Several Short Sentences About Writing
Everything you notice is important.Let me say that a different way: If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
^^ Verlyn KlinkenborgI'll read just about any writing book I can, and I tend to have a pretty short list of ones I find worth marking up. In Several Short Sentences, the several short sentences are a very literal thing as the way Verlyn Klinkenborg writes breaks up sentences into their own line and there're no chapters to speak of in the book. It was a fun read, and I found plenty of good takeaways and encouragements here to heartily recommend giving this one a look.
Several Short Sentences About WritingBY Verlyn Klinkenborg
The following are excerpts taken from Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing. Bold, italics, and notes are mine. Everything else is Verlyn's.
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Many people assume there’s a correlation between sentence length and the sophistication or complexity of an idea or thought—even intelligence generally.There isn’t.--Writing short sentences restores clarity, the directness of subject and verb. It forces you to discard the strong elements of long sentences,Like relative pronouns and subordinate clauses,And the weak ones as well: Prepositional chains, passive constructions, and dependent phrases.--Learn to use the position of a sentence, the position of a word— First? last?—as an intensifier, an accent in itself.Can a short sentence sound like a harbinger? An adumbration? Can it sound like a reprise or a coda? Listen.--One way to keep sentences short is to keep the space between them as empty as possible. I don’t mean the space between the period at the end of one sentence and the first word of the next. I mean the space between the period and the subject of the next sentence.--Writing by implication should be one of your goals.--The sentence itself has a rhythm. It has velocity. It uses metaphor and simile Or hyperbole or metonymy or alliteration or internal rhyme or one of hundreds of other rhetorical devices.--
Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.
--Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you. The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughtsAnd the value of your own perceptions.--Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, So they never learn how to notice,Not even what interests them.Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed, Already sifted and sorted and categorizedBy everyone else, by people with real authority.And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.--If this is the case—making, fixing, killing, arranging—how can your writing possibly flow? It can’t. Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.--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.--Most of all, take notes on what interests you. Be certain you’ve marked out what interests you.--The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written. If you’d begun another way, made a different turn, even started in a different mood,A different piece would have come into being.The writer’s world is full of parallel universes. You discover, word by word, the one you discover. Ten minutes later—another hour of thought—and you would have found your way into a different universe. 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.--
Notes on revising
Revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them.Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic.Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice.Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity.Toward rhythm—where it’s lacking.Toward literalness—as an antidote to obscurity.Toward implication—the silent utterance of your sentences.Toward variation—always.Toward silence—leave some.Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.Toward presence—the quiet authority of your prose.And when things are really working,That’s when it’s time to break what already works,And keep breaking itUntil you find what’s next.--You can get the book here.