Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

What we think we know about writing sounds plausible. It confirms our generally false ideas about creativity and genius. But none of this means it’s true.

Here, in short, is what I want to tell you. Know what each sentence says, What it doesn’t say, And what it implies. Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

every sentence has its own motives, its own commitments, Quite apart from yours. It adheres to a set of rules—grammar, syntax, the history and customs of the language, a world of echoes and allusions and social cues—that pay no heed to your intentions, If you don’t heed those rules.

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.

You’ll make long sentences again, but they’ll be short sentences at heart. Sentences listening for the silence around them. Listening for their own pulse.

Sentences listening for the silence around them. Listening for their own pulse.

Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing.

These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in. Distrust them.

What you don’t know about writing is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to grasp.

Whenever you get a glimpse of your ignorance. Don’t fear it or be embarrassed by it. Acknowledge it. What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.

What you’ve been taught. 2. What you assume is true because you’ve heard it repeated by others. 3. What you feel, no matter how subtle. 4. What you don’t know. 5. What you learn from your own experience.

Both models are useless. I should qualify that sentence. Both models are completely useless.

the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning, As if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.

You don’t have to write short sentences forever. Only until you find a compelling reason for a long sentence

To make short sentences, you need to remove every unnecessary word. Your idea of necessary will change as your experience changes. The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity. See which words the sentence can live without, No matter how inconspicuous they are. 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.

Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. In your head. Did no one ever tell you this? That is the writer’s life.

Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed. The rest will need to be fixed. This will be true for a long time.

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.

They believe the genre they’ve chosen Determines the way they should write, Complete with a road map, if only they could find it.

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, No matter what genre you call it.

If you make strong, supple sentences, Improvise, understand and exploit your mistakes, Keep yourself open to the possibilities each sentence creates, Keep yourself open to thought itself, And read like a writer, You can write in any form.

You’re also two people, writer and reader.

You’ve been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning. You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains, Which means that while you were reading, All those millions of words passed by Without teaching you how to make sentences.

Our conventional idea of meaning is something like, “what can be restated.” It means a summary. It means “in other words.”

But no one said a word about following a trail of common sense Through the underbrush of the sentences themselves. No one showed you the affinities at work among those thickets of ink Or explained that the whole life of the language Lies in the solidity of the sentence and cannot be extracted.

No two sentences are the same unless they’re exactly the same, word for word. (And, in a lifetime of writing, it’s unlikely you’ll ever write the same sentence twice.)

what if meaning isn’t the sole purpose of the sentence?

The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say but also to be itself, Not merely a substrate for the extraction of meaning

The words in a sentence have a degree of specificity or concreteness. They have complex histories. They derive from dense contexts—literature, culture, the worlds of work. They’ve been shaped by centuries of writing, Centuries of utterance by living human beings. They resonate with the ghosts of all their earlier forms.

It names the world, using the actual names the world already contains. Perhaps it renames the world. And this is only the beginning.

Much of what’s taught under the name of expository writing could be called “The Anxiety of Sequence.” Its premise is this: To get where you’re going, you have to begin in just the right place And take the proper path, Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude.

Why not begin where you already are? Is there only the one way to get where you’re going?

You were taught so much about outlining and transitions and the appearance of logic. Perhaps you face the difficulties you do Because you were taught so much about outlining And transitions and the appearance of logic.

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.

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.

The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing, A magical truth. You can get anywhere from anywhere, Always and almost instantly.

The gap between sentences is sometimes a pause for breath And sometimes an echoing void. And if you can get anywhere from anywhere, You can start anywhere And end anywhere. There is no single necessary order.

Prose isn’t validated by a terminal meaning

Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed.

The transitions you use should exist for the love of transition, To employ and honor our abiding affection For the turn that so often takes place in our reading, The turn when the story changes or redirects itself. They recall the moment, as children, when we came upon the phrase “And then one day.”

The ability to gather and redirect, To rise above the level of the prose and look around, As if you were standing in a crow’s nest Looking out over a sea of words, Detecting a shift in the wind,

A single crowded sentence means giving up all the possible relations Among shorter sentences—the friction, the tension, The static electricity that builds up between them. A single crowded sentence has only itself to relate to, Only an enervated communion among its parts.

To speak directly to the reader, To decide what dramatic gesture you were making and act upon it? Were you asked to write in order to be heard, to be listened to? Asked to write a piece that mattered to you? Was there ever a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why am I telling you this?”

You learned a strange ventriloquism, Saying things you were implicitly being asked to say, Knowing that no one was really listening.

You were also learning to distrust the reader and yourself.

In school, we’re taught—or we absorb the idea—that writing Flows out of the creative writer like lava down the slope of a volcano. An uninterruptible stream. And yet we study the work itself as if its molten fire had hardened into rock.

Every sentence could have been otherwise but isn’t.

It was all change until the very last second.

It’s the living tissue of a writer’s choices, Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.