We've been at this for a couple of months, and I wanted to pause and reflect on the why. Why scrutinize the sentence? Why labor over them, revising and revising, reading voraciously, on the lookout for stunning sentences?
What, exactly, keeps the sparks firing?
For me, the first spark is the desire to make something beautiful. It's as simple and as difficult as that. These are hard times, and perhaps there have always been such times, but I find falling headfirst into a beautiful sentence a miraculous thing. It's even more amazing if I can make a beautiful sentence. And if I manage that—which means it’s a good day—maybe my reader will have a momentary reprieve from the incongruent, the unjust, the horrible. That would be another miraculous thing.
Then there's the profound and fundamental. If you think of form and not content, if you strip down words to their essence, words are sounds. Writers can put these sounds together every which way. How you put the sentence together—the rhythm and sound, the syntax and diction—generates a layer of meaning separate from the content. "Remember," writes the poet Robert Frost, "the sentence sound often says more than the words."
The pentameter line (five-foot) most nearly matches the breath capacity of English lungs—that is, speaking in English. So, for instance, if you write a shorter sentence, you shorten the reader's breath. When the body takes small sips of air it transmutes into anxiety. Now, suppose you use short sentences to describe a character heading to work. Your reader begins to breathe differently and experiences anxiety or agitation or restlessness—without you, the writer, ever mentioning it.
Wait, you say. People usually don't read stories out loud. How are they hearing the sentences? Studies have found that the auditory processing part of the brain lights up even when you read silently. Sound is invoked, even in silence.
This is the profound and powerful part; what this means is that sound is in direct conversation with the body. It circumvents the intellect. Writers have an opportunity to create an experience for the reader, an experience that the reader feels in the body. We writers can create a reality by using sound that someone will believe, not because they are told (which doesn't work anyway) but because it is experienced.
Frost says the ear is the only true writer, the only true reader. The poet John Keats wrote, "Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved on our pulses." What Keats means is that readers will believe in the reality of the story if they feel it.
So here we are, creating realities at the sensate level, using what Frost calls "those living things flying around." Thank you for joining me in this adventure.
A Little Pause
Thanks for a moment of respite. How thrilling to imagine that we are creating something beautiful despite the tenor of our times.
I had to share this. Actually I could (and am sorely tempted to) share every one, but I know that would defeat my purpose.
Craftsmanship! You are its finest contemporary champion.