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

by Joe Moran

What I have learned is that trainee writers do not need to be able to parse every sentence into its parts. They just have to learn to care. Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, wrote that ‘what is done in love is well done’. The purest form of love is just caring – paying someone else the compliment of your curiosity and holding them in your head, if only for a moment. The purest form of praise is to pay attention. This is how we offer up the simplest of blessings to the world around us and to the lives of others. ‘Attention,’ wrote the French thinker Simone Weil, ‘is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ Give your sentences that courtesy and they will repay you.

The word sentence comes from the Latin sentire, ‘to feel’. A sentence must be felt, and a feeling is not the final word, but something that grows, ripens and fades like anything else that is alive.

However many words are made, they still snap together with the same force, so long as we learn how to snap them together well.

A classic way to do this is time, manner and place.

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.

Reading a sentence should never be a grim duty. This obdurate fact about writing stays true however much you scale it up. Most paragraphs are longer than they need to be, likewise most chapters. Most books go on for fifty pages longer than they should. We forget all this because it is less effort to speak than to listen.

I have said that a sentence is a gift. But it is an unusual kind of gift, given with little knowledge of the recipient, or any certainty that there will even be one.

You acquire a written voice not when you learn to sound like yourself, but when you perfect the knack of slotting words together so that they sound like a convincing impression of a whole, consistent person.

A written voice is a composite of your skill at selecting and arranging words and your genuine care for and commitment to what they are saying. That voice is not you, but it may be a buried, better-said version of you. It

This, it says, is what life looks like from here.

‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said,’ wrote André Gide. ‘But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.’ Our

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.

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.

Vary the length of your sentences, and your words will be filled with life and music.

A sentence is a gift from writer to reader,