Book Notes: Several Short Sentences About Writing

Book: Several Short Sentences About Writing
Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg

After putting it off for months, I finally got to this one during the winter break when I was in-between books. I am averse to pointed advice from strangers, and I will not be taking the opinions from a book written the way this strange way. So I thought. But the suggestions made sense, the prose persuasive, and I found myself taking notes. I began to wonder if I was liking it because it was appealing to my existing prejudices. I stopped then and looked up the author, Verlyn Klinkenborg, to see what his more mainstream work was like. That's when I discovered his review of Kim Stanley Robinson's The High Sierras and a few of his pieces from the New York Times. I found it more than reassuring. I am now a fan. This is someone who knows what he is talking about.

Good writing is intentional. Every word is where it is because the author has deliberately placed it there. This is one of the two high-utility takeaways — among many — from the book. The other one is instead of just obsessing over meaning of a text, you need to pay attention to the structure and literal significance of the prose. This has already started informing how I read. It is more rewarding than one would think.

This is a rare book worth reading and re-reading.

Highlights

• Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head. In your head. Did no one ever tell you this? That is the writer’s life. Never imagine you’ve left the level of the sentence behind.
• A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, The relentless exploration of possibilities, The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say The possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.
• You can only become a better writer by becoming a better reader. You have far more experience as a reader than you do as a writer. You’ve read millions of words arranged by other writers. How many sentences have you made so far?
• Prose isn’t validated by a terminal meaning. If you love to read—as surely you must—you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading, Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by, Not biding your time until the meaning comes along.
• Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions. Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again. It’s the living tissue of a writer’s choices, Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race. Interrogate those choices. Imagine the reason behind each sentence. Why is it shaped just this way and not some other way? Why that choice of words? Why that phrasing? Why that rhythm?
  • One of the hardest things about learning to read well is learning to believe that every sentence has been consciously, purposely shaped by the writer. This is only credible in the presence of excellent writing.
• The urge to write is so strong. Aspiring writers want so badly to be pouring something out of themselves. You need a place where you can practice noticing and making sentences— Observations of genuine clarity, Sentences of vigor, invention, and self-perception. That place would be your mind.
• When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way, What choices were made. You become not only a living concordance of your work, able to say where almost any word appears. You also carry within you the memory of all the decisions you made while shaping your prose, Decisions invisible to the reader except in the residue of your prose.
• Do you remember, in school, going around the room, Each student in turn reading a paragraph out loud? Remember how well some students read and others, how badly? It was a difference in comprehension, Not of the sentence’s meaning, But of its texture, pace, structure, actuality.
• The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow. But 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.
  • And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind writer’s block. So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s loss of confidence. And forgetting to think. And failing to prepare. And not reading enough. And giving up on patience. And hastening to write. And fearing your audience. And never really trying to understand how sentences work. Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself, or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.
• Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state. Daily. Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences—will not.
• Write consciously, deliberately. Learn how to get out of trouble. Learn how to free yourself when you’re stuck. Learn how to know what you’re doing when you’re making sentences.
• Try this: No outline. Research, reading, noticing, interviewing, traveling, paying attention, note taking—all the work you do to understand the subject, whatever it is, whatever kind of piece you’re writing. Reread your notes, and take notes on them. And again. Take notes on your thoughts. Most of all, take notes on what interests you. Be certain you’ve marked out what interests you. Don’t make an outline from your notes. Don’t turn your notes into a road map for the sentences to come.
• How do you begin to write? Look for a sentence that interests you. A sentence that might begin the piece. Don’t look too hard. Just try out some sentences. Lots of them. See how they sound. Do any of them sound first? Discard them readily, easily, with no sense of loss, then try out some more. This is important. Get used to discarding sentences.
• Don’t give in to the memory of your school writing, The claustrophobic feeling that there’s only one right order of arguing, proving, demonstrating, The assumption that logic persuades the reader Instead of the clarity of what you’re saying.
  • Your job isn’t to arrange chunks of evidence, Chunks of the world in the order you gather them. Your job is to atomize everything you touch, To dissect your evidence into its details and particulars and Resist the inherent jargon of your subject, Breaking apart every clod of words you come across. Your job is to undo the adhesiveness of the evidence you’ve gathered, Its tendency to clump into indissoluble units.
• All the authority a writer ever possesses is the authority the reader grants him. Yet the reader grants it in response to her sense of the writer’s authority. Authority arises only from clarity of language and clarity of perception. Authority is how the reader’s trust is engaged.

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