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Several Short Sentences About Writing - Verlyn Klinkenborg

📗 Several Short Sentences About Writing - Verlyn Klinkenborg

by c0nsilience · 76 things on Twos

I’ve learned by trial and error, which is how most writers have learned.
Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is.
Know what each sentence says What it doesn’t say And what it implies the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
This isn’t the whole art of writing well. It isn’t even most of it. But it’s a place to begin, and to begin from again and again.
There are innumerable ways to write badly. The usual way is making sentences that don’t say what you think they do.
It’s hard to pay attention to what your words are actually saying. As opposed to what you mean to say or what you think they’re saying. Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial.
Here’s an experiment: Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing. Write these things down—the contents of the noise in your head as you write. You can’t revise or discard what you don’t consciously recognize.
These assumptions and prohibitions and obligations are the imprint of your education and the culture you live in. Distrust them. 1. What you’ve been taught. 2. What you assume is true because you’ve heard it repeated by others. 3. What you feel, no matter how subtle. 4. What you don’t know. 5. What you learn from your own experience.
How long is a good idea?
Learn to distrust words like “genius,” “inspiration,” “flow,” “natural,” and “organic” when you think about your work. (Don’t use them when you talk about it either.) They have nothing to do with writing And everything to do with venerating writers.
The end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning
To make short sentences, you need to remove every unnecessary word. Your idea of necessary will change as your experience changes. The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making Says nothing about its necessity.
Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication.
The longer the sentence, the less it’s able to imply, And writing by implication should be one of your goals. Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you, The prose of law, science, business, journalism, and most academic fields. It was nonexistent in the way you were taught to write. That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools: The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence.
Your job as a writer is making sentences. Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed. The rest will need to be fixed.
A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, The relentless exploration of possibilities.
Every form of writing turns the world into language.
You can only become a better writer by becoming a better reader.
What if you wrote as though sentences can’t be summarized?
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.
Learning to write begins anywhere, at any time in life.
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. This is like not knowing where to begin a journey Until you decide where you want it to end. The conclusion that justifies their existence.
Here’s another basic truth. 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.
You were also learning to divorce your experience as a reader From your inexperience as a writer. When what you needed most was to trust your experience as a reader.
The answers to these questions may be nothing more than Noticing the effect of asking them.
Prose is the residue, the consequence, of the writer’s choices
The central fact of your education is this: You’ve been taught to believe that what you discover by thinking, By examining your own thoughts and perceptions, Is unimportant and unauthorized. As a result, you fear thinking, And you don’t believe your thoughts are interesting, Because you haven’t learned to be interested in them. (This is the downside of college)
You may be interested in your thoughts, But they don’t have much to do with anything you’ve ever been asked to write. The same is true of what you notice. You don’t even notice what you notice
Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization. No matter who you are. Only you can authorize yourself.
Start by learning to recognize what interests you. Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, So they never learn how to notice, Not even what interests them.
Attention requires a cunning passivity. To write on a theoretical basis, which deprives the world of its content, And to use passive constructions, which absolve everyone of responsibility.
The only thing to do with a cliché is send it to the sports page
Don’t let the word “years” alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months.
Poised at the brink of thought, but not actually thinking, As though by leaning forward a sentence will tip out of their heads And onto the page.
Decisions invisible to the reader except in the residue of your prose.
The problem most writers face isn’t writing. It’s consciousness. Attention. Noticing.
You need to look up even familiar words every time you have a doubt And especially when you don’t have a doubt.
Anything you notice, whether you think it matters or not. It matters because you noticed it.
The point of learning the fundamental language of grammar and syntax Isn’t correctness or obeying the rules. It’s keeping the rules from obtruding themselves upon the reader Because you’ve ignored them. Learn and then unlearn
If a sentence offers an ambiguous path—two ways of being read—this reader will always take the wrong one.
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. This is debatable at least initially
The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make. Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat. It’s a sign of engagement. Hiding beneath the skin of your thinking.
Like so much else about writing well, Getting rid of useless, even harmful, ideas is hard work.
There’s nothing natural about writing except the tendency to assume that it’s natural, It takes years of work to write well, And only part of that is learning to type.
It’s always worth asking yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence And adjusting it until you can.
Just as it’s always useful to ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.
It feels like inspiration. We’ve all had these moments. They’re enticing. The mistake is overvaluing them.
“Inspiration” is what gets you to the keyboard, And that’s where it leaves you.
With anything, starting from nowhere. All you really need is your head, the one indispensable requirement.
“Style” and “voice” are passive constructs, Markers of individuality, bow ties of self.
Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence. We assume that style is self-expression. It can be, but only in this sense: It’s the fusion of your command of language and your commitment to your own intent
Your prose is clear enough to reveal the character of your thinking, the shape of your ideas, and your sense of humor or irony.
Pursue clarity In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself.
All writing is revision.
There’s almost never enough time for revision, if revision comes after the fact And if it’s really revision.
Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision. Accept no provisional sentences.
Think of composition and revision as the same thing, Different versions of thinking
Revision isn’t only the act of composition. Revision is thinking applied to language
At first, what you mean to say will emerge By setting aside the things you don’t mean to say
No one will teach you how to wait while you think or what to wait for while you’re thinking. You’ll have to teach yourself. Above all, you’ll have to teach yourself to be patient.
You may have to cling to a partial outline for a while. That’s okay, As long as you’re prepared to abandon it. It’s a map of the places you may end up not going.
You’re holding an audition. Many sentences will try out. One gets the part.
What makes the first sentence interesting? Its exact shape and what it says And the possibility it creates for another sentence.
The opening sentence is only creating an opening for the next sentence. But there’s also nothing incidental about that first sentence. You—your role as a writer, the role you construct, your presence to the reader—you and your first sentence begin together.
So many writers stumble by making the first sentence try to do too much And end up making every sentence try to do the same.
See if you can write the sentence that arises from the first sentence, Not the sentence that follows from it
You have no idea what you’re going to say Until you discover what you want to say As you make the sentences that say it.
Every sentence is optional until it proves otherwise.
Writing is the work of discovery.
Sit back from the keyboard or notepad. Sit back, and continue to think. That’s where the work gets done.
It’s true that the simplest revision is deletion. But there’s often a fine sentence lurking within a bad sentence, A better sentence hiding under a good sentence. Work word by word until you discover it. Don’t try to fix an existing sentence with minimal effort, Without reimagining it. You can almost never fix a sentence— Or find the better sentence within it— By using only the words it already contains. If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
And then one day You’ll write a sentence that says more than its words alone can say. You’ll know that it says what you mean without having said it, And you’ll know that the reader knows it too. This will sound impossible until you’ve done it once. Then you’ll see how possible it is, and how inviting. It lets the reader complete the thought. It sets an echo in motion. This is writing by implication.
Rejoicing and despair aren’t very good tools for revising. Curiosity, patience, and the ability to improvise are.
Writing doesn’t prove anything, And it only rarely persuades. It does something much better. It attests. It witnesses. It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed. It reports on the nature of your attention. It suggests the possibilities of the world around you. The evidence of the world as it presents itself to you. Proof is for mathematicians. Logic is for philosophers. We have testimony.
It’s never hard to work when you’re interested in what you’re working on