First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

by Joe Moran

To write well you need to read and audit your own words, and that is a much stranger and more unnatural act than any of us know.

Stick to time, manner and place and your sentence will never seem cluttered. For you will be relaying an unbroken action in the world of linear time and three-dimensional space within which all of us are stuck. In the early hours I took off my shoes and crept into the spare room. That night I slept fitfully on an inflatable bed. The next day I rose late and went downstairs with a sheepish look.

‘As I altered my syntax,’ W. B. Yeats wrote, ‘I altered my intellect.’ Most skilled writers see writing this way, less as a form of self-expression than as a way of releasing them from the confused and faltering self they usually present to others.

Writing, Kurt Vonnegut once said, allows ‘mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence’.

The smaller the country the larger the stamps. He who lives alone is always on sentry duty. When our friends leave us, they take away our shores.

The bastard child of the epigram is today’s favourite literary form, the inspirational quote.

We want a sentence to be clear but not too clear, odd but not off-puttingly so, so that it can catch us off-guard and remind us that we are alive.

Calling a man a wolf renders him more like a wolf, but it also renders the wolf more like a man.

Verbs born of adjectives – we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose – can be especially cinematic.

The Angel of the North was stolen by art thieves who cut its ankles with an angle grinder, lugged it on to the back of a lorry and made their getaway on the A1. Here the art thieves and their modus operandi draw more attention than Antony Gormley’s artwork. The long phrase at the end of the sentence bears most of the weight.

life. Today’s drug of choice is convenience. We live cut off from its side effects, surrounded by unnoticed magic. We flick a switch and light or heat decants from the expected places. We grab a pint of milk from a supermarket shelf, tap our contactless card at the automated checkout and walk out of the shop without a word.

The Chinese ideogram is both poetic and truthful because it combines noun and verb, painting and music, into one. In ideograms, even abstract nouns are concrete, because the words are also pictures. Spring: the sun rising over green shoots. East: the sun snagged in a tree’s branches. Revenge: hatred coated in snow. Listening: an ear, eye and heart, and a line tracing undivided attention.

A participial phrase can be sneaked in almost anywhere in a sentence to add an espresso shot of verbal verve. That horse trotting up to the fence is angling for a sugar lump. It can stretch out the sentence by adding a coda to the main clause. There I was, stuck on an empty train platform as hope seeped away. When two things happen at once, a main clause and participial phrase bring them neatly together. Please do not drool over my enormous milkshake, panting like a lovesick puppy. One of the habits of good writing is adding these non-finite phrases to main clauses to give them an extra lease of verbal life.

V. S. Naipaul’s use of the past perfect in A House for Mr Biswas suggests sober sagacity: ‘Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.’

Verbs bring a sentence to life whatever form they take. Weighing down your sentence with nouns is always bad. But verbs, behind which you can never hide because they make you say what the subjects of your sentences are doing, are always good.

Bad ideas are the bedfellows of bad prose. Fake thoughts mean fake words.

More useful might be the way of classical rhetoric: learn how a good sentence sounds and mimic it. Instead of draining some finite pool of sense, write in a way that engenders sense out of nothing. That is how Shakespeare learned to write at grammar school – rote learning the art of verbal ornament, getting to know words as sounds and shapes before they calcified into meaning. The rhetorician sees meaning as something reached by tasting and relishing the words, not by trying to make the writing invisible.

Old English verbs, like flee, beckon, bless, chide and chew, are full of, to use an Old English noun, pith.

Poets love these strong and varied vowel sounds. Don Paterson says that poetry differs from ordinary language in the prominence it gives to the vowel. Poems get their music from the vowelly chewiness of single words, and from the dancing cadences of the words joined together. We notice the obvious magic of cadence, but not always the subtler magic of vowels. Poems are felt and we feel them most in our mouths, where the vowel sounds meet. Words are only flat on the page. In the mouth and in the head, where silent reading sounds, they are solid and alive.

The monophthongs of but, come or lip feel abrupt. The longer vowel sounds and diphthongs of need or ground feel slower and more settled.

Varied vowel sounds are not just useful for poets; they bring all writing to life. Lots of short words in a sentence fattens the vowel sounds and cuts down on schwa. Schwa is that little, indistinct uh sound in unstressed syllables – such as the a in above, or sofa.

But fewer writers notice a bigger problem: repeated sounds. The careful ones notice not just words but word kernels, the sounds that live inside words. Unintended echoes of prefixes and suffixes like con-, -ess or -ation make for schwa-sodden prose.

Cut syllables where you can. Blindfolded: blindfold. Unnecessary: needless. Begin: start. Eyesight: sight. Previously: hitherto. Genteel words suffer from syllable flab. Individual: person. Sufficient: enough. Ascertain: learn.

Poets know how to make words distinct from each other, by varying the vowel sounds. But they also know how to bring words together, by using assonance, alliteration and rhyme.

Tyndale is fond of a trick the Greeks called polyptoton, repeating a word but in a different form or part of speech. I have been a stranger in a strange land. Give us this day our daily bread. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Accidental repetition sounds clunky and careless; intentional repetition sounds musical and meant.

So much uncongenial writing comes from the fear of boring others with the obvious. Scared of sounding banal, we muddy our prose and it ends up sounding muddy and banal.

Good writing is done with a cold eye but an open heart.

The plain stylist singles out two word types as especially ripe for cutting: adverbs and adjectives. These parts of speech often betray a nerviness that the point has not been made. Or they are trying to prop up a verb or noun too weak to stand up for itself, or muscle in when the verb or noun is strong enough on its own.

In the parallel reality of amateur fiction, radios blare loudly, hands caress gently and characters saunter nonchalantly. Surprises, meanwhile, are unexpected, flames are burning and fists are closed. (A fist that isn’t closed is just a hand.)

An adjective should make a noun more specific, or vivid, or both. (The same goes for an adverb acting on a verb.) When Laurie Lee writes of his Cotswolds childhood that ‘we led marooned lives, marooned by nature and by lack of transport’, that repeated participle is perfect. Participles, used as modifiers, always inject a shot of verbal energy: running water, broken heart, lost soul, escaped lion.

sentence’s strongest stress falls on its last stressed syllable. Thus a light, unstressed word like to or of may end a sentence tamely. A sentence has a special snap if its last syllable is stressed – a good way to end a paragraph, especially a final one. A short word will do the trick, and even better if it ends with a hard consonant that stops the breath and brings the voice to rest. I binned that brainless book.

Short sentences meant more full stops, which meant more breathing pauses and less chance of mangling the sense. He advised writers to keep sentences under twenty-five words. His golden mean was seventeen words, the average sentence length in Reader’s Digest.

Almost all writers make this mistake: stuffing too much into one sentence. At its root is the same old problem of having too much to say and thinking that the reader will be as fascinated in it as we are.

More likely, long sentences are just overgrown graveyards where unconvincing arguments are conveniently buried.

A long sentence should exult in its own expansiveness, lovingly extending its line of thought while being always clearly moving to its close. It should create anticipation, not confusion, as it goes along. The hard part is telling the difference between the two.

The secret with long sentences, Christensen said, was to set their heart beating at once by putting the subject and main verb at the start.

Write a plain sentence. Spiders are loners. Then just add a phrase, and keep adding. Spiders are loners, working at night to build their webs, cross-hatched creations best seen on dewy mornings, each silken strand shining with water beads, the whole edifice flimsy enough to be destroyed by a stray human leg, and yet, in its filigree and symmetry, a thing of beauty, and also of utility, for this lone spider will spend its whole life in contact with its self-made silk – tightening its lines, slinging lassoes and awaiting its prey. A cumulative sentence starts with the simple thing and then unwraps the more intricate things in little, manageable layers. It spreads the reader’s brain load over the length of the sentence, asking her to understand it as she goes along. Once the basics are down, it takes flight, and tracks the mind’s motion as it snatches at meaning on the fly.

A comma-splice sentence can be fixed by replacing the comma with a semicolon, a colon, a conjunction or a full stop. But often the problem runs deeper: habitual comma-splicers can’t tell the difference between a clause and a phrase. A clause needs a subject and a main verb, and can form a sentence as long as it is not subordinate to another clause. A phrase cannot form a sentence on its own but can, if linked to a main clause, extend one. Often all that is needed to divide a phrase from a clause, or another phrase, is a comma.

A comma is not the only way of dividing up a long sentence. Brackets and dashes let you pull out a phrase so it can be read apart from the main thought, making the whole sentence easier to unload. Bracketing a phrase off puts less stress on it than parenthesizing it between commas; dashes put more stress on it. Imagine reading the sentence aloud. You drop your voice to bridge over words in brackets (to signal that this is a slightly sotto voce sideshow to the main thought) and then resume a normal tone. But you raise your voice when bridging over words in dashes – like this bit that I want to stress because I am getting into my stride now – to play up what they enclose.

‘Country music,’ the songwriter Harlan Howard said, ‘is three chords and the truth.’ Fairy tales follow the same rule of three. The princess guesses Rumpelstiltskin’s name on the third go. The three little pigs build houses of straw, wood and brick. The three bears have three chairs, three beds and three bowls of porridge.

Nominalizations can clog up sentences with nouniness, but they can also be handy pseudo-pronouns if you want to mention something a second time. When the bird started speaking I was astonished. That it spoke in Greek compounded my astonishment.

When you vary the length of your sentences, two things happen. First, as you fit your thoughts into shorter and longer forms, you come up with better wordings. Second, your writing will, as if by magic, fill with life and voice.

They use pure topic sentences rarely and wrap-up sentences hardly ever. In the first paragraph of a piece, they will often put the main point at the end, so the reader can feel out the writer’s voice before finding out what the beef is. I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here, that delayed drop is saying, then it tells them. Skilled writers will also often put the point of the final paragraph at its end, bringing the piece to a rounded close. If they do start a paragraph with a topic sentence, the other sentences will be a loose-limbed pirouette around the topic, not a series of hard proofs to support it.

The style of ad copy should be clear but also a little cool and oblique, implying a smartness just beyond the reader’s reach. The tone should be irreverent, disarming, self-deprecating – and yet avoid being too much of any of these, so as not to grate.

The prose must feel as if it is going somewhere. An old copywriter’s trick is to write the start and finish and then fill in the middle.

In writing his journal this deeply debilitated man attained a kind of nobility. He had found a way, in Luria’s words, ‘to live, not merely exist’. Luria’s book about him, The Man with a Shattered World, leaves him still living with his parents in his home town of Komovsk, sitting at his desk each morning, working on his journal. He died in 1993 at the age of seventy-three, still writing sentences to himself.

The most reliable antidepressant is rekindled curiosity, and only the curious try to draw bits of the world together into words.

Twenty Sentences on Sentences Listen, read and write for the sentences, because the sentence must be got right or nothing will be right. A sentence is not about self-expression but about editing your thoughts into a partly feigned fluency, building a ladder of words up to a better self. Train your ears, for how a sentence sounds in the head is also what it says to the heart. The bones of a sentence are just a noun and a verb, so put the right nouns and verbs in the right slots and the other words fall into place around them. Good prose is not a windowpane: a sentence reads best when the writer has tasted and relished the words, not tried to make them invisible. Your sentences should mimic the naturalness of speech, so long as you remember that speech is not really natural and that writing is not really like speech. Short words are best, for their clarity and chewy vowels, but the odd long word in a sentence draws just the right amount of attention to itself. Verbal economy in a sentence is a virtue but an overprized one: words are precious but they need to be spent. Learn to love the full stop, and think of it as the goal towards which your words adamantly move – because a good sentence, like a good life, needs a good death. If you keep the phrases short, and leave the longest phrase until last, the reader can cut a long sentence up into pieces in her head and swallow them whole. Your sentences should sound slightly more naive than you are, for good writing is done with a ...