The question keeps coming up and it’s usually phrased like this: “Do these writers just write these beautiful sentences? I mean, do they just come out that way?” and the tone is fraught with an underlying heartbeat of alarm and panic.
Some published writers I know write with colossal style in their first draft, and when I point out what they’re doing, they’re sometimes surprised. Their inner ear must be attuned to the music of their sentences even before these beauties stream from their fingers. The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky identified something called “inner speech,” an internalized self-directed language, fluttering between words and thought, in which a child discovers and creates her own identity and vision of the world. Perhaps these writers are listening to this ceaseless stream of inner meaning.
Virginia Woolf takes it further: “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”
But most writers revise and revise, endlessly. As Raymond Carver said, The real work begins after the third or fourth draft. A friend of mine, a well-known published author whose sentence glow, told me he does 40-50 revisions for a short story. A full immersion in language, sound, meaning—over and over.
Sometimes, I find myself marveling at a beautiful sentence that flows from my body to my fingers. Much more often, I revise. There is a third way, too, and the more you study style, the more it will happen to you. In the early stages of drafting, I half pay attention to sentences, to their syntax and sounds and rhythms. If I write a compound-complex sentence, for instance, I’ll follow with a simple sentence to vary the rhythm. Instead of one adjective, I’ll write two to create balance. I’ll write a word and know it’s important to the story so I’ll emphasize it through alliteration. This sort of split consciousness—a mingle of unconscious and conscious—invokes more music in my earlier drafts.
But here's what I really want to say. The close attention to sentences may sound arduous or even overwhelming, but it isn't.
Though writing can be difficult, a solitary act that's mentally exhausting, the hardship can be eased and sometimes eliminated when you write one beautiful sentence. When that happens, there is a bodily response, a palpitant thrill, heightened awareness, and even goosebumps. We are in the realm of aesthetics. The philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote about beauty's transformative powers and how it can lift a person out of herself. Beauty is experienced as joy, and it propels me to sit down, to write more, anticipating (hoping is too flimsy) another beautiful sentence.
I don't mean beautiful in an abstract Platonic way. (Plato wrote, "Beauty, proportion, and truth… considered as one."). I mean concretely and for the specific context of the story; beauty in relation to what is there and what is needed; beauty that is mimetic to whatever kind of music is required by the wave in the mind.
Seeking to feel more joy in the process of writing, at the end of the day, after my young son goes to bed, I print out what I've written and enter the story again via language. I cross out words and sentences that sound flat, redundant, or bore me. Not all of them; like a work of art needs to be surrounded by blankness to emphasize it, the sentences that need to do more in the story should have more style to come to the foreground. In the margins, I write new words or rearrange them, searching for what cleaves me from the dullness. If I get it right, if I find the words that add more beauty, I feel the intoxicating, invigorating, life-affirming joy. Which makes me write more.
So grateful this newsletter exists. I love it. Thank you. This was a beautiful read. So many stunning sentences.
In my current WIP novel the voice of my character is very lyrical, and the sentences flow with persistent and consistent alliteration and even rhyming. I attribute it to a lifetime of listening to hip hop music, which is a trait I've imbued into the character.
Because of the voice it often takes me a while to get into the rhythm when working on it, but when it clicks it's an awesome, sublime feeling.