for you. This is perhaps the most important thing I have to say. There’s no gospel here, no orthodoxy, no dogma. Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is. If that means arguing with me as you read this book, so be it.
You don’t have to write short sentences forever. Only until you find a compelling reason for a long sentence That’s as clear and direct as a short sentence.
Every word is optional until it proves to be essential, Something you can only determine by removing words one by one And seeing what’s lost or gained.
A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, The relentless exploration of possibilities, The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say The possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.
Fiction and nonfiction resemble each other far more closely than they do any actual event. Their techniques are essentially the same, apart from sheer invention.
Better to be discovering what’s worth discovering, Noticing what you notice, And putting it into sentences that, from the very beginning, Open the reader’s trust and curiosity, Creating a willingness in the reader to see what you’ve discovered,
In school you learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost, A problem you were taught to solve not by writing clearly But by shackling your sentences and paragraphs together.
Why were you taught to dwell on transitions? It was assumed that you can’t write clearly And that even if you could write clearly, The reader needs a handrail through your prose. What does that say about the reader? That the reader is essentially passive and in need of constant herding.
Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.
The extra space you feel between short sentences is mostly The missing apparatus of transition and connection.
Is it possible to practice noticing? I think so. But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself. Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world, Rather than siphoning the world into you In order to transmute it into words.
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Noticing means thinking with all your senses. It’s also an exercise in not writing.
- Note: Like taking a photo instead of looking
What you notice has no meaning. Be sure to assign it none. It doesn’t represent or symbolize Or belong to some world theory or allegory of perception. Don’t put words to it. And don’t collect it. Let it slip away. Be patient for the next thing you notice.
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There’s always an urge among writers To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible, As if every perception ended in a trope, As if the writer were a dynamo Turning the world into words. The goal is the opposite: To get your words, your phrases, As close as you can to the solidity, The materiality of the world you’re noticing.
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Let yourself wonder why this thing, this instant, this suddenness, caught your attention. What you’re noticing isn’t only what struck you. It’s also how your mind, your attention, gets from place to place, From the steady current of your thoughts to their sudden interruption.
What you get in return for this gathering and releasing Is habit, ease, trust, and a sense of abundance that sustains your writing. And your mind never relinquishes what really matters.
Don’t neglect such a rich linguistic inheritance. It’s your business to know the names of things, To recover them if necessary and use them. This isn’t merely a matter of expanding your vocabulary. It’s a matter of understanding that everything you see and know About your presence in this moment of perception Is overlaid by a parallel habitat of language, Names that lie tacit until you summon them.
A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language, A renaming of the already named. It’s meant to expire in a sudden flash of light And to reveal—in that burst of illumination— A correspondence that must be literally accurate. Any give in the metaphor, any indeterminacy, And it becomes a cloud of smoke, not a flash of light. Like any rhetorical device, the less you use it, the more effective it is.
A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
A cliché isn’t just a familiar, overused saying. It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking, Any group of words that seem to cluster together “naturally” And enlist in your sentence.
Volunteer sentences occur because you’re not considering the actual sentence you’re making. You’re looking past it toward your meaning somewhere down the road, Or toward the intent of the whole piece. Somehow that seems more important than the sentence you’re actually making, Though your meaning and the intent of the whole piece Depend entirely on the sentence you’re making. In fact, you’re distracted from the sentence by your intention And by wondering how soon you’ll be done. You’re distracted from the only thing of any value to the reader.
The writer’s job isn’t accepting sentences. The job is making them, word by word. Volunteer sentences, Volunteer subjects, Volunteer structures. Avoid them all.
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The point of learning the fundamental language of grammar and syntax Isn’t correctness or obeying the rules. It’s keeping the rules from obtruding themselves upon the reader Because you’ve ignored them.
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. A writer may write painstakingly, Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic, Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years. And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow. The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.
Everything may flow when you’re setting thoughts down on paper. But that’s jotting, not writing. “Flow” means effusion, a spontaneous outpouring of sentences. But what it really, secretly means is easy writing.
It’s easy to believe in “flow” if you can’t feel the difference between a dead sentence and a living one Or see the ambiguities you’re accidentally creating. In other words, “flow” is often a synonym for ignorance and laziness. It’s also a sign of haste, the urge to be done.
“Natural,” like flow, is also an effect in the reader’s mind. It doesn’t describe the act of writing. It describes the effect of writing.
Why the difference? It isn’t the change in genre. It’s the change in the reader. You’re writing to someone who knows you, who understands your allusions, Your patterns of speech, who’s quick and empathetic In reading your thoughts and feelings, whether they’re spoken or unspoken. What makes this reader valuable is a sense of connection and kinship, An intuitive grasp of what you say and don’t say.
You have an effusion one day. It spawns a piece. As the piece evolves, you try to protect those original, effusive sentences. Only to realize, at last, that what you’re writing won’t come together until they’ve been removed or revised. What were you trying to protect? The memory of the excitement you felt when those words “came to you.”
Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state. Daily. Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences—will not. That distinction is worth keeping in mind.
“Inspiration” is what gets you to the keyboard, And that’s where it leaves you. Inspiration is about the swift transitions of thought, Sudden realizations, Almost all of them carefully prepared for by continuous thinking. Inspiration has nothing to do with the sustained effort of making prose.
Sooner or later the need for any one of these will prevent you from writing. Anything you think you need in order to write— Or be “inspired” to write or “get in the mood” to write— Becomes a prohibition when it’s lacking. Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, With anything, starting from nowhere. All you really need is your head, the one indispensable requirement.
In writing, it’s impossible to express sincerity sincerely. That is, just by being sincere.
We believe so strongly in sincerity and naturalness of expression in writing that we’re almost unable to see how false this belief is. If you want the reader to feel your sincerity, your sentences have to enact sincerity—verbally, syntactically, even rhythmically. They have to reveal the signs of sincerity—a modesty and directness— Just as you do when you’re talking sincerely.
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You be the narrator. Let us be the readers. You’ll discover that being the narrator is not the same as being yourself. It’s a role, and a dramatic one. Absorb it and inhabit it.
The sense of who you are, what role you choose to play, What gesture you make toward the reader— These things are far more important than ideas of “style” or “voice.”
“Style” and “voice” are passive constructs, Markers of individuality, bow ties of self. They have more to do with what the writer makes of himself Than how the reader experiences his prose.
You don’t need to think about style. It’s as likely to appear in the character of your thinking, The shape of your ideas, your sense of humor or irony, As it is in any “stylistic” markers in the prose itself. But this will only be true if your prose is clear enough to reveal the character of your thinking, the shape of your ideas, and your sense of humor or irony.
Pursue clarity instead. In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself. Your clarity will differ from anyone else’s without your intending to make it differ.
Writers at every level of skill experience the tyranny of what exists. It can be overwhelming—the inertia of the paragraphs and pages you’ve already composed, the sentences you’ve already written, No matter how rough they are. Whether you love what you’ve written or not, Those sentences have the virtue of already existing, Which makes them better than sentences that don’t exist. Or so it seems.
Revision (or composition) just as often means Writing from the middle—from the many middles—and not the end. The end—where the page goes blank—has no priority. You’re not reading, picking up where you left off. You’re writing. You left off everywhere at once.
You’ll be looking for flaws. But also for opportunities—and for missed opportunities: Things you might have said, ideas you might have developed, Connections you might have made.
Sometimes you know just what you want to say, And you find the words to say exactly that. But just as often what you want to say emerges as the sentence takes shape. The thought isn’t primary or absolute. The thought is only a hint. Language offers guidance and resistance both. The sentence becomes the thought by bringing it fully into being. We assume that thought shapes the sentence. But thought and sentence are always a collaboration, The sum of what can be said and what you’re trying to say.
It fails to realize that writing comes from writing. You’re more likely to find the right path— The interesting path through your subject and thoughts— In a sentence-by-sentence search than in an outline. The standard model wastes the contemplative space of writing. Can you think all the good thoughts in advance?
The purpose of an outline is also to conserve your material, to distribute it evenly so that meaning discloses itself near the end. Here’s a better approach. Squander your material. Don’t ration it, saving the best for last. You don’t know what the best is. Or the last. Use it up. There’s plenty more where that came from. You won’t make new discoveries until you need them.
You’re holding an audition. Many sentences will try out. One gets the part. You’ll recognize it less from the character of the sentence itself than from the promise it contains—promise for the sentences to come.
You want to begin the piece, not introduce it, which is the difference between a first sentence already moving at speed and a first sentence that wants to generalize while clearing its throat.
Out of all the possibilities created by the first sentence, Make a second sentence, full of more possibilities, even disconnected ones. See if you can write the sentence that arises from the first sentence, Not the sentence that follows from it, Even if that means the second sentence lies at some distance from the first. The second sentence you write may turn out Not to be the second sentence after all. It may be the ninth. The sentence isn’t burdened by the question, where will it go?
Don’t worry about trajectory or sequence. Don’t look further ahead than two or three sentences. And don’t plan those sentences. Write them in your head instead.
You’ll learn to trust your memory as you work, Though it isn’t even a matter of trusting your memory. You’ll realize that thinking and remembering are almost indistinguishable. You’re not only imagining sentences you want to write down. You’re also reexploring your subject, sifting your research And all the elements that make up your subject Even as you’re imagining sentences. Soon the distinction between thinking about your subject and Thinking about sentences vanishes.
Instead, writing becomes intrinsic to the act of thinking, Completely intertwined with it. You’re also learning to trust the ability to work in your head
The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written. If you’d begun another way, made a different turn, even started in a different mood, A different piece would have come into being. The writer’s world is full of parallel universes. You discover, word by word, the one you discover. Ten minutes later—another hour of thought—and you would have found your way into a different universe. The piece is permeable to the world around it. It’s responsive to time itself, to the very hour of its creation. This is an immensely freeing thing to understand.
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- Note: Very Jamesian
Imagine this: The piece you’re writing is about what you find in the piece you’re writing. Nothing else. No matter how factual, how nonfictional, how purposeful a piece it is. Sooner or later, you’ll become more interested in what you’re able to say on the page and less interested in your intentions. You’ll rely less on the priority of your intentions and more on the immediacy of writing. It may sound as if I’m describing a formless sort of writing. Not at all. Form is discovery too. It’s perfectly possible to write this way even when constricted by A narrow subject, a small space, and a tight deadline.
You’ll become strangely aware of what you’ve chosen not to say And how that affects the sound of your sentences.
You may find that the most important section of the piece—a section you haven’t written yet—emerges from the gap created when you break a long sentence in two.
You can almost never fix a sentence— Or find the better sentence within it— By using only the words it already contains. If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing. And yet writers sit staring at a flawed sentence as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, Trying to shift the same words round and round until they find the solution. Take note of this point: it will save you a lot of frustration. This applies to paragraphs too. You may not be able to fix the paragraph using only the sentences it already contains.
It lets the reader complete the thought. It sets an echo in motion. This is writing by implication.
Writing doesn’t prove anything, And it only rarely persuades. It does something much better. It attests. It witnesses. It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed. It reports on the nature of your attention. It suggests the possibilities of the world around you. The evidence of the world as it presents itself to you. Proof is for mathematicians. Logic is for philosophers. We have testimony.
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These words take the reader’s head between their hands and force her to look where they want her to. Imagine how obnoxious that is, That persistent effort to predetermine and overgovern the reader’s response.
Chronology will always offer itself as the “natural” means of telling a story or recounting an event. But there’s nothing “natural” about moving chronologically in writing. It’s a rhetorical choice among many choices, and usually a dull one at that.
Writing is often an appeal not to the order of our chronological lives But to the order of our internal lives, Which is nonchronological and, in fact, unorderly.
When I say resist chronology, I also mean resist the chronology of observation. Why report on events in the order you observed them? Why stick to the sequence in which things happened Unless there’s a good reason for it?
Your job isn’t to arrange chunks of evidence, Chunks of the world in the order you gather them. Your job is to atomize everything you touch, To dissect your evidence into its details and particulars and Resist the inherent jargon of your subject, Breaking apart every clod of words you come across. Your job is to undo the adhesiveness of the evidence you’ve gathered, Its tendency to clump into indissoluble units. Dissolve them.
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Use the one detail you need as you need it. Beware of the way it sticks to other details. Why reproduce the whole scene when only one moment matters?
Writing is a way of ordering perception, but it’s just as often a reordering of perception in a form peculiar to the writer’s discovery.
As a reader, you know the feeling of looking up after eighty pages and wondering how you got there, The sense of immersion, of entering a shared but private space.
Authority arises only from clarity of language and clarity of perception. Authority is how the reader’s trust is engaged. “Authority” is another word for the implicit bond between writer and reader, The desire to keep reading. The desire to follow the writer wherever she goes. The question isn’t, can the reader follow you? That’s a matter of grammar and syntax. The question is, will the reader follow you?
The reader is in love with continuity, with extent, with duration, Above all with presence—the feeling that each sentence isn’t merely a static construct but inhabited by the writer.
Your grace, your authority, doesn’t borrow the subject’s validity: It creates it. The subject can never justify your prose or redeem its failures. When it comes to writing, the intensity of the writer’s feelings and The power of the subject mean almost nothing. We only glimpse that power and intensity In the power and intensity of the prose.
People clamor to tell their stories in words. This doesn’t make them writers, Nor does it make their stories matter. If you are your story, where do you get another? If you understand how to build silence and patience and clarity into your prose, How to construct sentences that are limber and rhythmic and precise And filled with perception, You can write about anything, even yourself.
One purpose of writing—its central purpose—is to offer your testimony About the character of existence at this moment. It will be part of your job to say how things are, To attest to life as it is. This will feel strange at first. You’ll wonder whether you’re allowed to say things that sound Not merely observant but true, And not only true in carefully framed, limited circumstances, But true for all of us and, perhaps, for all time. Who asked you to say how things are? Where do you get the authority to do any of this? The answer is yours to find.
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It’s surprising how often the trouble with a piece of writing Has nothing to do with the writing itself. The trouble is anything that keeps you from looking with undiverted attention at what you’re thinking and trying to say, At how you’re trying to say it and what the sentence is revealing. Anything that keeps you from watching the foreground of your mind. True discipline is remembering and recovering—inventing if necessary—what interests you. If it doesn’t interest you, how could it possibly interest anyone else?
Make yourself aware of the forces getting in the way of your writing. You may be creating syntactical and logical patterns that cast themselves forward Into future sentences and end up constricting you. Parallelisms and contrasts, for instance. They seem to offer structure and guidance, but they’re tying your hands.
The ordinary reader—the ordinary audience—is a barren conceit. It guarantees a shared mediocrity. Don’t preconceive the reader’s limitations. They’ll become your own.
And what happens if you trust the reader? All the devices of distrust fall away, The pretense of logic, the obsession with transition, The creeping, incremental movement of sentences, Sentences stepping on each other’s heels. With them go all the devices Meant to overawe the reader, that aping of authority Which even young writers learn so soon and so well— A prose about hierarchy and its demarcations Rather than the authority of clarity and directness.
You’ll be tempted to ask, “Who is the reader?” The better question is always, “Who am I to the reader?” And also, “How many versions of ‘I’ are present in this piece?” Who said there had to be only one?
It helps to remember that your prose is going to be read Against two different backdrops: What the reader knows about reading and what the reader knows about life. It’s surprising how many writers forget the life part.
Trusting the reader is a way of controlling The temptation to over-narrate, over-describe, over-interpret, over-signify.
Instead of writing for an imaginary audience of readers, however large or small, Try writing for the reader in yourself, A stand-in for the reader you trust, Who’s always at hand and always consistent. Like being the narrator, this is a kind of role-playing— Impersonating the literal-minded reader and the trusting reader at the same time.
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So revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them. Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic. Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice. Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity. Toward rhythm—where it’s lacking. Toward literalness—as an antidote to obscurity. Toward implication—the silent utterance of your sentences. Toward variation—always. Toward silence—leave some. Toward the name of the world—yours to discover. Toward presence—the quiet authority of your prose.