Several Short Sentences About Writing

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

You be the narrator. Let us be the readers. You’ll discover that being the narrator is not the same as being yourself. It’s a role, and a dramatic one. Absorb it and inhabit it.

You’re always building a habitation in your prose, A place from which you speak to the reader. You’re never merely, sincerely yourself. The question then becomes, who are you? That’s a question every piece needs to answer.

the tyranny of what exists.

Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision.

You’ll be looking for flaws. But also for opportunities—and for missed opportunities: Things you might have said, ideas you might have developed, Connections you might have made.

Revision is thinking applied to language, An opening and reopening of discovery, A search for the sentence that says the thing you had no idea you could say Hidden inside the sentence you’re making.

Revision is the writer’s reading, The habit of noticing choices, Noticing that every sentence might be otherwise but isn’t.

Language writhes with urgency to be saying something. Your job is to understand and control that urgency.

But you’ll also find yourself making discoveries you never could have predicted, Finding thoughts you never knew existed because they didn’t exist

The sentence becomes the thought by bringing it fully into being. We assume that thought shapes the sentence. But thought and sentence are always a collaboration, The sum of what can be said and what you’re trying to say.

Soon, you’ll grasp that sentences originate and take their endless variety From within you, from your reading, Your tactile memory for rhythms, Your sense of the playfulness at the heart of the language, Your perception of the world.

Squander your material. Don’t ration it, saving the best for last. You don’t know what the best is. Or the last. Use it up. There’s plenty more where that came from. You won’t make new discoveries until you need them.

Notice your thoughts, See if you can feel your awareness illuminating them.

How do you begin to write? Look for a sentence that interests you. A sentence that might begin the piece. Don’t look too hard. Just try out some sentences. Lots of them. See how they sound. Do any of them sound first?

The reader doesn’t need grabbing. She needs to feel your interest in the sentence you’ve chosen to make.

You—your role as a writer, the role you construct, your presence to the reader—you and your first sentence begin together.

The beginning is one sentence long.

Out of all the possibilities created by the first sentence, Make a second sentence, full of more possibilities, even disconnected ones. See if you can write the sentence that arises from the first sentence, Not the sentence that follows from it, Even if that means the second sentence lies at some distance from the first.

Resist the temptation to rush ahead to see where they’re pointing. What matters isn’t where they’re pointing But what interests you in the sentence you’re making, Which you may have to discover as you make it.

Don’t steer the sentences where you want them to go. See if you can follow them there.

Every sentence is optional until it proves otherwise. Writing is the work of discovery.

You’ll discover that the act of making sentences in your head— Composing and revising at the same time, Making them sharper and more accurate— Tends to uncover thoughts you didn’t know you had, Allowing you to say things you didn’t know you knew how to say In sentences stronger than you knew you could make.

The reader will feel the freshness of the discovery in the prose Because the writer almost always reveals the excitement of making a discovery In the rhythm and the vividness of the sentences themselves.

You’ll realize that thinking and remembering are almost indistinguishable.

You’re not only imagining sentences you want to write down. You’re also reexploring your subject, sifting your research And all the elements that make up your subject Even as you’re imagining sentences. Soon the distinction between thinking about your subject and Thinking about sentences vanishes.

You’ll have stopped making sentences in quarantine, In the special ward set aside for sentence making once the outline is finished, The way you were taught in school. Instead, writing becomes intrinsic to the act of thinking, Completely intertwined with it.

Everything about thinking makes us nervous. We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there. We don’t know when we’ll come to the end of our thoughts, But we think it may be soon. Why?

The writer’s world is full of parallel universes. You discover, word by word, the one you discover.

The piece is permeable to the world around it. It’s responsive to time itself, to the very hour of its creation. This is an immensely freeing thing to understand. It liberates you from the anxiety of sequence, The fear that there’s only one way through your subject, Only one useful approach.

Bring your intentions, by all means, but accept that the language we use Is a language of accidentals, always skewing away from the course we set. This is something not to mourn but to revel in— Not only for the friction and sideslip inherent in the language But for freeing us from the narrowness of our preconceptions.

Imagine this: The piece you’re writing is about what you find in the piece you’re writing. Nothing else.

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.

How soon will you be getting good? Why not ask how soon you’ll be getting clear?

And then one day You’ll write a sentence that says more than its words alone can say. You’ll know that it says what you mean without having said it, And you’ll know that the reader knows it too. This will sound impossible until you’ve done it once. Then you’ll see how possible it is, and how inviting. It lets the reader complete the thought. It sets an echo in motion. This is writing by implication.

Don’t let the success of a sentence or a paragraph or a piece deter you. Some writers freeze, fearing the next one won’t be as good. Some writers polish a single paragraph until it glows, Fearing that the next paragraph will ruin it somehow. Accept it: you’ll surely fail again and just as surely succeed.