Last night I pulled a book off my shelf just for the pleasure of reading about writing. You may know it, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. Right off the bat, I was pulled in by this counsel:

Know what each sentence says,
what it doesn’t say.
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important.
But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial.

This got me to thinking about sentences. As teachers, we love to teach story. We often begin teaching writers about story hoping that through engagement with narrative they will grasp the idea that sentences tell their story. I don’t know about you, but often, I observed that the concept of sentence remained elusive to many young writers.

I’m not here to criticize or to fix anything, but to share my renewed respect for the sentence.

A book I read recently captivated me with its clarity and beauty of language at the sentence level. This is Happiness by Niall Williams was a book full of gorgeous sentences which I happily underlined. Here are a few examples of sentences that caught my attention:

Chapter 1 was one sentence: It had stopped raining.

p. 4 – Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere.

p. 19 – As a shield against despair she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

p. 29 – I leaned back into the brown smells of his chest and there I left the world…Ganga [grandfather] understood that the ageless remedy for a boy whose mother was ill was to bring him to see the ocean.

p. 33 – It was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.

To me, these are not fancy sentences. Instead, through careful use of everyday language we experience something fresh. Isn’t it such a miracle that our daily words can be arranged over and over in new ways? Someday, I hope to be able to craft a sentence that says just what I want it to say. A truth I know. A beauty I’ve witnessed. A door opening from me to you.

Thank you to all who make this writing space
a place of safety, support, and beauty.