#sentence-making

[bettsfic]

betts i forgot how to write 😭😭😭 i try to write or edit something and!!!! i don't know how!!!! i've never been a particularly good writer but at least before i had some kind of, like... intuition? i could look at a phrase and think "you'd sound better this other way", or write something in a particular way because i thought it sounded better, but now i try to do it and it just doesn't work, my mind goes blank 😭😭

that can be very scary! the latter thinking you describe, intuition, is what i call writing inertia, where if you're writing pretty consistently, sentence-making becomes easier. sentence-making is a surprisingly mathy process, where a lot of it is dependent on repeated patterns and structures, and rotating through myriad options for sentence construction moves much more quickly because you have the momentum of all the sentences you've written recently still in your head. like how when you start riding a bike you're all wobbly until you get moving.

the only thing to do is to wobble (write stuff that really sucks) until you pick up some inertia again and steady out.

[hillsidewriting]

"He Taught Me How Sentences Worked"

Q: Did any writer influence you more than others?

JOAN DIDION: I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.

—from The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, No. 71

[hillsidewriting]

A Sentence as Clean as a Bone

Q: What are your first drafts like?

JAMES BALDWIN: They are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Don’t describe it, show it. That’s what I try to teach all young writers — take it out! Don’t describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.

Q: As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?

BALDWIN: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

—from The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78

[hillsidewriting]

A Different World, Depending

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

—from "Thank You, Esther Forbes," by George Saunders  

[hillsidewriting]

The Sentence and Your Discontent

Sometimes it’s just the tiniest kernel of something you enjoyed writing. Then, once you put it down on the page, and write it and rewrite it, it’s actually your own discontent with it that, in some slow mysterious way, urges it to higher ground. And often it will do so in ways that surprise you.

—George Saunders, in "George Saunders: On Story," by Redglass Pictures

[hillsidewriting]

Stay With It

I knew I had to stay with it as long as it took to write a sentence I could respect. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do — to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.  

—Vivian Gornick, The Paris Review

[hillsidewriting]

Getting Things in Order

Writing, we all know, is not just about end result, the final output; it is also about the process that leads to the result. All attempts at getting the words in their right, their inevitable-feeling order must likewise count as writing. In this regard, I often think of Frank Budgen's account of meeting James Joyce on the streets of Zurich and finding the Master quite pleased with himself. Budgen asked him if the work were going well, and Joyce answered that it was indeed: he had given the day to getting the words he had chosen for a particular sentence into the right sequence. He thought he had finally found it

—Sven Birkerts, "And What Is Writing" (AGNI 70)