Several Short Sentences About Writing

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

Here’s an experiment: Pay attention to all the noise in your head as you go about writing.

Why short sentences? They’ll sound strange for a while until you can hear what they’re capable of. But they carry you back to a prose you can control,

One way to keep sentences short is to keep the space between them as empty as possible. I don’t mean the space between the period at the end of one sentence and the first word of the next. I mean the space between the period and the subject of the next sentence.

Every word is optional until it proves to be essential, Something you can only determine by removing words one by one And seeing what’s lost or gained.

The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, The ability to speak to the reader in silence.

Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed. The rest will need to be fixed. This will be true for a long time.

A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, The relentless exploration of possibilities, The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say The possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.

If you make strong, supple sentences, Improvise, understand and exploit your mistakes, Keep yourself open to the possibilities each sentence creates, Keep yourself open to thought itself, And read like a writer, You can write in any form.

We take for granted, as a premise barely worth examining, that changing the words in a sentence—even the order of words—must have an effect on its meaning.

Any variation in wording changes the nuances that emanate from the sentence. Discovering those nuances, and using them, are parts of the writer’s job.

What if you value every one of a sentence’s attributes and not merely its meaning? Strangely enough, this is how you read when you were a child.

A reader is likelier to get lost cutting his way through The jungle of transitions than crossing the gap of a well-made ellipsis.

The obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing, A magical truth. You can get anywhere from anywhere, Always and almost instantly. The gap between sentences is sometimes a pause for breath And sometimes an echoing void.

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,

Writing isn’t a conveyer belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.

It was all change until the very last second. Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions. Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.

Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions. Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again. It’s the living tissue of a writer’s choices, Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.

Write consciously, deliberately. Learn how to get out of trouble.