One Sentence at a Time

The great thing about writing a book is you only have to know the next sentence or two to write. Maybe you know a whole scene that comes next. Maybe you know the next chapter. Maybe you think you know the whole next section of the book. Good for you.

But for the rest of us, all we have is the next sentence. And when we’ve written that one, we get to figure out the sentence after that.

Sentence after sentence builds up, day after day, until we get to the point where we realize that we’re missing a few things, and we go back and add in a sentence here, and a sentence there. Or sometimes even a whole chapter, written sentence by sentence, that was missing before.

You write a whole novel this way, a sentence at a time, bit by bit, never completely sure what the whole shape of it is.

If it helps you to sketch out the whole shape so that you don’t worry about that while you’re writing your sentences, that’s fine. No one kicks you out of the club of sentence writers just because you have a little quirk. But outlining or whatever your ritual is doesn’t let you escape from writing one sentence at a time.

There’s no easier or harder way to write. Just one sentence at a time.