Crafting the perfect sentence
Crafting a picture perfect sentence
Crafting a beautiful sentence
“It is safe to say that never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer, let alone one with his teeth in a margarine container in the kitchen, his mother in the next room, and the word HI! tattooed in tiny blue letters on his penis.”
This is the opening sentence in Diane Schoemperlen’s captivating memoir, This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications. How could you not want to read on?
Long ago I heard American author John Irving give a reading from his novel, Owen Meany. Something he said has always stayed with me. He described how he decides whether to read a book or not. He flips to the beginning of several random chapters and reads the first sentence. If he isn’t enthralled he puts that book back on the shelf. It sounds simple for the reader but what about the writer?
In the many, many years it took to write my memoir, Storm Orphan there was a great deal I learned about the writing process: plot and structure, characterization, dialogue, point of view, voice, and showing not telling. I couldn’t possibly list all of the components that guide this narrative craft. There is so much to know and learn that it can be intimidating and prevent you from even starting. It’s like gardening, the more you read about what different plants need to flourish, the more it seems impossible to grow anything. At some point, you just have to dig in. So, I began with a sentence.
Canadian author Alistair Macleod whose only novel, One Great Mischief took him 13 years to write, worked from sentence to sentence and would perfect each line before going on to the next. He never wrote a draft that he would then go back and edit. He said it was like making a doorstep. He wouldn’t want to make the step and then come back the following week and tear it all apart. He would rather make it right the first time—even if the process was slow.
Well, I wasn’t aspiring to write perfect sentences. My goal was to engage the reader using concise and vivid language—embellished detailed descriptions are not my style! I recently started reading a novel where the sentences were half a page. I’m not exaggerating. Once I got to the end of the sentence I couldn’t remember the first part. I put that book back on the shelf.
One of the most difficult challenges I have in writing a sentence is grammar. I don’t ever remember learning about grammar in school but perhaps because of all the reading I do, I just know when things sound right. It was a problem when I was a professor and had to grade hundreds of papers. I’d circle the errors and just write the word grammar in the margins. Thank goodness it wasn’t our role to teach syntax. If someone asked me what a dangling participle is, I’d guess it was something you should wear a hard hat to avoid or perhaps an illicit pornographic term.
My mentor when I attended the Humber School for writers was Diane Schoemperlen, the author I quoted above. She guided in me creating a more perfect sentence. Every two weeks I submitted a draft of my writing and she would return it with corrections, suggestions and follow up reading. I learned how to: change from a passive to active voice, reduce adjectives, the royal order of adjectives, avoid clichés, and use commas (I still don’t know how to do this without referring to a grammar book). Diane sent articles on hyphens versus dashes. Did you know there is an Em dash and an En dash? Not only did I have to learn what they were and when to use them, but I had to research how to create those dashes on my laptop. They don’t even have their own key!
Now there are some people that break all the rules and write one-word sentences or write dialogue without quotation marks, but those are authors like Ian Williams who won a Giller Prize for his novel Reproduction. If you’re famous, you can break the rules, but for someone like me who is just starting out and feels like an imposter (see my first blog) then you must play by the rules.
So, I continue to write sentence after sentence using The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need by Susan Thurman, reading each line out loud, editing, and rewriting until I feel completely satisfied. Is it perfect? No. (I thought I would try that one-word thing here.) But it brings joy. Janet Burroway, in her book Writing Fiction, A Guide to Narrative Craft says, “We write for the satisfaction of having wrestled a sentence to the page, for the rush of discovering an image, for the excitement of seeing a character come alive.”
Writing Storm Orphan was both agony and ecstasy. It seemed an insurmountable task to share my story using only words on paper, but when you string those words together to create a sentence—one after another—they can produce something beautiful, meaningful, and powerful.
We all have a story in us. Start with a sentence.