How to Write Sentences

No author wants to write a good sentence. Why should they? You don’t fill one of those fashionable, mammoth volumes with sentences. You fill them with words. A 2000-page tome about white guilt will earn you tenure at any one of the historically-white universities. A trilogy has even more words, and an unfinished, ever-growing novel is close to godliness. Modern writers need words. They need them fast. Good sentences will only get in the way.

So here are my eleven theses—eleven solutions to traditional, awful sentences.

A word of caution. When I say, “don’t write X, write Y”, I don’t mean, “write a sentence similar to Y,” I mean “write Y exactly.” You might fret that your astute readers will pick up on the idiosyncratic sentence repetition among today’s top writers — they won’t, no one reads, we have the evidence to support this — but you can’t forestall ignorance indefinitely. Also, you have an easy response:

“Yes, this is the exact same sentence that appears in Judith Trunsey’s ‘Light Falling on Hard Tack’. We both drink from the same well, that of eucharistic literature, stories that exist only in their constant repetition and performance. Past generations had theatre, but no one likes black boxes anymore. Our theatre is the cyclic play of these sentences, the bold premiere in his book, the matinee in hers, the reunion tour in mine. Are there connections between our stories? No. Yes.”

Without further ado, “How to Write Sentences”.

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Never write, “He was sad”. Instead, write “He laughed to himself, grimacing in pain and tearing up their picture.”

Never write, “They had sex”. Instead, write “She looked at him with the kind of doe eyes that he’d grow to resent after the unplanned pregnancy.”

Never write, “He missed her”. Instead, write “They hadn’t really met, but he felt a great kinship with the picture of her at brunch, cached from a time when her profile wasn’t private.”

Never write, “He hit the home run”. Instead, write “He didn’t swing to win, he swung because his hypertrophied arms had swollen into grapefruits custom-made for bearhugging Make-a-Wish kids.”

Never write, “He popped a sick ollie”. Instead, write “Down. Down. Down. You have to go down to go up. It’s called investment. It’s called getting air.”

Never write, “He wondered”. Instead, write “His blue eyes flicked from her face to the dog’s. ‘What has my wife become? I mean, what has my LIFE become?’ [Cue laugh track]”

Never write, “They married”. Instead write “Her wedding dress, salvaged from the wreck, didn’t fit any of his best friends, so he gave up on love entirely.”

Never write, “He was loved and admired”. Instead, write “His sexual potency was monomaniacally inspired by the galley proofs of his upcoming novel.”

Never write, “They danced”. Instead, write “He struggled to remember what the dressform had taught him about anatomy and physics.”

Never write, “He died”. Instead write, “Autoasphyxiation again? When will one of these emaciated ponyboys start listening to Usher?”

Never write, “No author wants to write a good sentence.” Instead write, “He was halfway through his Grantland blog about how Stephen Curry was like Stephen Malkmus when the WYSIWYG editor refreshed and he lost everything he had written.”

—EH w/ OLB