Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Verlyn Klinkenborg thinks we’re wrong about sentences. What they are. What they do. How to make them.

His core argument comes early:

There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do.

He recommends making short sentences, at least to start, because:

Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. It’s easier to tell what you’re saying in a short sentence.

He writes that we have misunderstood the entire purpose of the sentence.

You were taught that reading is extraction.

[…]

You’ve been taught, too, that writing is the business of depositing meaning to be extracted later,
That a sentence is the transcription of a thought, the husk of an idea,
Valuable only for what it transmits or contains, not for what it is.

I’m hooked.

Had I believed that reading is extraction?

I’d been taught to consider other attributes of a sentence. The rhythm. The word choice. The length.

But had I seen these only as window dressing?

(And what does my analogy to window dressing say about what I might secretly believe about visual design?)

Klinkenborg continues:

The purpose of a sentence is to say what it has to say but also to be itself,
Not merely a substrate for the extraction of meaning.

I was reminded of Hospicing Modernity and Machado de Oliviera’s dissection of the modernist obsession with meaning-making.

In a culture so focused on extraction, on work, on capital—to explicitly state that the purpose of anything or anyone is “to be itself” is radical.

This is an approach I would like to cultivate in my own making of sentences. That they are here to be themselves. That they can delight, as themselves. That their value is beyond mere meaning-making.

Klinkenborg moves on to what he calls “The Anxiety of Sequence.”

Its premise is this: To get where you’re going, you have to begin in just the right place
And take the proper path,
Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude.

For years, I’ve been troubled when writers say that each novel, or each essay, has only one starting sentence. That a different starting sentence would make it a different piece. What if one thought the piece was done, but there was a better starting sentence out there in some parallel reality?

Klinkenborg addresses my anxiety head-on. Yes, he says, a piece written on another day might have a different shape. Yes, if you’d worked on it longer, it might have been better, but one needs to set some limits. He seems to think these truths are not of particular concern.

What is of concern, for Klinkenborg, is writing sentences down too soon. He thinks you should spend time making a good sentence in your head before committing it to the page.

As best I understand it—and I’m surprised this part isn’t well reflected in my highlights—if sentences are valuable for all of their attributes, then a series of poorly considered sentences can lead a piece entirely in the wrong direction. Perhaps it leads the piece in the direction of what you meant to say, or planned to say, or thought you were saying. But a series of carefully considered sentences might have yielded a revelation.

Klinkenborg is extremely wary of “volunteer sentences.”

Flow, he says, is for the reader, not the writer.

Klinkenborg honors “the turn when the story changes or redirects itself.”

They recall the moment, as children, when we came upon the phrase “And then one day.”
You know exactly how those four words feel.
You know exactly what they do.
When you get lost in your writing, remember them.
Don’t use them: think about the possibilities they contain.

(I confess—in transcribing this quote, I planned to end at “remember them.” As I was typing it over, I thought, Hmm, is this piece getting too slow? Perhaps I should engineer some sort of turn. And Klinkelborg, ever the canny author, reaches across time and space to disabuse me of this idea.)

Surprise can’t be engineered.

But by clarifying our thoughts through one well-made sentence at a time, by making sentences that “listen to each other,” we may discover something new.

“Start by learning to recognize what interests you,” writes Klinkelborg. He acknowledges this is hard:

If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.
Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.

Klinkenborg quickly anticipates where a writer might take the wrong idea from this:

There’s always an urge among writers
To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses
Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible

[…]

The goal is the opposite:
To get your words, your phrases,
As close as you can to the solidity,
The materiality of the world you’re noticing.
Rushing to notice never works,
Nor does trying to notice.

Sentences and noticing come together in revision:

The fundamental act of revision is literally becoming conscious of the sentence,
Seeing it for what it is, word for word, as a shape, and in relation to all the other sentences in the piece.

Learning all of this takes time.

Don’t let the word “years” alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months.

And Klinkenborg is encouraging:

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.