Blogger’s note: What follows is some 1,200 words on writing and reading. Nothing to do with politics at all, nor snark, alas.
So get off here if you’re not of a mind for some of what we would have called in the dead-tree era of magazines a “back-of-the-book” piece. If, on the other hand, y’all like this kind of thing, I’ll post more great sentences/passages with some exegesis…let me know in comments if this is a feature or a bug for Balloon Juice going forward.
Finally — this is part of a temporary redirection of my efforts more generally. I’ve got a month to get out the door a book proposal that’s been languishing for laughably too long. So I’m going to be doing my damndest to avoid all provocation from the usual suspects — I’m looking at you, Ms. MM, Mr. Brooks, Douthat, et too many al. Instead I’ll be spending the next several weeks reading and writing in and around the eighteenth century, and as I find choice tidbits there, (and, as there is nothing new under the sun, I will) I shall be sure to share them with you.
_________________
Too many years ago to count, when I was just starting to think like a writer (instead of thinking of myself as a “writer”), I started to keep a notebook of other people’s sentences.
I remember the first one I listed, because it still seems to me to be as great an opening line as any in the English language. That would be the one Edward Gibbon used to launch The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:*
In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
O! That Augustan grandeur. The balance of its clauses. Gibbon’s music, too. Speak the line as you read it: it rings.
And, of course, the sense of it, all the enormous structural potential energy bound up in the first words of a story of decline. Gibbon leads us into his story at the point of the action, Rome in unquestioned glory. Bam! Like that, one sentence in, you know where we go from here.
That’s writing.
I lost that notebook, decades, homes, loved ones ago. I’ve written a fair amount since, and I think I’ve gotten better at it over the years — or rather, that I learned to read myself more carefully, and bury more of the dross before it makes me wince in public. (Blogging works against that training, as it happens; speed is not my friend.) And most of all, the crab pincers of everyday existence have hacked my reading time — and much of my writing life — to shreds.
But in the last month or so, from somewhere (I think I know where, actually, and I’ll write about that in one of these posts soon enough) I’ve regained something of the habit of reading like a writer. That is, once again, every day I carve out time to read something really good — and not necessarily words associated with anything I’m working on or teaching. And I’m watching as I go, picking up what the author is doing, what makes the engine go of whatever it is I’ve got in front of me.
When I do I look at lots of things. Structure most of all, for reasons that I think are obvious. (Basically: the task of the writer is to make his or her readers feel compelled to go on as they come to he end of each paragraph/section/chapter — up until they reach an ending arrives that is both satisfying and persuasively entailed by what has passed before. You get there through well-worked out structure.)
Then there’s language, down to the level of word choice, and things like qualities of description, use of metaphor and on and on — all the stuff that, properly stolen from others, can make me a better writer.
But while I’m doing all of that — think of it as the scales and chords I need to practice to maintain my chops as a writer — it’s always the exemplary sentences that leap out at me, that stop those worthy runs through all the sharps and flats. Sentences are what writers make. We use them to do all kinds of other things, but at bottom, our job is to assemble words into those essential, elemental units of meaning. And when they’re beautiful, when they signify, the really good ones teach me so much.
As, for example, this one, the first I pulled out of the mix in this recent return to good writerly habits:
She was bending and speaking English to a middle-aged lady seated at play beside her: but the next instant she returned to her play and showed the full height of a graceful figure, with a face which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but could hardly be passed with indifference.”
That’s from the first page or two of George Eliot’s “Jewish novel” — Daniel Deronda.**
Great Sentences: Daniel Deronda editionPost + Comments (129)