Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

The only link between you and the reader is the sentence you’re making.

It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. It’s easier to tell what you’re saying in a short sentence.

Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write. You can’t revise or discard what you don’t consciously recognize.

What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.

Learn to distrust words like “genius,” “inspiration,” “flow,” “natural,” and “organic” when you think about your work.

There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences. But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness. They’re pasted together with false syntax And rely on words like “with” and “as” to lengthen the sentence.

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.

You’ll be tempted to say, “But short sentences sound so choppy.” Only a string of choppy sentences sounds choppy. Think about variation and rhythm, The rhythm created by two or three sentences working together, Rhythm as sound and echo but also rhythm as placement.

It’s perfectly possible to make wretched short sentences. But it’s hard to go on making them for long because they sound so wretched And because it’s easy to fix them. Making them longer is not the way to fix them.

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.

The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence.

You already possess some important assets. You know how to talk. How to read. And, presumably, how to listen. You’ve grown up in language. You have the evidence of your senses. The upwelling of your emotions. The persistent flow of thoughts through your mind. The habit of talking to yourself or staging conversations in your head. Imagination and memory. With luck, you were read aloud to as a child. So you know how sentences sound when read aloud And how stories are shaped and a great deal about rhythm, Almost as much as you did when you were ten years old. You may even have the capacity of knowing what interests you— Or, better yet, knowing how to detect what interests you.

There’s another trouble with meaning. We’ve been taught to believe it comes near the end. As if the job of all those sentences were to ferry us along to the place where meaning is enacted—to “the point,” Just before the conclusion, Which restates “the point.”

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.

Are you that kind of reader? Do you tumble, uncomprehending, through the gaps between paragraphs? Do you trip over ellipses? Do you require constant supervision while walking down corridors of prose? Do you lose the writer’s train of thought unless you’re reminded of it constantly?

If you’ve written clearly— And you know what you’ve said and implied As surely as you know what you haven’t said— The reader will never get lost reading your prose Or have trouble following you without transitions. A reader is likelier to get lost cutting his way through The jungle of transitions than crossing the gap of a well-made ellipsis.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization. No matter who you are. Only you can authorize yourself. You do that by writing well, by constant discovery. No one else can authorize you. No one. This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s as gradual as the improvement in your writing.

Start by learning to recognize what interests you. Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, So they never learn how to notice, Not even what interests them. Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed, Already sifted and sorted and categorized By everyone else, by people with real authority. And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.

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.

Rushing to notice never works, Nor does trying to notice. Attention requires a cunning passivity.

You’ll never run out of noticings, And there are more than enough sentences to let a few go.

A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain. You can’t fix a cliché by using it ironically. You can’t make it less gangrenous by appearing to “quote” it or invert it or joke about it. 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. The only thing to do with a cliché is send it to the sports page Or the speechwriters, where it will live forever.

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,

The writer’s job isn’t accepting sentences. The job is making them, word by word.

When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way, What choices were made. You become not only a living concordance of your work, able to say where almost any word appears. You also carry within you the memory of all the decisions you made while shaping your prose, Decisions invisible to the reader except in the residue of your prose.

If you don’t know what I mean by rhythm, Imagine a singer’s phrasing of the lyric in a song. In prose, it’s subtler, the beat and the music quieter. Try reading aloud some of everything you read, no matter what it is, A couple of paragraphs from the newspaper or a textbook or a novel or a poem. Especially a poem. This is how you begin to understand rhythm and its absence.

And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind writer’s block. So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s loss of confidence And forgetting to think And failing to prepare And not reading enough And giving up on patience And hastening to write And fearing your audience And never really trying to understand how sentences work. Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.

There’s suddenly a wider variety of tone, an emotional latitude, A sense that the reader will be able to fill in the gaps, Even the possibility of humor. 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 can make any piece feel like an informal letter By using the generic characteristics of an informal letter. But it’s far easier to get that feel By writing to the reader you imagine reading it. The reader you construct in your imagination Changes the way you write almost without your noticing it.

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.

It’s true that the simplest revision is deletion. But there’s often a fine sentence lurking within a bad sentence, A better sentence hiding under a good sentence. Work word by word until you discover it. Don’t try to fix an existing sentence with minimal effort, Without reimagining it. 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.

The order of what you’re writing is determined by your interest in the material And the sense you make of it and by your presence to the reader.