Sentences

One of my weaknesses — and obsessions — as a writer is the sentence. Sentences are a source of great pleasure and inspiration to me, but I’m aware that I have a lot of work to do to make my own writing as effective, beautiful, or deliberate as the writers I admire.

It happens that I just started Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. She has a whole chapter on sentences, and I thought I’d share a section about Virginia Woolf that I particularly enjoyed, starting with an excerpt from Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

And then Prose’s analysis of this sentence (which she calls “complex and virtuosic”):

     Once again it's worth mentioning that the composition of a sentence such as this one -- or any sentence, really -- is the end result of many minute decisions, and that a different sort of writer might have decided to make the same point in a dozen or so words that could have gotten the idea across as understandably but not nearly so enchantingly, nor so intelligently. Nor would such a sentence have been nearly so much fun to read. Another author could have said, simply: Considering how frequently people get sick, it's strange that writers don't write about illness more often.
     But that sentence would be a far less revealing and reliable introduction to the essay. Because it's not just the content -- the meaning -- of the sentence that prepares us for what is to come. What's in store for us is not a straightforward examination, a glorified statistical analysis of the inexplicable infrequency of illness as a literary subject, but rather an opportunity to watch Woolf's mind skipping from subject to subject in a simultaneously imaginative and logical way, crossing gossamer bridges that never seen like non sequiturs but rather like stepping stones from one clear stream of thought to another, from one engaging observation to the next.
     By the end of the twenty-five page essay, at which point Woolf will have gotten to her real subject, which is the bravery that it requires to continue living in the presence and the face of loss and death, she will have touched on several dozen topics that include reading, language, faith, solitude, science, Shakespeare, the animal kingdom, insanity, suicide, and a brief biography of the third Marchioness of Waterford. In just a few words, the essay skips from a discussion about how hard it is for us to envision heaven to a very different kind of difficulty, reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when we are feeling less than up to par. And so by the time you have come to the end of the essay, you will have realized that a sentence that may have seemed to involve a sort of showing-off was rather an admirably accurate promise about, or introduction to, the sparkling wit and the deep seriousness of everything that has followed.

Some writers are just geniuses — naturally talented, creative, visionary. But the beauty of writing is that I can take my own level of talent and practice and study and learn from others and get better. Other writers have much encouragement to offer about this:

Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, admits his own weakness at the sentence level — “I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it comes to using language. I distrust myself. Consequently, I try every which way with a sentence, then a paragraph, and finally a page, choosing words, selecting pace (I’m obsessed with that, even the pace of a sentence).”

Ray Bradbury offers ideas for how to study the writing of others — “My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm.”

And Annie Dillard both acknowledges the struggle of writing and sets the bar high — “Writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

I can’t argue with that logic.