Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

The answers to these questions may be nothing more than Noticing the effect of asking them.

Revise a sentence by Austen or Baldwin? Why not? It’s an experiment. Try it, and you begin to glimpse the inherent necessity binding the writer’s choices together.

They’re echoes and responses, moments of candor and their aftereffects, Feats of resilience and attention, sound and impulsion.

This isn’t a description of the writer’s genius or inspiration or intention. It describes the way every sentence influences every other sentence. It describes the writer’s alertness to her sentences. The way her sentences listen to one another.

Prose is the residue, the consequence, of the writer’s choices, Choices about the shape of each sentence And how each sentence shapes the others.

You’ve been taught to believe that what you discover by thinking, By examining your own thoughts and perceptions, Is unimportant and unauthorized. As a result, you fear thinking, And you don’t believe your thoughts are interesting, Because you haven’t learned to be interested in them. There’s another possibility: You may be interested in your thoughts, But they don’t have much to do with anything you’ve ever been asked to write. The same is true of what you notice. You don’t even notice what you notice, Because nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important. And if you do notice something that interests you, It doesn’t have much to do with anything you’ve ever been asked to write. But everything you notice is important.

If you notice something, it’s because it’s important. But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice, And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you.

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.

I know you’re not really interested in what I think or notice.” But that’s the very thing the reader is interested in If your sentences allow him to be.

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.

Noticing means thinking with all your senses. It’s also an exercise in not writing.

So what is noticing? A pinpoint of awareness, The detail that stands out amid all the details. It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing you notice And paying attention as you free yourself.

What do you notice? Whatever you notice. Behavior, thought, overheard words, light, resemblance, Emotion, totality, particularity,

What you notice has no meaning. Be sure to assign it none.

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.

Notice what you notice and let it go.

Catching a phrase in your head, Exploring the possibilities it occasions, Then releasing it, Making nothing more than a vanishing sentence, Which you do not transfix in some collection of sentences Or etherize in a jar.

A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language, A renaming of the already named.

One of the hardest things about learning to read well is learning to believe that every sentence has been consciously, purposely shaped by the writer. This is only credible in the presence of excellent writing.

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 so...

Don’t let the word “years” alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months.

You may think a volunteer sentence is an inspired one Simply because it volunteers. This is one reason to abandon the idea of inspiration. All the idea of inspiration will do Is stop you from revising a volunteer sentence. Only revision will tell you whether a sentence that offers itself is worth keeping.

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

The problem most writers face isn’t writing. It’s consciousness. Attention. Noticing.

The very nature of reading encourages us to believe we’re looking through the prose to worlds on the other side of the ink.

Try reading the words on the page as though they were meant to be spoken plainly To a listener who is both you and not you— An imaginary listener seated not too far away. That way your attention isn’t only on the words you’re reading. It’s on the transmission of those words. As you read aloud, catch the rhythm of the sentences without overemphasizing it. Read so the listener can hear the shape of the syntax. You be the listener, not another person. You’ll be stopping often.

Don’t read straight through without stopping. Read until your ear detects a problem. Stop there.

No one taught you to disregard these inner sensations. No one taught you to be aware of them either. No one even acknowledged that they exist. You thought they weren’t significant— Mainly because they were occurring within you. And what do you know (you’re always tempted to ask)? You know a lot, especially in a preconscious kind of way.

Variation is the life of prose, in length and in structure.

How many sentences begin with the subject? How many begin with an opening phrase before the subject? Or with a word like “When” or “Since” or “While” or “Because”? How many begin with “There” or “It”? What kinds of nouns do you see? Abstractions? Generalizations? Multisyllabic Latinate nouns ending in “-ion”? Or are they the solid names of actual things? Is the subject of the sentence an actor capable of performing the action of the verb? Can you adjust the sentence so it is? Or does the subject of the sentence hide the action of entities that are able to act—humans, for instance? How close is the subject to its verb? Are they separated by an inserted phrase? What does that do to the velocity of the sentence? How many of the verbs are variants of “to be”—“is,” “are,” “were,” “was,” and so on? Are the verbs active, energetic? Or do they merely connect or arrange or present or relate? Are the constructions passive? How often does the word “as” appear, and in which of its many senses? Are you using “with” as a preposition or as a false conjunction, a false relative pronoun? Are there inadvertent repetitions—words repeated unintentionally? Is every phrase in its proper place, every word? Is everything next to what it should be next to? Anything outright ungrammatical? Words used improperly? Do verbs that require direct objects (transitive verbs) lack them? If there’s a modifying phrase at the start of the sentence, does it modify the subject of the sentence? (It must.) Can the...

A good example: the word autopsia, Which I came across while working on a book of my own. I thought—by inference from the context and by analogy with “autopsy”— That autopsia meant a collection of stuffed or dissected animals, The sort of collection a natural historian might accumulate. But if I had thought more carefully and considered the word’s roots, I would have realized that it means A collection of objects one has “seen for oneself.” I discovered that when I looked up the familiar word “autopsy,” Which means, etymologically, to see for oneself.

every word carries a social freight.

Ask yourself too how present the writer feels to the reader. How strong is your sense of the speaker or narrator? How is that sense created, and where do you detect it?

Imagine it this way: Every piece is an ecosystem of words and structures and rhythms. How rich and diverse is the ecosystem in each of these pieces? From which do you derive the most pleasure? And why?

the effect of these discoveries may be nothing more than Noticing the effect of making these discoveries.

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. You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own. You have only your own working world to consider. The reader reads in another world entirely.

If you think that writing—the act of composition—should flow, and it doesn’t, what are you likely to feel? Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid. The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow. But if you accept that writing is hard work, And that’s what it feels like while you’re writing, Then everything is just as it should be. Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat. It’s a sign of engagement. The difference is all in your mind, but what a difference. The difficulty of writing isn’t a sign of failure. It’s simply the nature of the work itself.

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.

It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence And adjusting it until you can. Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.

The memory of the excitement you felt when those words “came to you.” (Where did they “come” from?)

Think of all the requirements writers imagine for themselves: A cabin in the woods A plain wooden table Absolute silence A favorite pen A favorite ink A favorite blank book A favorite typewriter A favorite laptop A favorite writing program A large advance A yellow pad A wastebasket A shotgun The early light of morning The moon at night A rainy afternoon A thunderstorm with high winds The first snow of winter A cup of coffee in just the right cup A beer A mug of green tea A bourbon Solitude 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.

Then you know exactly what you’re doing And are therefore manipulating the reader. Which, of course, you are. We hate the thought of being manipulated, And yet reading means surrendering to the manipulations of the author’s prose. This is an experience we love, love so much, in fact, That we hope to be able to manipulate readers ourselves someday. Readers usually choose not to think of it that way. They prefer not to think of it at all. But you should.

Writing can’t convey sincerity—or any other emotion or mood in the writer—simply because you feel it.

Sincerity is a dramatic role for you and your sentences.